> but what sort of things are y'all searching for where reddit's opinion is relevant

If you want real, unvarnished reviews and opinions of products, you need to get it from real people that have owned the product for more than 1 day before leaving the review.

I recently needed to purchase a new winter coat. Surfing many reddit threads across a dozen or so subs actually convinced me to not purchase the coat I had in mind. It looked nice and all, but real users that had owned it for a while had disappointing things to say about the zippers failing prematurely.

That's not something you would find in Amazon reviews, which are mostly people who recently purchased the item and have not owned it long enough to experience failures.

Why do you assume the posts on reddit are at all organic? Big brands 100% astroturf on reddit.

If you read the conversation threads, you can pretty easily pick out astroturfing.

Plus, do your own research of course. I don't exclusively use reddit for this sort of research... if I'm looking for outdoor gear I will browse outdoor gear forums for people's thoughts. Cycling, same thing... etc. You look for a consensus to be formed before making your own opinion.

My point was default google search results are now unreliable because they are almost always affiliate links.

>If you read the conversation threads, you can pretty easily pick out astroturfing.

How do you know that?

We're humans, not computers. We don't have the same problem of discerning intent like AI would.

It's pretty obvious when someone is communicating nothing but positive things about a product, or nothing but negative things about another competing product. Sometimes it's more subtle... but seriously, if you read enough comments you will locate the ones that are obviously shilling or astroturfing. They won't talk about many topics (or no other topic) except the item or company they're promoting.

It's really hard to make a bot or corporate account appear, sound and feel like a genuine human writing about their experiences. Particularly on a platform like reddit where people speak rather freely about products and ruthlessly call out astroturfing accounts.

With all that said - perhaps some people have better BS detectors than others. I like to think mine is rather accurate most of the time.

>We don't have the same problem of discerning intent like AI would.

The same problems? No. But humans pretty notoriously don't always communicate effectively.

>It's pretty obvious when someone is communicating nothing but positive things about a product, or nothing but negative things about another competing product. Sometimes it's more subtle... but seriously, if you read enough comments you will locate the ones that are obviously shilling or astroturfing.

Yeah, you'll notice the ones that are obvious, but that doesn't really tell you much about your overall accuracy, since you don't know how many non-obvious ones you're missing.

I don't know what you're driving at. Is it perfect? Of course not... what alternative do you suggest?

Yeah, reddit is a lot better for gauging what owning a product is like long-term. Don't blindly trust naturally, but it can be a decent data source in what would otherwise be a total vacuum.

There’s a lot of useful stuff on Reddit but you do have to be careful as “upvoted” stuff is sometimes wrong and “downvoted” stuff is sometimes right.

My bigger issue with it is that volunteer-mods are often power-hungry and ban people who they disagree with or who hurt their feelings.

Reddit is a social experiment, and the result is humans are still trash to each other when they’re anonymous.

> There’s a lot of useful stuff on Reddit but you do have to be careful as “upvoted” stuff is sometimes wrong and “downvoted” stuff is sometimes right.

Default subs and big subs are by far the worst about this. Comments in threads on r/technology for example frequently perpetuates easily verifiable falsehoods that would quickly get shot down in smaller communities.

I have a suspicion that the "volunteer-mods" on the big Reddits, like the Wikipedia admins, are infiltrated by people paid by interested parties to represent their interests on those popular web sites. In the case of Wikipedia, I recall a story about how one of their admins was a woman in Canada who was a former British intelligence agent with whatever the British equivalent of the CIA is called. If governments and NGOs can infiltrate Wikipedia to do things that are specifically against its rules, they can infiltrate Reddit and probably have.

Most people are too busy to have the time to be an online moderator and those who have the time typically don't have the political skills to get appointed as a moderator of a large online community. That's why the best way to hire a good mod for your online community is to make it a paid position and to randomly monitor them for evidence of bias and/or abuse of power.

The reddit searches are to find people's real-world experiences with something, not to find abstract, self-proclaimed expertise.

These searches often lead to niche communities that have built up expertise over time in their wiki or FAQ, though.

I agree in the broad that much (most) of reddit is awful, wrong, and not worth viewing. (I wonder how you feel about HN over the years. To me HN got as bad as parts of reddit were at some point, however reddit has gotten worse too so there's still a quality gap.) Still, it can be occasionally useful to filter it as a site for queries, like with HN. (It's fun to see if a company I've thought about working for has been talked about on HN at all.) Recently I found some useful travel posts on reddit, like how to best get to a destination with some tradeoffs highlighted for time sensitivity and helpful links for everything, and as an augment of location reviews, some offering quite a bit more context than the one or two paragraphs I usually see on google maps. Though to be fair, a sample of short reviews is usually good enough. Another use of reddit remains finding other people who want to talk about relatively niche things, but these days it's more common that it's just one way that leads you to a discord server whose contents are sadly invisible to search engines.

I actually like Reddit and HN in general. On Reddit, I like the comment threads where they trash politicians with escalating levels of absurdity, and the creative writing exercises disguised as AITA and TIFU.

As for HN, I think it's fine. It really hasn't gotten worse over the years (people were saying that in 2010 too). Moderation here is excellent, and people mostly behave themselves. But, you do have to stay away from certain subject areas. If you see "it's a lab leak for sure!!!" with 2000 comments, I recommend bypassing that. Lot of people very mad at each other. Anything technical, though, lots of good discussions, even on popular topics, and I often learn something. The intersection of technical and social is mixed, but generally you don't feel terrible after reading them.

HN does feel like it skews younger than it used to. Probably because I am now older than when I first started using the site. I read a lot of things where I think "you'll figure it out in a few years" more and more, but know that you can only explain so much. Lessons have to be learned firsthand, HN's average reader has many good life lessons to learn. So do I, of course!