I do the same. With that said something will come along. As is the case with these things once the "new standard" becomes the "standard" it becomes astroturfed with fake reviews and manipulation. Reddit is a bit less trustworthy on this front than it used to be.. i suspect at least.

I wouldn't mind some fresh blood even for this purpose.

I hope it humbles whoever builds the next platform. Nothing lasts forever no matter how entrenched it is in the zeitgeist.

Once something gets big enough, it becomes impossible to moderate and eventually it will fall out of fashion and lose its original intent. Look at Etsy and Amazon.

I'm finding people are rearely loyal customers to a brand long-term. Rather, they want whatever platform gets them what they want. People jump from sites like Aliexpress to Wish to Shein to whichever webiste has the most latest and marketing team.

maybe try using phind.com, not exactly the same but LLM infused search can have similar results, since it was trained on a lot of Reddit data.

Thanks, I didn't know about it, will give it a shot.

I do the opposite. Finding reddit links in a search result page just lets me know I'm in for a world of disappointment in modal pop-ups (on mobile), modal blockers to see the full comment thread, and then unhelpful/missing/flippant and generally unhelpful comments at the end of all that anyway.

Especially when I search for vehicle/mechanic advice the old school forums just can't be beat for their value, even though many are ghost ships with no active users anymore.

On mobile, yeah, it's awful. They have absolutely destroyed the mobile experience, especially if you're not logged in. And why would I be logged into reddit on my phone's browser, when I use BaconReader to read reddit?

On desktop though, it's an entirely different experience. I'm always redirected to the old layout, so I don't have the stupid anti-user shenanigans.

i do the opposite. legitimately, "site:reddit.com <search query>" is like step 2 or 3 for me when looking for leads on information or product suggestions, product reviews, travel ideas, hidden gems, places to fish, etc. if you know how to cut through all the noise then it's a gold mine — you can find information just about anything. even just finding basic terminology about a thing then you can research the word.

as for the modals, just visit the reddit thread by prepending `old.` to the url. like `old.reddit.com` and then you can see everything without all that annoying stuff. also sign up for a reddit account but based on your comment doesn't sound like you'd be open to that.

social search vs. reference search

same, tried to search about a specific topic and couldn't access the subreddit

The problem is that now 'everyone' knows the reddit trick and marketers sit there all day writing sponsored posts + upvoting them with bots / bought accounts.