Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby.

It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it.

What are the alternatives? Facebook and Discord are walled gardens. Quora is a shithole. The rest of the internet is blogspam and significantly more dubious than your average Reddit comment!

My favorite alternatives are email and going outside.

Going outside is a great alternative to mindlessly consuming Reddit, but we're talking about researching opinions here. That's something that Reddit is actually good for.

So is going outside though. In fact, I think talking in person is usually a much better way of actually understanding someone else's opinion, because normative rules of social behaviour tend to stop the discussion from becoming a flamewar.

I could spend hours just neutrally asking someone questions about a particular view they hold, why they hold it, etc. I think you gain a lot more insight into how people think this way than through an online forum.

Who cares about "particular views they hold"? We're talking about fridge or tv brands, not some personal stuff.

>Who cares

I do.

Perhaps GP meant that since desire is the root of suffering, that rather than desire that your server work and suffer and strive to return it to functionality, you could go outside and mediate on the grass until you relinquished your desire for a working server.

Or your desire for an umbrella that doesn't break in the wind, or the best public estimate of when Starship will launch, or any of the myriad other desires that cause people to append "reddit" to their searches.

Yeah, I could just meditate the entire day instead of doing anything. Why have desires at all?

I'm sure random passerby is great information on how to configure network equipment /s

Agreed -- before making any major purchase I start at Reddit. The Internet as you say is a dumpster fire of blogspam top-10 lists where the top of the page is just STR."Updated in \{current_year}!"

Literally anything else. Having seen the general/highly upvoted Reddit opinions on things I have domain expertise in, and having seen the outsized effect that angry subs can have on media opinions, there is absolutely nothing I trust on Reddit at face value or without having interacted in very small subs long enough to know who has useful opinions.

The only consistently good advice I see on Reddit is "call a local expert/call a lawyer." Anything else is almost certainly abject nonsense.

Don't look at highly upvoted opinions. Look for barely upvoted opinions of everyday users and aggregate them.

To be fair, I found the best alternatives are just friends, and Twitter.

In Twitter you can follow people whose content you find useful. If you're a Blender user, for example, you can follow 5 Blender tech artists and your feed will be now full of cool tips and art.

With friends, with more or less the same skillset and hobbies as you have, you can ask them whatever you wanna ask. Heck, you'll learn a lot from them without even asking!

I'd just avoid using Reddit or forums to decide if I'm gonna use or buy something.

For example, if you ask what's the best OS on the internet, people will say Linux. Best DAW? Reaper. Best game engine? Godot. Best headphones? whatever is new and costs 100$ in Amazon.

Meanwhile, friends who make money and are in the industry and have businesses just prefer Windows, FL Studio and Unity. They aren't on the Reddit saying that the software or hardware they use - they just use them and make money. :)

I like my friends a lot but we don't always agree. With reddit I can read like 5 opinions of a game I want to play and I can instantly feel like "this person doesn't like it and their reasons are similar to things that I don't like too" and make an informed opinion.

The point you make about "professionals don't have time to use Reddit" definitely applies though. /r/synthesizers for example is a great sub if you want to spend thousands on hardware. Not so good for making real music! Although I do feel like there are a lot of Unity game devs on there. Maybe you just need the right community.

> walled gardens

Walled garden is marketing speak. Don't use it. Use curated/controlled/whatever described the closed nature.

It spins what would otherwise be a negative term into one that gives images of delicious fruits, vegetables and beautiful flowers.

> Quora is a shithole

It's actually funny how much this is true. They used to be a quality source of info, but these days the default option is to show "all related" so you don't even get direct answers to the question you searched for, ads from top to bottom (and even somewhere in between) and just hordes of bots answering nonsense. At least they made it official with Chatgpt integration now lol.

I make it a point to downvote and report as spam the promoted answers that have no relation to the current question.

Quora is a shithole because you can earn money answering, so people who have no knowledge at all are putting together convincing articles (probably with ChatGPT). And the mixing of unrelated questions into the answer stream is extremely annoying. I added it to my uBlacklist, anyway...

That's really only an issue for technical topics. Stack Overflow would obviously be a much better source of quality training data for the kind of questions you presented.

But for most things outside of that Reddit is by far the best online source that actually represents answers you would get from real people. Questions like what is the nightlife like in x city don't have a single true answer and thrive due to Reddit's the diversity of thought.

> Stack Overflow would obviously be a much better source of quality training data for the kind of questions you presented.

I dont think we need a llm that only responds with "Your question was marked as a duplicate"

Yeah, interesting point.

I'm curious to what your take is on Chat-GPT's response to the same sorts of questions?

I also work in a specialist field, and I've come to understand that the instinct on of a particular question is going to give me a bad answer on Reddit or SO, is also finely tuned to about when GPT either starts hallucinating, or providing bad info.

not only that but 80% of conversations on reddit is idiotic jokes and puns

This is absolutely true for any subreddit that shows up on the front page but many subreddits with smaller user bases or draconian moderation policies (like /r/askhistorians) can have excellent quality.

> When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations.

Training in this sense is about how people use language not what is the right answer. Among other sources - the exact thing you describe is a contributor to some of the things within the (in my opinion misnamed) internal taxonomy of 'hallucinations'.

Right or wrong - reddit is human beings using (mostly english) language to speak to each other, and so if you want to train an ML model to do that - its a great source.

My experience in the past 5-10 years on Reddit is:

- the voting system is about what people want the truth to be, not the truth.

- the users can be very easily gamed in comments to vote one way or another just by the initial voting being negative or positive (aka most just vote with the trend)

- the opinions all come from a bias of urban and major metro area people. It's painfully obvious they don't understand any mindset outside of this one.

- it wasn't always this way.

I agree with you, the quality went down as the quantity went up, and it may be possible to use the comments, but using the vote data as a signal of truth is going to produce a terribly narrow minded AI.

> the voting system is about what people want the truth to be, not the truth

Probably the best example is legal type advice.

Personal example: The whole situation with internet archive and their e-book lending process. I was vocal that they didn’t have a leg to stand on and would lose. The comment was just about the legal situation.

I was downvoted to hell for that opinion and identified as some sort of book publisher advocate/ internet archive hater. As was anyone else predicting a loss or just raising questions.

Personally I love the internet by archive, but I didn’t think they had a chance at winning.

But go by the comments and it was a slam dunk win because of some idea of “freedom” the comments and voters had. And yet they lost the lawsuit…

Interestingly, here on HN the response seem to be a generally more balanced. That’s not an endorsement of HN all the time, but it was an interesting contrast.

I see the same thing with the situation surrounding the game "Dark and Darker". The TL;DR is that the game is likely stolen intellectual property and there is a lawsuit directed at the publisher and one of the developers. The lawsuit will likely prevent the game from being released, so the prevailing opinion on reddit is that the whole thing is an unjustified shakedown, despite the copious amount of evidence that the publisher stole intellectual property.

I struggle to find the right word for this, but I find that Redditors with 10K+ comment karma have an "attitude" that pervades how they respond on virtually every topic. There's this sense of faux-civility and if you have an opinion that slights them in some way the mask comes off and you end up with hostility or sardonic replies that completely misconstrue your point. Then there tends to be a dogpile with downvotes.

Yes, I know reddit can be valuable for niche and non-contentious topics but such examples are becoming increasingly rare. Snark and combativeness pervades the site and it seems to be a function of the voting system and monkey-see, monkey-do from how commenters are rewarded in the default subreddits for this kind of behavior.

I dread AI models being taught to comment like a redditor.

> Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic.

Equally said of HN. Folks with a few years of dev or startup experience asserting this or that all over the place. Im sure less experienced folks read these "truthy" answers and take them as gospel in some cases.

> Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic.

That's kinda sorta exactly how ChatGPT answers stuff though, no?