[xelhark]

I think a much bigger point can be summarized with this sentence from the article:

> Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which really makes you question the objectivity of the advice.

This is true when searching for pretty much everything in Google nowadays, that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

[lawlorino]

> that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

Agreed, I often default to Reddit or HN for a lot of stuff although there are an increasing number of obvious adverts disguised as genuine posts (see r/hailcorporate for some examples).

More difficult to spot are marketing firms who curate a bunch of fake accounts, make them seem like "real people" by posting random content but interspersing this with subtle ads. There was an AMA recently from someone working at a firm that does this, they even gave their accounts personalities by posting in specific related subs (e.g. hiking, outdoors) in order to advertise boots. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, but still my point is that even though Reddit generally leads to better advice take it with a grain of salt.

Edit: Found it, wasn't an AMA but just a comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/f9rjh0/he_dressed_up_...

Although I don't see a reason not to trust this comment, the line about "we have seen great success with this method" had me wondering how they measure the impact of this strategy? It seems this would be quite time and effort intensive, therefore expensive. How do they know they can attribute sales to this since presumably they aren't providing affiliate links as that'd be too obvious?

[speeder]

I dated a woman that had this job, but using Facebook (this was some years ago too).

It was not just marketing, but PR too, for example she bragged about when Whirlpool had a serious problem with one of their washing machines in my country, and it was going viral, so Whirlpool paid the marketing agency to make all fake profiles (even ones not belonging to their campaigns) make other viral posts to drown out the washing machine one. She bragged about two things: 1. It worked, the "counter-viral" campaign successfully made people ignore the washing machine issue. 2. They got paid ludicrous amounts of money (she hinted that each account with 5000 followers, that was Facebook limit, was worth some thousands USD, and that they had many, many accounts, precisely to go around that 5000 follower limit, for example if a company ordered 50.000 followers from them, they would setup 10 fake accounts and try to attract 5000 real people in each, each account with different hobbies to try to attract different people).

EDIT: some other interesting info:

* They had a huge cache of personal photos, to make it look like the person was real, there are even stock photo agencies that create these photos, for example take a female and a male actor to tourist destinations and take pictures to make them look like a couple doing romantic things, then they would release the photos slowly, so people wouldn't notice it was fake, and to stretch their money for photo purchases.

* They would get sometimes employees with real hobbies, and have them take care of fake accounts with same hobbies, so a surfer for example would have some 8 accounts under her care, each for a different company, and write some surfing content that is real, but tweak and then repost on all 8, with differences, and adjusting to fit each profile.

* Another technique at the time was the sale of "instantaneous company profile", you made a fake profile, and made it get genuinely popular with a target demographic, then you sold it to someone, after the sale you could edit the account to turn it from a person to a fan-page, with the category correct for the company that bought it, so a company could buy a fan-page for them with 5000 real followers that actually are about the subject. I never asked how often people would realize what happened and unfollow... but I guessed most people wouldn't bother with unfollowing anyway.

[Humdeee]

The sheer amount of fabrication is nauseating. I suppose it's not much different than the business model of any common ad company at it's purest essence: customer manipulation

[nojvek]

I know of a couple of folks that were in the business. Selling twitter profiles, Instagram profiles or asking users with >10k followers to make content ads that don’t look like ads.

Marketing is a massive business. It makes a shit ton of money. FB and GOOG are ad companies at the end of the day, and there’s ton of little companies that they nurture as side effects.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

It makes sense. A lot or traditional ads are drowned in noise and even if they catch users attention, squashed by internal firewall and indexed under bs.

There are difinitely some posters, who are clearly promoting given brand, but.. 9/10 it is pretty apparent, so again drowned in HN sea.

Incidentally, have you tried Xyz vpn? Totally decentralized, easy setup and great customer service.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

The next logical step—as terrifying as it is—is automation. Generate those people with GANs, then you 1) don't have to pay the photo companies (and producing photos with real actors in real locations has MASSIVE overhead compared to just some compute time) and 2) the photos can't be found online.

You can similarly generate the history and backstory of each fake person, complete with realistically banal social media posts, etc..

[lotsofpulp]

And hence we end up with an internet requiring verification via SMS to prove you're a real person or the stupid Google CAPTCHA images or simply having to upload your government issued photo ID.

[pjc50]

Of course, you could just have a GAN generate images of photo ID too ..

(Unless Facebook had access to the national ID database, a terrifying prospect)

[robotnikman]

IIRC this has already been spotted in action on Facebook. I can't find the article, but about a month or 2 ago there were thousands of profiles being created on Facebook with profiles pictures created using GANs.

[druddha]

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

[code_duck]

The way Facebook works, you never see 90% of the people or pages you are following in your feed, and maybe 10% of the content from those. If I “liked” a page that turned into a washing machine page, I wouldn’t even know for months and when I saw it, I’d be confused about how I “liked” it in the first place, rather than connecting the old page to the new version.

[magduf]

How long did you date this sociopathic woman?

[Nursie]

Oh but it's just marketing...

Yeah those excuses run thin. Actively participating in this stuff is not acceptable.

[speeder]

I will just say, you are not exactly wrong. No more details than that.

[nhumrich]

Almost all of marketing statistics/metrics are correlation, not causation. They are mostly just looking at stats over time, trying only one new thing per quarter. No way to know for sure if the new channel was actually the reason for success, but you can be fairly confident

[beatgammit]

I'm pretty sure I ran into an MLM that does this. They said they do "network marketing" with "social media" and represent big brands like Nike. I met with someone a couple times, but didn't continue to their seminar or whatever because they wanted me to do more than I was willing to do (in this case, get my wife to read a book and bring her). My guess is that you get paid based on some combination of your number of posts and your connections' posts.

It would be interesting to get an idea of what percentage of posts are from marketers.

[sergiotapia]

Advertising is a tumor on society - god damn.

[slip]

Well, unscrupulous advertising and marketing is. I get the sentiment, because we are flooded with it. But there is honest and respectful advertising too... unfortunately, most companies gravitate towards making a quick buck instead of investing in earning trust.

[magduf]

Exactly. Letting people know you have a product/service which will make their life easier isn't a bad thing, and you have to have some way of communicating that to prospective buyers. The problem is when you start lying about your product, or use psychological tricks to get people to buy something they don't need.

[Nursie]

> you have to have some way of communicating that to prospective buyers.

Only if the prospective buyer is actually interested. This too often gets translated to "I have a right to spam everyone!"

[sli]

It's just easier to trick people and prey on psychological triggers than it is to make totally truthful ads and high quality, reliable products and services.

[scarface74]

The best advertising I have ever found is in the Overcast podcast app. I’ve found a few interesting podcasts based on the ads. Marco Arment (the developer) created his own ad platform for his app so he would know who is advertising and he wouldn’t have any mystery meet third party binary blob in his code.

[GFischer]

It´s very sad that Google basically has such a monopoly on online ads that people have to resort to creating their own ad platforms.

Maybe that's a space worth disrupting? Google is getting fat and lazy (but still has a scary warchest and resources).

[scarface74]

I disagree. Marco didn’t want to use any third party network because he didn’t want any content embedded into his app that he didn’t control.

All of the advertising on the internet that I don’t find abhorrent is controlled by the content creator.

[bityard]

While you don't get as much "blogspam" on Reddit, it has a very different problem today: The amount of misinformation and echo chambering of said misinformation on Reddit is simply staggering.

Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over.

The other problem is that when someone does ask for advice, the quality of the advice is usually somewhere between mediocre to terrible. I think this is largely because there is no incentive for experts to stick around in subs to provide good answers. And because they are tired of giving the _same_ advice over and over. This gives space to the non-experts who don't _really_ understand the concepts behind the advice they are giving and end up giving bad (and sometimes dangerous) advice because that's what they were told by other non-experts in the same situation.

[debaserab2]

I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again.

I've witnessed this pattern in an array of subreddits spanning from hobbies to coding to gaming. Ultimately they become discussion forums for the lowest common denominator of skillsets.

[teach]

My wife gets this a lot with nutrition. She has a freaking PhD in Nutrition Science and also is a registered dietitian but god forbid she suggest that maybe bacon isn't the mostly healthy of foods in most subreddits.

[Muuuchem]

Well nutrition isn't exactly a settled science. There are many problems with studies and as a result we have a wide variety of sometimes contradictory conclusions from them. New conclusions and findings come out but the nutrition community is unable to achieve a consensus understanding on these types of aspects of a diet. There are too many confounding factors involved in studies and it is nearly impossible to design a study that will show the exact effects of eating bacon on the diet without other dietary considerations tainting the results. Like for instance lots of new studies are coming out recently claiming that our disdain for saturated fats is highly misguided. However, nutritionists cannot come to a consensus because old school people stick to what they learn in school without keeping up with studies, people distrust the new studies or argue in favor of the many contradictory studies, etc...

[teach]

Way to make my point for me.

The science is settled, but like everything else, untrained people can't tell the difference between a good study and a bad study, and the media reports on them all.

Check out the book _How Not to Diet_, which is the most recent masterwork on evidence-based nutrition.

[aggie]

> The science is settled

It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.

[wolfv]

There is now enough evidence that there is a good amount of consensus among nutrition researchers:

https://wfpb-wolf.netlify.com/consensus.html

https://wfpb-wolf.netlify.com/scientific_studies.html

[basch]

I would not agree with those government diets, without some nuance sprinkled in. Calling all the government bodies published guidelines "scientific consensus" isnt the same thing as scientific consensus.

Vegetables - way too broad a category. Should be split into leaves, stalks, roots, starches, seeds, alliums, brassicaceae, legumes etc. Calling it all "vegetables" makes it hard for people to rank, prioritize, and proportion which are a better use of time, money, and energy to consume. There might be consensus on eating "vegetables" but not necessarily every group of them. Nutritional density is more complicated than "vegetables."

Whole grains - Antithesis to previous point, grains are not categorized as vegetables. Why are whole grains their own recommended category everywhere as a staple part of diets? Is it cost? Industry lobbying? Diet recommendation should focus on leaves and seeds, with cereals as a filler. Cereal portion should be the one controlled to control weight gain, moreso than plant fat from seeds/nuts. We've gotten too comfortable with a huge serving of rice or potatoes with something thrown on top.

Red meat - carcinogens appear to come from preparation methods (browning, curing) and can be mitigated by vegetable intake. https://examine.com/nutrition/does-red-meat-cause-cancer/

Fruit - mostly as not necessary to a healthy diet as this makes it look like. Can be avoided the same way meat is.

Fish (salmon & sardines) and Seafood (mussels) belongs in the consensus part over fruit.

Doesn't touch on fermented food.

The jury is more out on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol than these government bodies want to admit.

Its hard to reverse course quickly and say "everything we said for the last 30 years is wrong."

Almost none of the diet suggestions focus on digestion, absorption.

I just dont see consensus on what percent of a diet should be grain vs vegetable, starches, legumes, fats, meats. Maybe it doesnt matter. "WFPB is the healthiest diet" is very different from "WFPB is one of the healthiest diets."

[ethbro]

> settled science

That seems like an odd turn of phrase.

[cookiengineer]

> I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again.

/r/programming in a nutshell.

[sli]

/r/programming is not an anomaly. My experience is that programming-related discussion boards everywhere are like this, almost from day one. The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong, to the point where even typos can cause a relentless dogpile and accusations that said person "has clearly never written real software in their life." You simply cannot make even one mistake, no matter how minor.

Consequently, I haven't discussed programming on an open forum in over a decade, because I've never found a single programming forum that wasn't openly toxic in this way.

[na85]

>The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong

Frankly, that's my perception of HN, too. Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy, for example, and then prepare to fend off the throngs of people clamoring to be the first to tell you that email is hard (tm), and only fastmail can save us from Google's dragnet, oh also email is deprecated and we should just use signal or some other proprietary walled garden.

[shadowprofile77]

And the irony that your comment gets downvoted for pointing out that HN too suffers from a tribalist mentality about certain things (it does)... All these sharp minds don't like to be reminded of their own strange little obsessions and failings as human beings.

[cookiengineer]

> Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy

Well, I guess there are different levels of expectations on what easy means. letsencrypt with dovecot and postfix is the definition of complex legacy, but in times where everything is spam that didn't come from domains with dmarc et all... there might be people that think of "what email server is" differently than you.

[noizejoy]

> rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong

Could that be, because so much of programming is a group activity (understanding, maintaining, and evolving other people’s code), and thus actually benefits (in an evolutionary sense) from simplistic group think more than from innovation and perfection?

[ethbro]

I'd chalk this one up to folks with enough time to endlessly post on Reddit not spending those hours building and maintaining software.

Professionals have time for the internet as a hobby. Hobbyists have time for the internet as a job.

[tomlu]

I have experienced this first hand. I wrote a novel multiplayer algorithm for a game that shipped on the consoles at the ,time and weighed into a conversation about lag on Battlefield. Downvotes everywhere...

[GFischer]

Maybe some subreddits, but on other subreddits you get actual top people - I´m in a couple of card game ones and I sometimes get answers from a top 50 player. You also get advice from not so good players too of course.

[marblar]

That seems like an unusual case because you have an external way to verify the expertise of a top 50 player. You don't have the same for a finance subreddit.

[NicoJuicy]

Yes they do. They require proof of payment

[code_duck]

I’ve seen this on medical subs. Doctors get downvoted and their posts disputed. This is often because members have had poor experiences with doctors and the doctors underestimate the level of sophistication of the patient members, and their own level of knowledge is not always what one would expect.

[travmatt]

I’d describe the drift towards anti-expertise in terms of size rather than time - I’ve found that the best subreddits are fairly small or have heavy moderation if they are large.

/r/askhistorians has kept up their quality through removing top line answers that are not properly cited, sometimes entire posts have nothing other than [deleted].

I think most smaller communities are still pretty valuable, maybe because they are too small or infrequently used to have their users coalesce around a single set of ideas. I think/r/asknetsec is still a pretty good resource even though it’s in the bigger end of small, I’m not sure how it’s kept it’s quality though.

[noizejoy]

> I’ve found that the best subreddits are fairly small or have heavy moderation if they are large.

Maybe that’s just reflecting how our species seems to work. The larger the group, the more it turns into a mob unless increasingly tightly structured.

[palebluedot]

My favorite example of this is that Popehat (Ken White) was banned from /r/legaladvice.

[lonelappde]

Just the opposite.

/r/legaladvice is heavily moderated to keep it clean and high quality.

Ken White was banned for deliberate persistent rule breaking and hijacking the sub to make it popehatLegalAdvice.

https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_i...

[palebluedot]

I don't really see how that fails to fit the pattern of "I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again."

While /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated, it is not particularly high quality.

[76543210]

I have a data heavy website, and posting links on most subreddits isn't okay.

So I could format my data for Reddit, or post a simple summary (which looks as authentic as any random poster), or I don't post at all.

I have the highest quality, low cost food Data, but can't post it. But hey Aldi astroturfs and gets away with it.

[code_duck]

>Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question

People don’t follow that, anyway. First, the rules for subs, on the sidebar on the desktop, are fairly hidden away now in the ‘about’ link. It’s doesn’t matter, though. Even when it’s at the top in a sticky post people don’t read it - take /r/scams, for instance, and the ‘I installed a RAT and filmed you watching poern so give me bitcoin’ scam. People post about that every day for months despite a highlighted bold post at the top of the sub for 6 months. Or /r/celiac. Plenty of links about diagnosis in the sidebar, but people ask ‘I have this and this symptom, do I have celiac?’ about 4 times a week.

Overall people come to reddit or a forum to have a discussion. Searching and reading is what they don’t want to do.

I’m on the fence as forbidding previously covered topics makes a forum dry and cobwebby. On the other hand, repeating the same basic advice 5 times a week for different people feels very repetitive, like you say. It takes a community of dedicated posters, basically obsessed volunteers, to make a sub consistently give good advice to everyone who comes by. I essentially do this as a hobby, myself.

[maest]

Reddit also has a big problem with astroturfing. There are 2 really prominent use cases:

1. (mostly) US politics, with shills on all sides 2. corporate advertising. r/hailcorporate takes this to the extreme sometimes, but there are plenty of astroturfed posts supporting or advertising various brands reddit.

Think about how much companies would pay to have the discussion around their brand monitored and controlled on a forum with millions of eyeballs.

Also, reddit accounts being farmed for karma then sold on is an open secret.

[Domenic_S]

> As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over.

I answer questions in r/personalfinance's "new" area, and the split is something like:

"I am upside down on my car loan/loan is too expensive/want to get out of my current car" - 40%

"How do I do I make [some crazy ROI]? I have [$small amount] to invest" - 20%

"I have no money and need to pay my bills" - 20%

"Can I afford to buy this house?" - 10%

Novel questions - 10%

So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.

[outworlder]

> So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.

You should, but charge the full price, if you genuinely have useful information. The perceived value of an item changes according to the price you charge.

Given that cars are multi-thousand dollar expense, investing a tiny fraction to get better information is a good return of investment.

[bobloblaw45]

I noticed a good amount of of young people humble-bragging too. Like "I just got out of college and I make 6 figures, should I eat lentils or splurge and get Sizzler?"

To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past.

[InitialLastName]

> To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past.

I wonder if that's usable as an indicator?

[nkassis]

I'd probably read something like that. I hate buying cars. I know I'll get scammed somehow and pay more than I should.

[lonelappde]

r/AskCarSales is already popular

[semicolonandson]

I just finished listening to an engaging series of podcasts by Michael Lewis (author of Flash Boys, The Big Short etc.) about the loss of referees in our society. It's called Against the Rules: https://atrpodcast.com/

Much of reddit still has functioning referees in the form of its moderators, but I'm seeing signs of it cracking — e.g. when I researched the backgrounds of certain moderators I found out that they produced content in some space and would allow their own stuff to get posted while blocking other people's submissions.

[NegatioN]

To me it seems like this is an enternal struggle of /having to be/ a "hipster", and move to the newest services/forums. In the sense that the only untainted grounds will be the ones where there's not that many people yet, or people joining/promoted to influencial positions are scrutinized.

It takes very few bad actors to poison the well. At least on Reddit, there's a myriad of small subreddits which makes it more difficult to infiltrate all of them effectively.

[modo_mario]

Some issues i think reddit has is that they haven't been great about helping their helpers. I remember toolbox being the only way to moderate properly. It not actually being a tool by reddit itself and a massive resource hog and hampered by the size of the wiki for big subs.

Also reddit not curating the moderatorship of it's big subs unless there's controversy. Making it so the top mod can basically take over, disappear, etc. Basically the tiered nature of mods is an issue imo.

[rgg_32]

I’m wondering how long it will take for large companies to realize that people are gradually adapting and starting to look for information on sites other than Google search bar.

Today, Google results are a big problem in the sense discussed in the article, there are no more sources of information that can be trusted like in the old days. Some days I reflect with myself trying to figure out how it can be solved…I hope someone ends up finding a solution.

[basch]

I still for the most part would put site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com into the google search bar. Mostly out of muscle memory, habit, and speed. If I need to use other tools to find something, its because google has failed.

On a similar note, Google deranking Wikipedia (which used to be the first result for like half of my searches) makes it so much less useful. I now need to add wikipedia to my searches.

[wlesieutre]

With DuckDuckGo as your default search, you can use "!w" to direct a search to Wikipedia, "!g" to send it to google, "!gi" for google images, "!a" for amazon, "!ais" for archive.is, and a lot of other options.

If you're using search as a shortcut to get to some other service, it can be nice to go straight there instead of sifting through whatever garbage has been SEOed to the top of Google.

[gibspaulding]

Perhaps more relevant to the GP, you can use !r to search reddit and !hn to search HN:)

[wlesieutre]

Those are two examples where I might not do it because the built-in search on reddit and HN are worse at finding things than searching the same site through Google. For wikipedia search though, no reason to put that through Google.

[matheusmoreira]

> I’m wondering how long it will take for large companies to realize that people are gradually adapting and starting to look for information on sites other than Google search bar.

Hopefully it will take them a very long time. I don't want companies to start poisoning online communities with their hidden advertising. When I visit an online community, I want to read about the real thoughts of real people that are hopefully much smarter than I am, and maybe even post a few of my own. No community wants paid members with ulterior motives and conflicts of interest.

[arvinsim]

I have actually read that some country specific subreddits that are moderated by people who are not from the respective country.

[modo_mario]

It makes sense if it's not solely that Like r/europe has a Canadian and Brazilian if i remember well to handle night time stuff.

[CapsAdmin]

In game communities I've managed there's always a strong desire from the people within the community to become a moderator for IMO the wrong incentives. (wrong being standing out and sometimes power)

I've tried to combat this but it seems very difficult. The thing that works best is to really hide the status and let people make their own ways of standing out.

I also very rarely gave moderator status to anyone who asked. It would mostly be people I see could be a good fit and also make sure there are no obligations to actually use power.

[shostack]

This is a growing concern. There's simply zero transparency, accountability, or ability to verify who is actually moderating these communities.

I'm particularly concerned about political subs, those dealing with hot button issues, and global news. There is zero way to tell if a mod is acting in a potentially alarming manner.

[jbjohns]

I would expect the majority of the mods are actually advertising accounts of some form or another. The more popular the sub the more likely the mods are not acting in good faith.

[voicedYoda]

This is essentially how imgur got started, banned, then bloomed into popularity.

[ehnto]

I often use google to search specific sites, because of this reason.

The simple issue is that people who make money from being first page on Google can afford the money it takes to game the index to their benefit.

This would be true of other search engines too if they were as popular as Google, so I don't blame them for it. Nor do I envy their task. I imagine making SEO gaming harder would be in Google's benefit, so they could sell more advertising.

Commerce has ruined Google's results consistently for years now. It is just what commerce does to everything, when there is money to be made from it. You can't even fly on a plane you paid to be on without being advertised at as thanks for your patronage.

[moksly]

I didn’t think much about it, but now that you mention it, I’ve been typing “reddit” after my google queries almost every time I search for something that isn’t a technical problem or me looking to buy something.

[mgerb]

I've been doing the exact same thing for quite some time now. Google is filled with so many garbage results. For most things I want to see short and sweet answers by real people.

Just yesterday I searched for "index funds vs etf reddit", as I'm really new to any sort of investing. The first reddit result on google has a simplified response that is to the point.

Now try searching google for "index funds vs etf" and the results are littered with investing sites and long lists of information, that is more than likely helpful, but much more verbose.

[Goronmon]

Google is filled with so many garbage results.

In this case I would just replace 'Google' with 'the internet'. Switching search providers isn't going to make a marked difference the vast majority of the time, as at the end of the day, if the vast majority of the internet is filled with 'garbage' a search engine can only do so much to avoid it.

[cle]

Stop trying to deflect blame from Google. They go out of their way to show garbage. They sacrifice their search results as much as they can get away with, in order to show more ads. Reddit does not do this nearly to the degree as Google. It’s not even close. There are ways to filter through the noise, it just doesn’t involve companies with financial conflicts of interest.

[three_seagrass]

>They go out of their way to show garbage.

Citation needed. Searching "index funds vs etf" on Bing gives ads for the first five results, while Google shows a card thing and organic results.

If you're going to accuse them of deflecting, at least show evidence that it's not just the whole internet.

[cle]

Look around at this thread for evidence. Targeted searching on other platforms that rank results based on votes from small communities yields much more relevant and trustworthy results.

Try searching for "financial advisor" on Google. I did it on my phone, and the only thing on my screen is ads.

[moksly]

Considering you’ll often find more informative links posted on reddit than you will see in your google results, I think it may be a problem with Google. At least for my anecdotal experience.

Which is what makes other people having similar experiences interesting. Because if enough of us feel like this, then there would be a need for a better search engine. Not sure who’s going to make it though, libraries?

[LegitShady]

Disagree. Google has gotten much worse and not because of the internet but because of their own priorities shifting.

[FillardMillmore]

I even look to Reddit when I am looking to buy something, because as pointed out above, Reddit often presents people with a more objective view on a product in contrast to the results you'd get simply from a generic Google query on the product.

[moksly]

Oh I look to reddit/HN and hobby forums when I want recommendations, but if I already know I’m going to buy something specific, like a yellow “specific brand” paint for my blood bowl team, I’ll google and look for the cheapest seller.

[neves]

You can say this about any advice. My brother worked in a bank. They gave bonus for everyone that sold a specific financial product for the clients. The internal name of the product was "good for suckers".

[icedchai]

Let me guess.. annuities? VULs?

[neves]

It was in Brazil, I don't know the equivalent. The name here was "capitalization title", it has terrible profitability, liquidity, but you can win "prizes". Almost a lottery.

[atwork95]

I usually search for recommendation on reddit because they seems to be more legit and so far it has always worked

[disiplus]

and that's mostly thanks to subreddit moderators, if they weren't that aggressive it would be full of spam. u can notice that on some subreddits when moderators are away or some that have lax rules.

[Cthulhu_]

It's only a matter of time I think before subreddits and / or moderators are replaced by sales / marketing representatives. It's probably already the case in e.g. the political subreddits.

Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another.

[stjohnswarts]

The political subreddits are mostly echo chambers of a single party that has taken over there especially in "nonpartisan" groups, especially in news subreddits like politics, news, and worldnews. Even moderates aren't really welcome and I've seen anyone who said something even slightly conservative get ripped to shreds and moderators are like "I'll allow it", pretty crazy. There are many, many good informational forums though, like the article mentioned you just have to look out for marketeers and snake oil a bit.

[FrozenTuna]

Its not even as open as a single party right now. Its single candidate.

[jahlove]

/r/moderatepolitics is my new /r/politics.

[DelightOne]

> Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another.

What would you do here, specifically?

[jerf]

If you are implying that it can be difficult to investigate a particular person like, say, a reddit mod with very little biographical information and no particular post history, then I'd suggest that finding that someone giving advice is not themselves investigatable is itself an answer. Yeah, that metric will have false positives, but, alas, fewer and fewer over time as a site grows.

[read_if_gay_]

That's because of the voting system.

[fullstop]

That can be manipulated too, though.

[koboll]

>searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

Well, search on reddit has always been pretty terrible.

I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results.

[gniv]

> I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results.

That works, but for many searches will include results from other sites, since the operator works on the entire URL, not just the domain. If you want to limit to just reddit.com, use `site:reddit.com`.

[blackandblue]

this is so true! but we have ourselves to blame for it. these days i don't get mad at google search results anymore. i knew someone gamed the result in order to try to sell me something...

here's one the has started to puzzle me: TED talks have become the ground for people trying to sell you something. but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right?

wrong!

at least to me. this feels wrong.

[P_I_Staker]

>but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right?

Are they really selling these things versus their revolutionary new book, trying to get attention for their research, or some good/service?

I agree. I think TED and similar pop-science programming is dangerous. People think they're actually learning something meaningful. I see it as the granola bar of media. They're filled with sugar and only minor nutritional value. You feel like you're getting something healthy, but you're not doing much better than a snickers bar.

[rgovostes]

Virtually every blog post I've ever found on a well-known brand of orthodontic clear-aligner treatment includes a note, "by the way this post was sponsored but this is my honest opinion." Have to hand it to the marketing team.

The reviewers seem to believe they are unbiased but your satisfaction with the results may differ if you had spent $5,000 versus if you had spent nothing.

[gonzo41]

That sentence would probably hold true if you went to ten financial advisers.

[skepticmoron1]

I find blind app to be a lot more objective. Your company information is required to sign up. This primary property of the app makes it is easier to differentiate an ad vs real advice.