[lloydatkinson]

It’s amazing really that the internet or rather the WWW has become a dumpster fire of shitty articles and ML generated click bait articles. I put Reddit in maybe 80% of my google searches to ensure I get actual quality information.

[AshamedCaptain]

How can one believe even for a second that the entire WWW is a dumpster fire of shitty ML generated articles... but at the same time that Reddit, whose only barrier of entry is creating an account (actually a lower barrier of entry that creating a website) is a safe haven of "quality information"?

Food for thought...

[anonymousab]

It's not a belief, it's outcome oriented. I have had more luck troubleshooting a niche issue or finding common viewpoints (negative ones being the most important) on products and problems I am trying to solve via Reddit than the autogen listicles and vaguely related quora posts that make up the vast majority of Google's first 10 page results.

All the signals I am picking up on/using to differentiate a real or usable comment (sometimes paid ones can still be useful!) can of course be gamed the same way Google search or Amazon product reviews can. Reddit can also still be botted.

But in practice I am currently finding more success at home with information sourced from Reddit. That will no doubt change eventually, but right now, it is indeed better for me.

I hint at it above, but we all use Google for different things - buying things, finding things, getting information on a variety of topics. If I'm trying to do something like solve a technical or software issue, it actually doesn't matter if the result is gamed or not - what matters is if I solve the issue. Stackoverflow, Reddit and wikipedia results easily help me reach that end far more often than Google does, especially when Google doesn't seem to often surface the more obscure hobby forums that might have niche information.

[WorldPeas]

Honestly reddit is pretty bad, much of it feels like an echo chamber/shilling, but when it comes to things not focused on consuming product(e.g. linux) it's pretty helpful and has gotten me out of jams more than I'd care to admit. I think the reason the information is higher quality in those spheres is because there's no incentive to push something. You don't see people pushing a product on you to rip a cd, they just tell you the DD command(results may vary for macos and windows users), wheras in product oriented subreddits I see things being pushed all the time that at second glance are either crap or expensive. Similarly, these SEO sites are simply scraping documentation from oracle, and answers from stack overflow and slapping ads on them to make money. I reckon if reddit users got paid to post we'd see a whole lot more botting.

[spupe]

Because it's not easy to monetize a Reddit post. If you attract people to click on your garbage article, you can display ads and extract value. Meanwhile if you post the same bullshit on Reddit, you get nothing.

This is not to say that there are no bots, paid shills and other issues on Reddit, but it is definitely a good filter. It's the same with Stackoverflow vs most coding sites that just rip them off.

[lloydatkinson]

Because humans wrote it, and there is an upvote system. Human content > ML content. Are you saying that HN is also not better than ML clickbait content? I doubt it.

The fact that this is the second reddit append tool mentioned on HN within a week means there is obviously something you are not considering.

[AshamedCaptain]

When you _search_ for content in reddit using Google, the upvote system is irrelevant. You are actually just trusting the same ranking system Google uses for the rest of the Web. Reddit's community moderation does not play a role at all (unless the moderation effectively deleted the content, which it doesn't).

It's not the same to look at HN's frontpage articles (or similarly the most upvoted comments) versus just randomly doing a text search for some obscure topic on HN and looking at whichever crap comes first. Specially when you use the very same search ranking algorithm you already complained tends to give crap.

[seanhunter]

With you on this. It depends hugely on which subreddit and the subreddit approach to moderation but on average I would say reddit is reflective of (and in many cases worse than) the general level of quality of the www as a whole.

[pluc]

That's because SEO has ruined everything that isn't heavily community-managed.