[nullindividual]

> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.

Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal.

The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior.

Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.

[mvdtnz]

> The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"

This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. New users read the confidently wrong information, take it as gospel and spread it to other new users.

[MostlyStable]

1) Compared to what? It's really important to compare those reddit results to elsewhere and not the hypothetical "best" answer. Yeah, reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit. If I don't already know where to look (and just want google to get me there faster), 99% of my results are going to be useless blogspam.

2) It's even more important to have an understanding of the _kinds_ of things reddit is good at answering, and which communities provide good answers to those questions. Reddit is so big that there are good and bad versions of almost everything.

[mvdtnz]

1) As always it depends on the query. For categories like cars/engines, gardening/landscaping and DIY stuff I've found that a Bing search often outperforms Google because it returns a dedicated section for internet discussions that isn't focused completely on Reddit. Here's an example of that section from a search about manifolds for an old engine[0].

There is a TON of (actually good) community discussion on such topics on "the old internet" as long as it doesn't need to be timely.

For topics that need more timeliness, I don't have a good answer. The internet in general is so enshittified that maybe Reddit is the only good answer when the alternative is AI-generated garbage.

2) In my experience, for factual information, it's just too much of a minefield. Try finding actually accurate information on Reddit about Roundup/glyphosate, for example. Compare what you find to the actual published research on the topic. It is very hard to find correct information on this topic on Reddit, and where you do see it, it will be downvoted to invisibility. [0] https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ

[nitwit005]

For a subject like pesticides that is both emotionally fraught, and the subject of multi-billion dollar lawsuits, I'm genuinely not sure you can find accurate information anywhere. People are careful to say things like "not supported by credible science", because the industry has paid for some of the research.

[JohnFen]

> reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit.

Fascinating.

I've read so many comments here about how people search reddit specifically in order to get better results, but I've never understood this. I don't find reddit to be better enough for that sort of thing to be worth going to reddit as a first choice.

Perhaps this explains it? I stopped using Google search a few years back because I find it hard to get to useful sites using it.

Are people comparing reddit-specific searches to general Google search results? That would be the explanation, because if I had to chose between the two, I'd go with a reddit-first approach, too.

[KnobbleMcKnees]

It really depends what you're looking for answers to.

If you're looking for more trustworthy product reviews than the ones on an Amazon product page, or you're looking for how to fix an obscure problem with your 3d printer, it's damn reliable. Having the opportunity for open and anonymous conversation on these things increases the chance of meaningful discussion.

For the former, Google search results are a hodge podge of bought-and-paid for "best of" sites, and for the latter dominated by ancient niche forum posts and shitty Quora answers.

Half of the Internet is now soulless self promotion and devious attempts to advertise without you knowing you're being advertised to.

So two cheers to Reddit, frankly. We could do a hell of a lot worse.

[JohnFen]

> If you're looking for more trustworthy product reviews than the ones on an Amazon product page

I totally believe that! But since I personally don't look for product reviews on the internet at all (and absolutely wouldn't look on Amazon), I wouldn't really know.

All I'm saying is that for the sorts of things I tend to search for, anyway, finding good resources on the web isn't that hard, so I never really understood why people prefer to search reddit (unless they already are reddit users anyway, of course).

[KnobbleMcKnees]

Without knowing what those things are this is a rather fruitless discussion.

[jameson71]

It's really good for home type technical questions too. Like a stack overflow for plex or handyman type things for people who want to scan text and not watch a half hour youtube.

What are you using instead of google search?

[JohnFen]

DDG, although I think I'll be switching to Kagi in the future.

> for people who want to scan text and not watch a half hour youtube.

I never use YouTube videos for that sort of thing because I don't really learn well from videos. I'm a text kind of guy. But even for those sorts of things, I never have a problem finding good resources on the web, so I have no reason to have to go to reddit for them.

That's just me, though. It's not a criticism of reddit, just a preference. Reddit is just not my kind of place, so I like to avoid it when I can.

[trts]

it's a fairly common and incredible experience for me to see people on reddit assert the most inane drivel that collect hundreds or thousands of upvotes and enthusiastic agreement.

It makes me feel some combination of

1. Reddit is flooded with bots or brigades that seem to have cryptic agendas

2. My own reality is really far afield and the internet is bursting that bubble OR

3. The present young adult generation exists in a seriously orthogonal reality and absolutely sweeping societal changes are on the horizon (as may already be becoming evident)

I still find a lot of pleasant discourse on the smaller subreddits. But it's an absolute shock to visit some of the larger communities sometimes.

[TheNewsIsHere]

I think #3 is closest to the mark, but I don’t think it’s caged to young adults.

For example, if you were to look anywhere on Reddit and found yourself in a thread that just barely, tangentially, almost-not-in-this-plane-of-reality touches on something related to law, a hundred people will show up to give you all sorts of the most inane and dangerous legal advice.

Granted, for something like legal advice you: 1) shouldn’t go Reddit; and 2) should search for an attorney. That said, there are (were?) some places on Reddit where you could find advice or discussion attached to the reality shared by the rest of us. But that isn’t the current draw of the site to the masses.

I’m one of the people who (until this past week) used Reddit in a technical capacity.

That shouldn’t be taken as “I get my solutions from Reddit.” Rather, I posted and consumed niche technical information for unusual problems. There were (are?) a boatload of smaller, vendor specific, etc subreddits that _did_ (do?) have smart people who collaborate or rubber ducky tricky issues.

Most of Reddit is not and was not that.

And as I type that, I realize I must apologize for sort of hijacking your reply with a response to the parent comment. I’ll leave this and have prepended a direct response to the points you raise and added a reasonable segue.

[samtho]

> Granted, for something like legal advice you: 1) shouldn’t go Reddit; and 2) should search for an attorney.

Counterpoint, not everyone has access to an attorney, a mechanic, a doctor (sadly), tradesperson, or any number of expensive professionals when someone just needs to know if they can ignore something, can fix it themself, or if they should seek out professional advice. These communities can be of great help to people who just need to guided to the next step.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Wholeheartedly agreed.

[castlecrasher2]

I also avoid the larger communities. The value in reddit is having a number of doors to open and shut at will. Can I find a better place for discussion in a specific forum? Probably, but reddit is great for being able to visit and consult with many different groups.

[smackeyacky]

This is the crux of the problem and why free moderation doesn't scale. Communities simply can't exceed a particular size without attracting chuds, and smaller communities self regulate because "being a member" of something useful is valuable.

Online discussions communities since Usenet always suffer the same problem. They become useful, attract too many users of the wrong kind and die. Reddit will be no exception.

[soundsgoodtome]

4. Most people are idiots.

The older I get, the more I go with #4

[ttctciyf]

> assert the most inane drivel

Thank goodness that never happens here!

[hotpotamus]

Number 3 just seems like a fancy way of saying that you're getting older. Not that I disagree; I'm also getting older.

[throwaway22032]

The Reddit algorithm of upvotes and downvotes means that, if >51% of voters agree with something, it's visible. If <49% do, it's at the bottom of the page or hidden.

This makes basically anything even remotely controversial within the specific demographic of the site invisible to reddit users.

[andybak]

I’m 52 and frequent a mix of large and small subreddits.

Can you elaborate?

[cityhall]

One thing it's still useful for is getting user reviews that actually tell you if a product is junk or has recently been replaced with an inferior version. Store sites and review pages make it too easy for companies to get negative reviews hidden.

[xapata]

> People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years.

Isn't that just a microcosm of the internet and society in general?

[mvdtnz]

The internet I came from (in the days of discussion forums) didn't suffer this problem because there were no internet points attached to posts, and posts were ordered oldest to newest. Incorrect information was called out. On Reddit, the "right kind" of incorrect information is upvoted and boosted to the top, and anyone calling out this misinformation is downvoted.

[itairal]

The worst part to me is the binary nature of internet points. Up or down. No difference between something one simply doesn't agree with vs utter and complete bullshit.

On the other hand I am not sure what the old internet forums I loved would look like if you scaled up the users 100X and then linked all these random forums together so one username interacted across message boards. That would have basically been a disaster and internet points would not have been the major problem.

[rightbyte]

Internet points are fine but the sort by votes order messes up any interesting discussion if people use downvotes as disagree buttons.

[dmichulke]

I use reddit to search for a diverse set of options (= many possible solutions), not for facts (wikipedia), code (stackoverflow) or how-tos (YouTube).

Google only gives you a million times the same top n solutions iff your keywords are unique enough.

[greenpresident]

There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.

[transcriptase]

I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post.

Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process.

Eerie was an understatement.

[flomo]

> I’ve seen entire comment chains on a repost that were re-created verbatim from an older post.

I have seen this happen on one of those (former) small niche cozy subs, where it is small enough that people notice their content being recycled. No idea what the goal might be, so I wonder if it is a platform feature to pump-up engagement by automatically reposting content.

[z3c0]

> Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original

What's sad is how many of those aren't bots. It's not uncommon for karma farmers to have their bots upvote each other, but it isn't cost effective to have hundreds (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). The sad reality is that of those hundreds of upvotes, almost all represent a person who fell for it.

As the saying goes "a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on".

[aryan14]

> (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma).

Someone who bought a reddit account here, I bought a 2 year old aged account with around 3000 post karma for $10. The karma has lost its value.

[transcriptase]

Without judging and out of pure curiosity, can I ask why?

[evouga]

What’s the endgame here? Who is buying ripened accounts with lots of karma and why?

[joshstrange]

People who want to astroturf, from everything from products to politics (though honestly probably more for "products"). Reddit is well known for being one of the few places you can "trust" product reviews (that hasn't been fully true for a while now but it's still valuable). If a near-0 karma and/or new account says "I love X product" then they can sometimes be downvoted/called a shill but an account that's a couple years old and has decent karma? Looks like a real person.

That's at least the explanation I've heard many times.

[MostlyStable]

Once you cross the extremely small karma barrier needed to get your comments allowed/not be rate limited...whats the point? I use reddit for a lot of recommendations/research and I have _never_ checked the karma of a user after reading their comment.

[TylerE]

To appear trustworthy.

Account says buy bitcoin - user checks history and sees 7 year old account with thousands of posts, many highly upvoted, so assumes source is sane and not astroturf.

[giantrobot]

Karma on Reddit is used as a proxy for "this user makes good contributions". At smaller scales in the past this might have been a useful proxy but when a pithy joke on a huge subreddit can get thousands of upvotes it's not longer a good proxy. But since people still use it as a proxy astroturfers wants as much karma and activity as they can manage because it makes the account look more realistic.

[waboremo]

Outside of buying accounts, some people literally just want control. For the same reason that people will spend countless hours moderating large subs for free. They want to push certain narratives on subs, so you'll see large accounts where all they post are generic filler distractions or inciteful links. It's not all super nefarious or political, often it's things like mindless fanboy wars, where they only post things that make their favorite companies look good.

For others, they do it because getting upvotes and reddit awards makes them feel good. They see themselves as community pillars. I suppose this kind of feeds into the above reason in some ways.

If you check /r/games today, you'll see one user is responsible for over half of the submissions. Such accounts are what I mean, where unless they have fine tuned a bot to such a degree, they're really just someone with a little bit too much time on their hands.

[mejutoco]

Did you see all those "where can I buy this flavor of snack in $location", or some weird anecdote involving a flavor of chips or similar. Tons of astroturfing on reddit.

I notice a lot of talking past each other in only tangentially related comments. Lately also here on hn.

[monnok]

Lately, I’ve seen comments copied verbatim from lower in the very same comment section.

They’ll find a comment with upvotes rising above its thread neighbors, but with the entire thread neighborhood buried at the bottom of the comment section. Then they’ll just staple that low comment as a response to some visible comment in a thread much higher up the comment section.

[ilyt]

I wanted to make one for a joke and see how long it takes for people to notice but I guess people did that already for nefarious purposes.

That was after I noticed that cat delivering bot I wrote for internal chat appears to have "infinity supply of cats" according to the users, while all it has is a ~200 long list of imgur links that never changes.

[tmaly]

People are going to go somewhere. I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction.

For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.

[panopticchaos]

I'm on the fence about Lemmy/Kbin, but I think it has a better shot than Mastodon.

Twitter's thing was "giant conversation with everyone" - federation interferes with that.

Reddit was inherently fragmented (subreddits, and heavy redditors tended to describe groupings of related subreddits). Federation seems pretty natural here (community names can just have an @ symbol somewhere in there).

There are UI and discoverability issues, but those seem rather tractable.

I think performance at scale will be a real issue though.

[soperj]

Napster worked because it was free and easy and that didn't exist before (FTP servers were not easy). If it were because it was centralized then bit-torrent would have never taken off.

[SoftTalker]

Hm. FTP servers are pretty easy. "ls" to see files. "get" to get them. What wasn't easy was finding them, and then preventing them falling over when too many people tried to access them at the same time. Napster solved that with distributed file serving and consolidated listings of what was available.

[giantrobot]

FTP servers were easy...except for actually finding content on them where Napster was better. You literally described why Napster was better. FTP was only concerned with moving bytes. Napster added a search functionality on top of the moving bytes which is the thing most people actually wanted. Napster could have just been a fancy Archie front end and it would have been just about as popular.

[itairal]

FTP servers at that time for MP3s were ratio servers. You had to upload something in order to download and at a specific ratio of kb. Most wouldn't give you credit for uploading something they already had as well.

Finding the songs was no problem. I can remember some kind of web search engine. It was just too hard to get a collection going to even be able to download something though. I guess the idea was to rip your cd collection but that idea simply didn't occur to me at the time.

Napster took off because it was a free record store at a time when everyone was use to paying $13 an album in 2000 USD($23 adjusted for inflation).

[JohnFen]

Even easier if you used a nice client to access ftp. The notion that Napster was easier than FTP doesn't ring true to me, either.

[soperj]

napster was fire up the program and search. You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from, often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything. Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Because I did, and it was vastly more difficult.

[JohnFen]

> You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from

True, but that was easy. It was a bit less convenient than file-sharing systems because you had to search as a separate step, using a different program, but it wasn't hard.

> often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything

I saw that sort of thing with BBSes, but never with FTP sites. I didn't know that was a thing with them.

> Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster?

Those aren't ftp clients. I was questioning the premise that ftp was hard to use.

[codetrotter]

> I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction.

Me neither, but it’s worth a shot. I have set up a public Lemmy instance. Registration is open currently. Would be nice to see a handful of people join my instance.

[anadem]

I'm happy to join your Lemmy instance, having jumped ship from Reddit as there's no way I'll use their app. Would you share its address?

[codetrotter]

> Would you share its address?

Yes! :D https://zapad.nstr.no/

[seszett]

Napster was actually made up of a large number of servers that didn't really communicate much, especially for chat.

You couldn't choose your server on the official application, but others allowed you to do you could always meet the same persons. I was on the Orange server.

[colinsane]

i’m feeling like i don’t understand the language around this recently. Lemmy/Kbin takes 1000’s of previously disparate forums and brings them into one UI and identity system: isn’t that more “centralized” than the old phpbb/forum way?

i mean architecturally it’s nearly as decentralized, but from a user point of view that’s not the part that matters. construct the Napster UI atop a decentralized architecture, and it’s all the same right? heck most large websites today are internally decentralized (sharding, load balancing, …) if you peek inside them: the real difference here is not that a service is distributed across machines, but across machines with different owners. it’s really more of a political distinction, the UX could be identical, it just isn’t (quite) due to preference or limited labor.

[somethingreen]

Which is why I don't think that moderator strike will have much effect. All these popular trash filled subreddits are moderated. Moderators just don't do that good of a job. Managing a community is hard and I sympathize with people doing it for free and failing. But as result, the number of subreddits that will actually be destroyed by their mods leaving is too small to affect company balance sheet. Vast majority of Reddit is already pretty low quality and its users are fine with it.

[tacocataco]

I don't think the strike will have much of an effect because there is a end date.

[castlecrasher2]

I agree with you. /r/legaladvice is the peak example of this; as someone who enjoys reading threads there and generally avoids commenting as I'm no lawyer nor legal expert they've become practically unbearable as more and more ignorant people comment freely and without restraint.