Reddit is a company that made people moderate their content for free.
You don't need to know sub names to get some use of it. I append "reddit" to probably 1/3 of my search engine queries. Especially useful when looking for product recommendations.
My favorite reddit search result story: I asked a question once on Reddit, got no answer, figured it out on my own, then added my solution to the thread because I've been saved countless times by the guy that does that on the internet and I wanted to pay it forward. A couple years later, I have the same problem and remember solving it but don't remember how, search it and find my own answer.
This distils down basically every quality of reddit you need to know.
Maybe. But content on reddit has better provenance data than content on the web in general; reddit has found a version of identity that strikes the right balance. You can take an arbitrary comment and be able to tell with reasonable confidence whether there's an at least somewhat "real" user behind it, in a way that you just can't for a random blog or a product review anywhere else.
your phrasing makes it sound like a conspiracy, but its really not.
Going on various social media platforms to decide on a purchase has already been an established pattern for more then 10 years. That's more then enough time for even the biggest corporations to act on.
Do keep in mind that the influencing agency doesn't actually have to write comments. Machine Learning is super good in determining if a given comment is about [topic], and wherever its a [positive] or [negative] comment.
I'm sure people already know that there are a lot of agencies around which sell you votes on relevant platforms, so any given company can - for peanuts(!) - just upvote positive 'real' comments and downvote the same for the competitors products etc.
There is very little you can 'trust' on the internet, as its just too profitable to spread propaganda through it.
there have been several people that publicly admitted that their whole job was to derail critical conversations on various platforms. So even if you put in time and produce a quality comment... there are people who get paid just to write comments to make it look like misinformation.
The accuracy of Google's search results have gotten worse as time goes on. Once upon a time I could search for a specific system error code and get only results that contained that code. Now however, I am lucky if the search term I am looking for is on the same page, even after I add or try all the Search Modifiers.
Yes, the internet has gotten worse. Far more noise then signal. But if I search for: "Error: 98yuasdvfnbi89yt7" I expect to find that within the results. Even if there are 0 results, that is valid feedback too.
If you actually include the quotes in your search term, you'll get the results you want, including zero results if there are no exact matches. Either of the following search terms will work:
"Error: 98yuasdvfnbi89yt7"
Error "98yuasdvfnbi89yt7"
In both cases, that search will currently return one page, this one.
This is the trick I use too; but I found the result still isn't great enough for a few reasons.
1. People seem have a tendency to recommend products/brands that are niche or "in minority". Like some obscure ones that scratch particular itch for that user (and often expensive and hard to find). This is totally fine on its own, but you want to have the big picture (i.e. learn about the most popular ones) first when researching a new product.
2. The number of the answers is often so low (and most would have 1 digit upvotes) that it's very hard to judge when there is conflicting info.
3. People often just list the brand/name, without much more information.
4. you can't even sure if these answers are genuine (instead of marketing/soft advertisement).
Still, probably much better than anything else that can be easily found in general search.
I've found that reddit tends to get pretty cargo culty around particular products/brands, like Sony mirrorless and the Olympus mju II for cameras, Denon DJ equipment, or Starting Strength for weightlifting. So many recommendations basically follow the form "I'm new to this hobby and bought one of these a week ago, I swear it's the best thing ever"
- A headphone is released which is not flawless, but offers great value.
- The headphone is recommended on Reddit.
- Demand for the headphone goes up.
- The price of the headphone increases.
- The headphone is no longer a good value, but is still recommended.
- This continues until either a well-reputed user points out the poor value or a new headphone with great value is released.
This is not a coincidence, I'm guessing Reddit is around 1/3 astroturfing to 2/3 legitimate discussion. I don't fault people for doing it, but I'm not going to pretend that Reddit is some pristine haven for genuine reviews.
HN is just as exploitable, but at least the ratio of informative content is higher, and the concerted marketing efforts are better disguised.
In any kind of subreddit about a category of products, they are all very sure that anything that's not expensive is awful. But what would real customers be doing replying to posts I'm a subreddit like that? Probably not a great place to compare things
Reminds me how I once asked what's a good EU online shop for running gear on the running subreddit, and the top recommended post was about a premium priced boutique european manufacturer of clothes for "plus sized" runners...
Starting strength - absolutely. It’s fine and served me well, but it isn’t the bible of building strength. There are several books worth reading, different schools of thought, but somehow SS always comes out on top on Reddit.
It’s good if you keep in mind who the typical redditor is and if you would take advice from that type of person in real life. One notable example was when I was trying to do some research on cars. The type of things generally recommended seemed almost tailor made for young men at a certain stage of their life (ie budget/sporty/manual/etc). Sure I love that stuff too, but just take a look around in the real world, and it’s pretty clear that the recommendations you’re getting are super limited in scope.
It’s an echo chamber too. On /r/investing people parrot “time in the market beats timing the market”, while this may be true for most, I read a post the other day where someone wrote “I really want to buy the dip but I know that would be childish”. While it may be riskier than the strategy they parrot it’s hardly “childish”.
On /r/personalfinance people say you must payoff a 2% mortgage before you can consider investing. Advice on there is hit or miss because of herd mentality
There’s also entire subs dedicated to illegal activity like sharing pirated content or sourcing scheduled substances, or discussing conspiracy theories or discussing violence, and Apple is ok with this while shutting down other apps like parlor which arguably didn’t do anything different
I agree with all of the above but there are two good dynamics.
For small niche subreddits where you only get a few answers it seems less likely that those are advertisements (and user history is often telling)
And on bigger subs, it's much harder to manipulate the answer unless your product is already pretty decent and you're just fighting over some market spot. In other words, obviously bad products won't be able to advertise this way because of negative comments, but some covert brand building certainly can be done.
> In other words, obviously bad products won't be able to advertise this way because of negative comments
Negative comments can be downvoted and it's not a secret that you can buy reddit accounts and that there are lots of bots. A comment only needs what, 5 downvotes before it's automatically minimized by the default view? You're not seeing those comments unless you're digging, the same way you would on Amazon or anywhere else.
Reddit is great for knowing what products to buy if you want upper middle class status symbols. If you're looking to spend money with little regard for efficiency of the dollar (i.e. buying someone a gift) it's fine. If you are accountable to yourself or others it is far from ideal.
Perfect example I found the other day... the main post is clearly a bot, and all the replies are bots pretending to be users too.
Reddit USED to be amazing for finding recommendations for products/services but these days it’s just another bot-filled and paid-content dumping ground like the Google search results.
Sometimes it's obvious - the same user posting/commenting the same link across many related subs with very low signal and no other posting or commenting activity.
Or you see the same link and comment/post text posted by many different users.
But this is just low-effort marketing. There's a lot of content that is relevant but also marketing. Burger/chicken restaurant twitter account screenshots getting posted to a default sub, for example.
as others said, it can be obvious if one account is used to share the same sentiment.
one other obvious one I've seen is when batches of similar posts for recommendations in category "X" have each received a reply, usually days/weeks after the original submission, all from different users, posted around the same time, recommending the same product
Yet they totally borked the discovery experience through search. Now you search, click a reddit link, it takes you to half a page with two comments and you have to click a new link to see the whole thing, that is after fighting away the Install the App prompt of course.
I append "-site:reddit.com" to my programming queries, if it's coming up in results, because it takes multiple clicks in their slow, user-hostile web application to expand the conversation, and there's NEVER an answer there.
That's the new, terrible interface. Replace the "www" with "old" in the URL, like "old.reddit.com". If you create an account, you can configure "old reddit" to be your default. There are also browser add-ons that will rewrite the URLs automatically. The difference is night and day.
Well, like I said, there's NEVER an answer there, so there's no reason to rewrite the URL, or create an account to make it the default.
Given the engineering effort to write the "new" site in such a user-hostile way, the refusal to backpedal on it in the face of overwhelming public negativity, and similar malfeasance on the mobile version, I have a hard time believing that they will keep the "old" version around for much longer.
This. When I'm looking for a product rec or review, looking up an experience doing something or even a health symptom, and many other things, the first attempt with Google is a dismal failure.. Does Google think we are so stupid that we don't see that paid garbage has replaced data in search results?
So reddit is added as a keyword.
How soon before the user generated content is fully under centralized control so they can go back to force-feeding in search?
You don't need to know sub names to get some use of it. I append "reddit" to probably 1/3 of my search engine queries. Especially useful when looking for product recommendations.