Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit

redditprofile.com

76 pointslettergram55 comments

If you want to find mods and bots, try searching for "please". It works on the HN version to pick out dang and sctb and it seems to work on Reddit as well.

There are some false positives, however. E.g. a comment saying "Zuck Fuck" being interpreted as discussing "please" might be due to uncleaned word vectors. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/85y46f/facebooks...

I tried https://hnprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=... to no avail; there's neither dang nor sctb on the first 5 pages.

So.. the system learns what the subject of a sentence is over time. It's since learned "please" is not a subject, so I imagine that's what's dropped them in the results.

Still appear first for YCombinator, because that's the links they constantly post

Fortunately I'm not the kind of person people would be searching for, but this just seems impolite. Posting to an internet forum on a topic that interests you is not an opt-in to have random internet people or reach out to you asking for free advice. If I were a domain expert I wouldn't want to be searched for on Reddit using a tool like this because the implicit goal is to then be spammed about it. If I wanted to be reached out to, I'd say so on a web site somewhere

Neither is it proof of being an expert.

But semi-anonymous posts on social media are?

If so there's a lot more Navy SEALs than I was lead to believe.

When I searched for my own account, it didn't show up. When I searched for a topic, it showed me a user with the same name as the topic. When I did find some users claimed to be experts, I found their mood over the year and the main link was to a HN comment of them.

I am not sure how to use this, what makes a user a domain expert?

It's all kinda confusing.

I only show accounts that were active in the past year (in the subreddits it’s tracking).

Do you have examples of the errors? I’d love to try and figure out the issue.

Regarding a domain expert it’s identified by the terms a person uses and related terms people are interested in. The learn more section might help clear some of that up.

Not tracking all subreddits makes sense I guess. But I searched for "Jailbreak". But got a user with that username.

Searching for "ios programming" shows me some guy wyager and the discussion link is to HN, not reddit.

Thanks for the heads up -_-

The full blown system creates what I call "metaprofiles" merging profiles across various domains. Basically, it can identify people based on conversation (regardless of username or domain). One thing I do, is create these "metaprofiles" and will return the first linked account.

Apparently, I forgot to add a "data source" as an input to the function, thus you may get some of the cross profiles.

I searched for "suicide". I got a list of people back who had interesting opinions in a thread about suicide, but who are not domain experts.

It's an interesting idea though, and it worked a lot better than I was expecting it to. The limitations are clear from the description on the page ("note we only track a small number of subreddits").

A few characters (' ) ( :) (And probably more) lead to an error screen:

https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sea...

Thanks for catching the error!

Should be fixed now, for reference the error was because I was estimating the count. Turns out that couldn't handle only special characters.

The same thing but for HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981

I searched for photography and none of the regulars on /r/photography (including myself) came up.

FYI the system just looks at a subset of subreddits:

/r/dataisbeautiful

/r/news

/r/worldnews

/r/technology

/r/programming

/r/cars

/r/stock market

/r/cryptocurrency

/r/all

Basically didn't want to build an insanely large database for a simple demo.

Well that kills it. The gems of reddit are to be found in small subreddits. For example, awesome bag advice can be found in /r/onebag/ (41k subscribers) /r/ManyBaggers/ (783 only but don't let that fool you, the knowledge in that place is astonishing) and somewhat on /r/BuyItForLife/ (500k). Even that 500k is very small.

Interesting. As someone who has a marketing subreddit dedicated to my content that's about 3k people I wish this was a bit more inclusive outside large subreddits. There's a lot of value in the "longtail" subreddits as it were.

Can you just use the name “Reddit” in your Domain like that?

I'm guessing they are running some legal risk there.

Probably Reddit could technically make a trademark enforcement claim, but it seems they are unlikely to, given the long existence of sites like redditlist.com

@lettergram In lettergram.com, when it says "{} opinion ({}) in {} separate discussions" - are these discussions from Reddit and HN?

It’s what ever is fed into the system. So currently it’s monitoring 12 or so data sources. I could monitor more, but I figure I’ll scale it with interest.

Cool! What are they?

Have you considered adding the feature of listing the conversations which contributed to the score?

100% of the conversations on this website come from subreddits (main ones listed in another comment here). Overall I also monitor some forums, hacker news, and others for https://projectpiglet.com which identifies company insiders then recommends trades. So I don't feel comfortable with sharing exact sources.

Regarding the score - The paid version I'm offering to companies has said feature. It also has a bunch of other items as well, find duplicate accounts, automated related project notification, etc.

Thanks! I will consider trying paid version.

> The paid version I'm offering to companies has said feature.

Should note! That is not the projectpiglet.com version (that wont show you any user information, don't want you to pay unnecessarily). I'm offering the paid version which can be hosted and deployed by a given company internally. To do that you'll need to contact direct via email.

Interesting stuff, how do you calculate a users "mood". Are you willing to explain your algorithm?

Everyone I searched for have an unhappy mood...

Ignorance is bliss

Semantic analysis belongs to the third category in "lies, damn lies, and statistics."

I'm sure it's slightly better for Metacortex's real use case - which is an employee surveillance system - because people won't use strong language, hyperbole, share their real opinions, or talk about certain topics as much in professional communication. But I still find the whole domain to be a fraud with just enough signal in the noise to trick people.

This tool is interesting but it is fundamentally an exercise in turd polishing because Reddit is a completely terrible place to get "expert" advice. It's designed to be a place for show and tell with commentary and false appearance of consensus.

If you want expert advice you should be asking for it somewhere that's properly formatted for long form discussion. You should also seek out advice in a specialized community, not a general one like Reddit. For every piece of good advice on Reddit there's ten pieces of terrible advice and ten pieces of mediocre advice you could find yourself on Google offered up by the riff-raff that happen to be passing through that day. Reddit is just polite 4chan. If you want expert advice to somewhere where only people who are interested in the topic you want advice on are (usually forums).

Edit: Also this tool thinks I am an expert in hipsters. I like to think I'm an expert in calling people hipsters.

Calling people hipsters is the most hipster thing of all.

Source: am a hipster.

I thought the most hipster thing was hating stuff that is popular.

Is anyone aware of a catalogue that houses all of the various forum domains? For example, if you want to seek fashion advice, probably better to head over to StyleForum instead of /r/malefashionadvice (or HypeBeast for streetwear).

I know someone asked on here recently for investing forums and were pointed to Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax (as well as /r/securityanalysis) but that is indeed better than /r/investing or /r/wallstreetbets which are garbage.

I think r/wallstreetbest is supposed to be garbage, but with lots of in jokes.

/r/wallstreetbets is a bunch of intelligent investors pretending to be ignorant, and a bunch of ignorant investors pretending to be knowledgeable.

I made a tidy profit off of someone's SPY options play they offered up as a post yesterday in /r/wsb, and they showed their work (proper due diligence on the why). It's not all fun and laughs in there.

/r/WSB is different in that it doesn’t try hiding what it is. Or pretending to be something. It’s supposed to be silly (understatement) and most things discussed are supposed to be [stupidly] high risk. You can’t compare that to most subreddits that take themselves seriously.

/r/askhistorians is by far the best place on the internet to ask historians questions.

But you're right that most other types of questions are better served by the *overflow communities or something else.

Sigh. Reddit is not a completely terrible place to get expert advice. Yes, there is a great deal of awful advice to be found there. But there are also a fair number of subreddits that are the primary gathering place for that community, and thus the best place to go for advice on that topic.

When I google something non-programming related, the correct answer is very frequently found in a Reddit post.

Reddit isn't usually the absolute best place for advice on a topic, but painting it as "completely terrible" seems like hyperbole to me.

But there are also a fair number of subreddits that are the primary gathering place for that community, and thus the best place to go for advice on that topic.

With absolutely no way to vet, verify or validate anyone who proclaims to be the expert they say they are outside of asking, and hoping what you get isn't a complete fabrication.

Could you not generate an "expert score" by comparing expert candidates with open data sources for domain expertise?

That's a really good question, the closest thing to this I think is the 'delta' feature on /r/changemyview. How do you see something like that operating in the reddit ecosystem?

You'd essentially build up a reputation score for Reddit users based on their post history, but this would assume you have some programatic method to verify their expertise between domain knowledge data sources and their comments. I would assume only someone like Facebook would have have the resources to accomplish such as task, as they own the platform, and are actively working to discriminate fact from fiction in user posts.

I hang out on Reddit, and I sometimes come across surprisingly insightful commentary on technical subjects that I don't see on StackOverflow or Quora or even HN.

The experts are there. That said, Reddit does skew heavily to mediocre "bros", so the signal-to-noise ratio is low [1].

But for discussions on cities, neighborhoods and even certain technical topics, Reddit seems to be where knowledgeable people congregate.

[1] Some subreddits like r/bigdata are complete garbage filled with spammers and Dunning-Krugers.

Reddit's the best way to get lots of real people's opinions of stuff. Search for "best Windows backup tool" and you get a pile of sponsored pages and fake recommendation sites, and probably some malware. Search for "best Windows backup tool site:reddit.com" and you get people posting in sysadmin communities having real discussion.

Thanks. I couldn't remember a specific example off the top off my head, but this is exactly the sort of thing were reddit is a great combination of reliability and accessibility.

Of course, astroturfing is still an issue even on Reddit…

"site:reddit.com {{tool name}} vs ______" is something I use fairly frequently. Its not perfect by any means due to astroturfing, but its better than nothing

Adding onto this, Reddit is a terrible place for advice, but there are a lot of good gems in there. If you knew which subreddits to search. Because there aren't alternative communities for that topic, and people gather there.

I have used reddit for some programming related advice (excel VBA, batchscripting, etc). It was better than what I got from stackoverflow

Whenever I need a 2nd opinion on something, the first thing I do is "<insert topic> reddit". There's usually a lot of good insights to glean from it. The nice thing about reddit is it is also generally less biased in my opinion than quora, since there isn't an ulterior objective to most posts.

It doesn't really matter if we're talking about reddit, quora, hackernews, stackoverflow, etc. Bad advice is found everywhere. Its up to you to ultimately gauge if that person is really an expert or not.

But this tool is not a bad idea though. Someone who constantly post things about Postgresql is probably an expert, or someone trying to be an expert. All it takes is just a bit of sifting through their post history to know

Anecdata: I searched for "embedded" and found this guy who writes a lot of really great content that seems to go unnoticed: https://www.reddit.com/user/pinealservo

isn't "domain expert" and "reddit" contradictory?

Searched for "trump", site returned PoppinKREAM so this seems pretty accurate!

Love his write-ups. Shame the people who don't want to hear his message can just say "fake news" and carry on... :(

https://redditprofile.com/author_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sea...

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