Hacker News Reader

Comment by fhood | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com