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I want you to be right but the GME and AMC nonsense doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that Reddit isn’t being gamed already by automated accounts. I’ve had my own comment altered a little and regurgitated by a bot before, which was extremely creepy.

But you are right that the signal to noise is at least better on Reddit.

I do think it is slowly deteriorating though. I've noticed it on indie gaming subreddits. A dev will announce a new game and I suspect a lot of the comments are fake. Maybe not bots just yet, probably more likely the dev gathered a large group of friends to help out. But it wouldn't surprise me if this type of promotion became more and more bot driven as time goes on.

I don’t know. It depends on the ‘quality’ of the community. Eg when I’m considering a new IT tool, I tend to search ‘!hn $tool’ just to see what the comments on HN are like, as it’s the most reasonable signal I can find vs google. Similar example, when searching for a good EV charging pass my first go-to were the Tweakers.net forums. It’s a place where the general IT crowd of the Netherlands hangs out and indeed someone already wrote a very extensive topic on the EV charging world, the business models, what to watch out for, etc.

I suppose if you have the same for cooking, cycling, cars, etc. It might actually end up going that direction for more people.

As a community becomes higher quality though, it also becomes more interesting for scammers to abuse. (The Bitcoin Reddits you mentioned are a great example). Good moderation is key I think.

The bots can definitely be frustrating.

I like to stick to smaller subreddits as they tend to be more authentic. Usually anything under 100K subscribers (with exceptions) can be really enjoyable to lurk + a great source of info.

The GME/AMC nonsense will get downvoted on more serious subs.

The one that started it is called “wall street bets” and people openly call each other “retards” and “autists” over there.

The GME nonsense was a guy posting that he bought a lot of options and why.

Then he kept posting updates

Sure but then it kept going with millions of posts with diamond hand emojis that had me deeply in the uncanny valley.

> We're going to end up going back to community sites.

For me they never left... It makes lots of sense: many forums have a "no commercial posting" policy and the users/mods there are very good at detecting submarine/hidden commercial content. To me forums are a better web than the web.

Many of the forums I used to visit in the 2000s are looong gone. I have a lot of respect for the ones that stuck around. For example I am have been on a soccer team's messageboard for over a decade, and seen it go from hundreds of daily posts to maybe a few dozen now.

> if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or whatever), take the time to join up, search, ask - someone with a passion for it will give you a great, well researched list because they love it and take pride from knowing.

Agree 100%. And in the "good old days" of the internet (that is, after Google had just replaced the pre-PageRank search engines (Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo)), what you'd find with a search would be precisely those community sites run by fans and nerds that were happy to disseminate their arcane knowledge.

Today, you have to wade through pages and pages of SEO and Amazon-affiliate crap that has no expertise and interest in the underlying subject matter at all.

I like how the show "Halt & Catch Fire" used this topic as a plot within the show. You had the Google-esque team of laborious devs unhappily stressed on coming up with the perfect algo, then you had the Yahoo-esque team of party atmosphere humans scanning the web for things to highlight/promote/scan/etc.

Going to? I've been including "reddit" in the majority of my google searches for years now.

It’s even in the search box autocomplete frequently.

I bet Reddit could take a big chunk of Stack Overflow's market share.

Reddit would need to fix their UI so that it isn't actively hostile to people trying to read content on their site.

StackExchange is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the web. I saw a meta post the other day where they were soliciting feedback about how make their mobile site more information dense. Love it!

Yes! I hate the move to information sparsity and hiding functionality to make things look “cleaner”

Shame most of the content is moderated to an epic level of uselessness.

old.reddit.com exists, for now. Reddit as a company is actively hostile to users, so they don't consider the new UI broken.

Half of the time when I click links on old.reddit.com, it just redirects me back to the home page. When I go to those same links, on the new site, it takes me to some image gallery page. They've definitely broke a good portion of the old site.

people sometimes bemoan stack overflow's rigor and pedantry, but try to ask a technical question on reddit... unless you're in a very well moderated reddit you're getting worse answers or no answers at all

yes! probably only a matter of time until they ramp up the astroturfing (which already happens a fair amount). It seems pretty common for someone to do a Google search for "X product review reddit"