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Comment by slap_shot | Hacker News Reader

> Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit.

I've heard these sorts of shots taken at Reddit since I started using it in 2011 (I was late to the game) and I'm fascinated by it. I use Reddit every day and am in constant awe of how it is populated with such a wide breadth of people with such a strong passion and expertise about virtually any subject I enjoy.

Many times a week i type "reddit <some topic I'm curious about>" and the top threads/comments are almost always someone with better knowledge on that subject than anything else I can find on the internet.

It's just funny how everyone's perception is different, but I think Reddit is a modern marvel.

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I like Reddit but I think you have to be very careful about trusting any information on it, it's a populist's wet dream.

There have been multiple times on Reddit I saw a comment about something I personally had deep knowledge of, and was astounded at how inaccurate the comment was relative to the thousands of upvotes and dozens of awards it had.

This has made me wary of comments relating to subjects I have zero expertise in, as I can't properly evaluate if they're correct and I can't trust the responses or upvotes because those might come from people with as little expertise in the subject as me.

Since upvotes don't correlate with truthfulness, they only correlate with popularity, they're useless as a measurement of how accurate a comment is. This is usually exacerbated by how popular a given subreddit is, with smaller niche subreddits being better (in my experience).

That said I do indeed go to Reddit first for most of my purchasing or entertainment decisions, just have to be careful to take any info there with a massive heaping of salt.

This may just be my confirmation bias, but I started using Reddit in 2012 and that felt like the big heyday and the peak of the site. It had reached critical mass to be interesting, but the new UI design hadn't come yet and it still felt niche enough to have the weird, interesting corners.

I think the sad reality may be that the majority of folks out there don't want niche, weird and interesting.

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