Wikipedia? Sure. StackOverflow? Sometimes.
I occasionally prefer Quora links, only because I'm active there and there's a chance I'll know the person (and thus have some faith in their answer). Is it something like that?
What is it about Reddit that I'm missing?
Not everything is about truth or untruth. Some things are opinions, and some opinions are worse than others. Some are just spam.
Search engines have been absolutely destroyed by blog spam. Look up info on new hardware? Dozens of amazon referral blog spam. Look up information about hobbies? Dozens of blog spam trying to either sell you something or get ad revenue. Look up an obscure thought about something civil in nature? A mix between thousand page government docs that I don't know how to navigate, a few dozen irrelevant "news" articles, and more blog spam.
At least with reddit I can usually find something that is not blog spam, and I'm generally familiar with the biases of various subs. It's far from perfect, but I don't know anything better in the general case.
If I search with `site:reddit.com`, I get actual users discussing their problem and what solutions they've tried.
Reddit is a catch-all for communities nowadays, where you can generally find authentic questions and answers to most common problems and discussions about most common topics.
Personally I trust (some parts of) Reddit far more than Quora, where the content seems to be largely SEO/marketing crap and not authentic.
Reddit does have the same SEO/marketing crap content, to be sure, but it has a lot of authentic content too, and I find it’s generally easy to tell what is what.
I guess for me it boils down to authenticity being more important than authority or expertise, because one of the largest problems with the web today is inauthentic content, content where the author has an ulterior motive.
Recently there has been an influx of paid reviews and opinions everywhere, yt comments, Amazon reviews and even reddit comments. So take everything with a truckload of salt but given the limited content I have to source, reddit is as good as it gets. Someone should build yt comments extractor and search on top of that.
Op thx for the tool it is on my homepage now.