Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

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The content of Reddit discussions on relative merit are terrible. Usually a bunch of groups are repeating long-held misconceptions that may have been true at some point but are no longer true, and get upvoted by people that recognize the same out-of-date facts.

I'm not saying the web-at-large is _much_ better, but curated content from true experts _tends_ to be a lot better (finding those experts is obviously hard). Throwing more algorithmic crap on the results page doesn't make results better. It just adds more noise.

The given example on the blog post points to this page [1] where the top comments/top replies are:

- "I know OLEDs are better, but you should at least show 2 pictures from the same angle." "The room lighting is completely different as well. I don't understand the motivation here. Bit of a weird post"

- "You ah ..... You see that location more times than you care to admit ?" "Yeah but now when he sees it, it has the deepest blacks"

- "I absolutely think OLED is way better than LCD, too. Just your comparison is not good. [...]" "I totally agree, it was a spur-of-the-moment comparison as I saw the awful backlight bleed and the shimmering on the image I put on top there [...]"

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/safq43/the_dif...

In fields where I have expertise, the Reddit discussions I've seen are worse than nothing - the wrong answers to the wrong questions. I find them a waste of time, with very rare exceptions.

Perhaps I'm painting with too broad a brush, and some subreddits are valuable?

> curated content from true experts _tends_ to be a lot better (finding those experts is obviously hard)

Yes! I would love a search engine that is limited to high-quality sources. Technically it seems simple: Just limit indexing to expert/professional/high-quality domains. If I look up something in the field of science, show me results from Nature, the NY Times science section, AAAS, conferences, Scientific American, etc.

Some valuable content would inevitably be omitted, but we live in an age of information overload - I would much rather omit a few things than deal with the 99% low quality info.

You can already accomplish this by defining relevant sites in your query.

Maintain a few lists of sources you deem authorities in various disciplines, and voila…

While I agree the current state of search is pretty brutal, it’s still a slight improvement over the limitations of a physical library or encyclopedia.

That said, IMHO it’s unreasonable to expect any ‘search engine’ to be able to capture the intent of your brief query string, survey the current authorities (simply determining said authorities is contentious enough), and return the type of results you’re describing - in countless languages and across infinite disciplines, no less

Don't you know where are the experts... if you know where they are you only need to customize your search in Google to get the best results. Don't be so lazy, human intelligence is far more discerning that any available AI at the moment, most everything that champs AI or Machine Learning is neither anyways.

>Yes! I would love a search engine that is limited to high-quality sources.

I'm pretty certain Google ranks pages higher if they are viewed as authorities.

Also, I think quroa does this

They don't weigh it nearly heavily enough IME. Most of the search results are useless.

Yes

E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness

Yep, you should also be careful of people shilling (not even corporate brands doing marketing but regular people who are shareholders in a stock shilling!). For example /r/buildapc famously has a bias towards AMD CPU/GPU because many posters there are $AMD holders. Same goes for Tesla across pretty much all subreddits.

That is simply nonsense. You like NVIDIA that is fine... some other people value bang for the buck and go for AMD knowing the limitations fine. But just thinking that people are doing a concerted effort to try to pump a stock in a specialized group about building a PC is just simply insane... You better have it looked by a specialist, you may have a real problem.

I have the same experience.

Usually, I find Reddit discussions at least 5 orders of magnitude less valuable than HN ones, for example.

They're not useless, but HN most often contain good advice. It has bad advice too, but it's easier to sort out.

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