It feels truly absurd how many queries I need to append "reddit" to get something useful. The web has changed but Google isn't keeping up.
I assume all those posts such as “what did buy (for less than $x) that you find most useful” are spammers so they can reply with their own products.
And I am sure they are making posts asking for product/restaurant/etc recommendations and then replying to themselves.
I had joined a few (like The Swift Programming Language), and would see questions like "I have this problem <Detailed description of the issue>, how can I solve it?"
Since (in at least one case) this was a problem I had easily solved, years before, I would provide a detailed, concise, answer, showing how to deal with it in a few lines of code.
My answer would get ignored.
Instead all these replies would show up, saying things like "I added the <XXX Library>, and it solved the problem!". These would get voted up, and the original poster would actually engage them.
After seeing a few of these, I realized that LI groups are dumpster fires, and quit them all.
I am no longer interested in discovering new web sites. The established ones are known to be good, and any new, unknown one is almost 99.9999% likely to be SEO spam. For example, I'm not interested in Dropshipper 45512's automatically generated web store where he gets a commission to ship you Alibaba goods, and that's really all you get in the long tail of shopping searches. Search engines need to pivot away from helping people find new web sites (since they are mostly crap) and instead help to curate the best content from existing known-good ones.
Yes, it sucks if your new site is legitimitely one of the 0.0001% that are human-made and awesome. Sorry, but I'm not going to find you through search. Don't worry, I'll find you through word of mouth if you are actually high quality.
When I use search on NewPipe, I get _much_ better results, and those unrelated videos don't show up, presumably because those searches don't use a Google account. I get much better results when I search on NewPipe, and have found some great videos from the normal YouTube frontend search
The regular google results are filled with affiliate-link-driven ads disguised as product reviews. If you want to really know what people think about products, you have to go digging these days.
corporatism is everywhere and infecting the web to enrich a few at the expense of everyone else
So what you're saying is I should create dedicated subreddits about my products that only allow my multitude of bot accounts to post to it, but look like real conversations?
For those attempting to game reddit, the trick may be in properly categorizing the accounts.
surprisingly few topics haven't been discussed here. Often there's interesting technically-minded thinking, and for most (most!) topics it's less likely than a dedicated forum for any interested parties to be present. The latter really applies to any generalist forum or off-topic section of a forum where a sincere community has gathered. Until the dead-internet is achieved, at least.
I'll usually `query bla Talos II bla bla site:ycombinator.com`, and if that doesn't give me what I want, I'll try the Algolia search [1]. And only then will I give up and try `site:reddit.com`, unless there is a more specific site I know to try first [2].
---
[1]: I'm sure most regulars here know it, but if you don't, it is super useful. I just wish it had more query operators to filter out stuff sometimes -- <https://hn.algolia.com>
[2]: I'd be interested in what others here do. Off the top of my head, these are the ones I'll usually use, maybe it'll be helpful to someone else:
• For questions about server hardware / networking equipment / weird second-hand HPC stuff, ServeTheHome has a surprising number of quality articles and lots of forum discussion -- `site:servethehome.com` or `site:forums.servethehome.com`
Level1Tech's Forum (site:forum.level1techs.com) can be decent as well for such topics and stuff like ZFS-related questions, but it tends to have a more 'inexperienced'/consumer userbase relative to STH (though usually more into it than, say, the LTT audience).
• If you don't mind Google Translate, Russia's more-or-less HN equivalent, Habr [3] often has pretty high-quality, in-depth articles on a variety of tech/programming topics. It differs from HN a bit in that companies themselves tend to write them and they are displayed inline on Habr itself rather than more of a Reddit-like link-aggregation system like on HN.
The style tends to be similar to stuff like the CloudFlare blog posts -- `site:habr.com` (word of warning: great content, but the comments can be quite mean at times - e.g., the blog post on Cosmopolitan was just filled with awful transphobic stuff).
• For anything video encoding-related, `site:doom9.org` is a great resource when Googling specific questions. And for finding out which country has the best quality release of a movie, outside of something like a torrent tracker, screencaps from <https://caps-a-holic.com> are great, and adding `site:forum.blu-ray.com` or `site:dvdcompare.net` to your queries can help a ton to find actual info about a disc.
Otherwise, certain Discord chats, like Beatrice-Raws, /r/av1's Discord, and the SeaDex Discord can have useful discussion.
• Anything Linux-related, the Gentoo Wiki is really good, and Arch too - adding `https://wiki.gentoo.org` to a query can help a lot, particularly for weird compiler flags and old/obscure hardware, or `site:wiki.archlinux.org`. For LTO and optimization bugs, the Gentoo LTO overlay project is also really useful, between the patches/notes and the issue tracker discussions [4]. AUR comments can also be helpful for issues with somewhat bleeding-edge builds.
• Arch's PKGBUILDs and Alpine's APKBUILDs are really easy to read, and I find actually getting to them/the sources for their patches is easier/quicker than most distros. If I'm running into trouble, I tend to check their stuff to avoid the useless Google searches.
• For anything drug/medication-related, the Psychonaut wiki [5] and Tripsit [6] tend to be better than stuff like Wikipedia in terms of "wtf did my doctor prescribe me, what will this do, and do I need to worry about taking it in combination with XYZ".
As a last resort, if neither has good info on some obscure thing I've been given, like when I was living in Russia, if you're willing to Google Translate, I've found Russian Wikipedia to be really vast on all sorts of medications and chemicals, and also much more objective and skeptical about certain topics (e.g., there are tons of borderline placebo Soviet-era meds they'll give you there, and if you look them up on English wikipedia, you can tell some Nootropics-bro wrote half of it, whereas the Russian page will quickly tell you "actually, there's been basically no proof this does anything").
• If I'm looking for a particular file that I can't seem to find normally on Google or torrent tracker, I've had success searching for Apache directory listings with some query abuse [7]. And if that fails, DHT indexers [8] like BTDig [9] can be helpful when you're in a situation where you know the filename, like a particular font that is no longer for sale, but seemingly can't find it on Google, Yandex, Archive.org, etc.
• For finding new music / movies / anime, queries like "Films like Parasite" or "Best Korean movies" on Google tend to be useless due to all the SEO-spam WatchMojo-tier blogs, all featuring the same five films that barely relate to what you're looking for.
The best way that I have found, personally, is to use the collages and comment sections on certain torrent trackers; as with HN, the communities tend to be tighter-knit and have higher quality discussion than you can find on Reddit.
For general music, even if you don't intend on ever actually pirating anything, Redacted's ("RED") "collages" (think: ultra high-quality, user-curated lists of similar music) is unmatched. And they have relationship diagrams for each artist to show what other users tend to download. RED is a private tracker, but they allow anyone to sign up if they submit an application through IRC [10]. For East Asian music (j-pop, j-rock, k-pop, etc), Jpopsuki can be useful as well - almost the same system, but more targeted niche (and unfortunately, less curated/moderated).
Otherwise, Last.fm's recommendations tend to be better than Spotify/YouTube for me, and the ability to see which other users have similar taste to you / have the same current favorite song can be really useful, since you can then click on their pages and inevitably find something you've never heard before that matches your taste.
Anime, unfortunately, does not have the same level of pirate curation as movies or music, so I tend to rely a lot on AniDB's tags [11] and MyAnimeList's user-curated recommendations [12]. For Korean and Chinese TV, MyDramaList is similar and pretty decent [13].
And for movies, another torrent tracker, PassThePopcorn ("PTP") has the same sort of collections/collages and system as RED, which can be great if you're looking for very specific types of films. And even better, you have to "pay" credits (non-purchasable points you receive for seeding) to even create a collection, which adds a surprisingly nice, artificial barrier to ensure that the only collections that exist are ones maintained by people who truly care about that particular sub-niche.
Like HN, the comments often have more value than the content itself. And unlike RED, where comments are for a particular torrent (e.g., Fake Record Label's 1997 Japanese-region CD of Fake Band's Self Title album), PTP comments are per torrent group (i.e., Fake Movie as a whole rather).
This can be really nice because the comments often turn into reviews and discussion about particular editions of a film.
As an example, I watched Wong Kar-wai's "Fallen Angels" much later than I should have (great movie, btw), but had I not read the comments, I'd probably have just downloaded the 4K Blu-ray, not realizing they re-colorgraded the film to have an entirely different style from the original, and changed the aspect ratio by cropping it from 16:9 to 2.39:1.
Personally, regardless of what the director claims is his true vision, I am really glad I read those comments because what sticks out to me the most in Fallen Angels is the beautiful color work and the ridiculous decision to use a super-wide angle lens (possibly 9.8mmi adapted to 6.8mm?) [14] for most of the film, which gave it this immersive feel. However, like almost everyone else, I have a 16:9 TV, and so when you crop it to a cinema aspect ratio, something feels very, very wrong -- you lose that immersion and claustrophobia the lens created in the first place [15].
• For anime watchers, you'll often notice that the official subtitles for certain, difficult-to-translate series, like Bakemonogatari end up feeling really robotic or simply don't make much sense in certain scenes.
However, while fansubs can be significantly better sometimes, there are always a dozen different groups, and often neither Google nor Reddit will have any information on whose subs are actually worth downloading.
For that, I tend to use SeaDex [16] or "A Certain Fansubber's Index" [17] -- these are spreadsheets with the current 'best' releases of most anime.
[3]: this is the English version, which has much fewer articles, but it might help to get a general idea - <https://habr.com/en/all/> (also, note the company-specific and topic-specific filters)
[4]: <https://github.com/gentoo-mirror/lto-overlay>
[5]: <https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Adderall>
[6]: <https://combo.tripsit.me>
[7]: <https://www.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/comments/933pzm/all...>
[8]: <https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/BitTorrent_DHT>
[9]: <https://btdig.com>
[10]: <https://interviewfor.red/en/starting.html>
[11]: <https://anidb.net/anime/7243#tab_main_4_1>
[12]: <https://myanimelist.net/anime/7785/Yojouhan_Shinwa_Taikei/us...>
[13]: <https://mydramalist.com/shows/top>
[14]: really cool video that tries to identify (probably successfully) the mysterious, seemingly non-existent lens the director claimed to have used - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2dq_7wu0Dw>
[15]: good comparisons of the WKW remasters - <https://youtu.be/OrvGqEdomLo?t=435>
[16]: <https://releases.moe>
[17]: <https://index.fansubcar.tel>
(edit: sorry for the wall of text -- the U.S. Adderall shortage had left me unmedicated for the past two weeks, so I guess you can tell finally getting a refill has hit me like a truck!)
As you mentioned a smaller, tighter community that delivers. This is what deliver looks like.
Maybe add a "tl;dr" section
Reddit is kind of like that effect that people say about popular journalism; for the things that you're an expert on, they always get it wrong, but for things you know nothing about, they have a way of sounding right. Reddit is very much like that for me; if I know nothing about something, I love the comments. If I know a lot about something, it's all too crazy to even read. (I stopped reading programming subreddits like 15 years ago. A lot of very mean wrong people hanging out there.)
My bigger issue with it is that volunteer-mods are often power-hungry and ban people who they disagree with or who hurt their feelings.
Reddit is a social experiment, and the result is humans are still trash to each other when they’re anonymous.
Default subs and big subs are by far the worst about this. Comments in threads on r/technology for example frequently perpetuates easily verifiable falsehoods that would quickly get shot down in smaller communities.
Most people are too busy to have the time to be an online moderator and those who have the time typically don't have the political skills to get appointed as a moderator of a large online community. That's why the best way to hire a good mod for your online community is to make it a paid position and to randomly monitor them for evidence of bias and/or abuse of power.
If you want real, unvarnished reviews and opinions of products, you need to get it from real people that have owned the product for more than 1 day before leaving the review.
I recently needed to purchase a new winter coat. Surfing many reddit threads across a dozen or so subs actually convinced me to not purchase the coat I had in mind. It looked nice and all, but real users that had owned it for a while had disappointing things to say about the zippers failing prematurely.
That's not something you would find in Amazon reviews, which are mostly people who recently purchased the item and have not owned it long enough to experience failures.
Plus, do your own research of course. I don't exclusively use reddit for this sort of research... if I'm looking for outdoor gear I will browse outdoor gear forums for people's thoughts. Cycling, same thing... etc. You look for a consensus to be formed before making your own opinion.
My point was default google search results are now unreliable because they are almost always affiliate links.
How do you know that?
It's pretty obvious when someone is communicating nothing but positive things about a product, or nothing but negative things about another competing product. Sometimes it's more subtle... but seriously, if you read enough comments you will locate the ones that are obviously shilling or astroturfing. They won't talk about many topics (or no other topic) except the item or company they're promoting.
It's really hard to make a bot or corporate account appear, sound and feel like a genuine human writing about their experiences. Particularly on a platform like reddit where people speak rather freely about products and ruthlessly call out astroturfing accounts.
With all that said - perhaps some people have better BS detectors than others. I like to think mine is rather accurate most of the time.
The same problems? No. But humans pretty notoriously don't always communicate effectively.
>It's pretty obvious when someone is communicating nothing but positive things about a product, or nothing but negative things about another competing product. Sometimes it's more subtle... but seriously, if you read enough comments you will locate the ones that are obviously shilling or astroturfing.
Yeah, you'll notice the ones that are obvious, but that doesn't really tell you much about your overall accuracy, since you don't know how many non-obvious ones you're missing.
These searches often lead to niche communities that have built up expertise over time in their wiki or FAQ, though.
As for HN, I think it's fine. It really hasn't gotten worse over the years (people were saying that in 2010 too). Moderation here is excellent, and people mostly behave themselves. But, you do have to stay away from certain subject areas. If you see "it's a lab leak for sure!!!" with 2000 comments, I recommend bypassing that. Lot of people very mad at each other. Anything technical, though, lots of good discussions, even on popular topics, and I often learn something. The intersection of technical and social is mixed, but generally you don't feel terrible after reading them.
HN does feel like it skews younger than it used to. Probably because I am now older than when I first started using the site. I read a lot of things where I think "you'll figure it out in a few years" more and more, but know that you can only explain so much. Lessons have to be learned firsthand, HN's average reader has many good life lessons to learn. So do I, of course!
I'd argue that Google incentivized the web to change in a way in order to better exploit/profit from Google, and that's led to a net negative experience for Google users (who then leave, causing problems for Google).
It’s made supporting very old things (products, code, computers) extremely difficult.
And EVERY search for products needs to say "-pinterest".
Like breaking a shop window to steal something small and easily transported/resold.
I usually give up and end up having to go and StackOverflow the ffmpeg filters I'll never remember for burning in subs just to clip it myself -- `ffmpeg -i episode.mkv -vf "subtitles='episode.mkv':si=0" -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 18 -c:a aac_at -b:a 320k -ss start_duration -t opening_duration output.mp4` [1].
I think it bothers me even more given anime is rarely even natively fully 1080P 29.97/30 FPS, let alone 4K 60.
I try my best to live and let live, but it's my biggest pet peeve. It drives me nuts that basically all TV manufacturers do this too now by default -- everything I've purchased over the past ~10-12 years or so comes preset with """"smooth""" motion and a billion other video "correction" modes enabled, despite it just artifacting or making everything look straight up worse [2].
I'm genuinely really curious, does anyone here on HN use and enjoy those modes? Maybe there is something I'm missing.
Or maybe I'm just hyper-sensitive to that kind of thing. It made me laugh when I moved back to the US after school in Russia; family had gotten a new TV and within like seconds of being home and trying to watch a movie together, I'm immediately sitting there fiddling with the sittings, meanwhile no one else apparently even noticed the frame interpolation was on in the first place.
Anyway, sorry for the rant ;-)
[1]: OK, this time it was from memory, so it might not quite be right. But maybe I've finally memorized the correct incantation?
[2]: good video on the topic - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1nUCyC8hGA>
The incentives are just not aligned anyways, Google Search gets its money from the ad links on the top, they don't really lose anything if the links below are half terrible...
I'd be surprised if anyone at google would understand that to be a problem, because "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
What made Google take off was not only was it fast, but you also got what you were looking for in the first page of results — if not the top of the first page.
No more carefully crafting queries to try to filter out the chaff. What you wanted, fast, and easy enough that someone not versed in how to carefully structure queries could be immediately successful.
- -
If some search engine or other tool can get us back to that point, that’s not only what will eat Google’s lunch, but devour it - and quickly.
It takes me much less effort to do the former than the latter.
Usually, a great product will have enough activity surrounding it that it's difficult to fake with bots. Especially, Instagram profiles with <1000 followers + non-seo-optimized stories/posts raving about something signals that the the <joy-from-product> is organic rather than manufactured.
I think the strongest signal for legitimate IG accounts is the ephemeral nature of the 24-hour IG stories. I suppose someone enterprising could auto-build hundreds of personas that post stories daily, but a random profile with stories posting activism, their morning latte art, a selfie with some friends seems doesn't fit in the ROI of a scalable marketing strategy across a ton of accounts. Maybe I could be wrong?
Part of the issue is our built-in bias towards thinking of other Reddit users (and HN and whoever) as people just like ourselves. That means we give undue weight to their recommendations.
I definitely find myself being more swayed by a single user's recommendation with maybe a few dozen upvotes, over SEO-gamed websites and Amazon reviews. But in reality, that's a ludicrous assumption, since advertisers knows it too, and it only takes 5-10 fake accounts to create that kind of pretend consensus.
In many ways, Reddit is far easier to spam.
Incidentally the first algorithm updates to 'combat spam' came around by then, starting with 'Penguin'. They were supposed to cut the spammy sites from search. All that they did ended up being removing small sites, blogs and ecommerce businesses from search results for the benefit of mega companies at the cost of search quality...
The perversity is that site-local searching used to be better when it existed, but people (users and web devs both) came to rely on google. It's a sorry state that google remains the primary interface to sites that should know their data better them google...
"here are some ads that match your search query"