Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

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Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!

I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.

Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US based and there was problems using every credit or debit card. The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google Adwords.

We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads were not approved because they were in the crypto space where indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and also work for Web3 projects.

Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.

BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google back in 2013 in the same vein [1].

[1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...

> Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit"

Which is funny as builtin search is so utter shit you pretty much need to use google to find anything

Maybe this is giving reddit too much credit, but I do see people say "append reddit to searches" literally every time the topic of search is brought up, so what if reddit is aware people do that but doesn't want to be a search engine?

Imagine you're one of the few remaining sources of human content on the Internet, and you look at the terrible cat and mouse game google plays forever with spam, you don't really envy it. So imagine telling the world hey, reddit is the new google, everyone come do your searches (and spam) here, gl mods.

This doesn't ring true to me. Reddit has clearly demonstrated a desire/mandate to monetize, even at the expense of its users. If they thought they had a viable Google competitor they wouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth.

The fact that unpaid volunteers (mods) are handling the spam problem is an upside.

I disagree with that. It doesn't matter if Reddit doesn't want to be a search engine. People are already using it a search engine and they simply will never stop no matter what those ppl in Reddit are thinking. Better to embrace the search use case and make it search friendly.

With big power comes greater responsability.

Is this phenomenon also happening in the markets were Google is not dominant? Like Yandex, Baidu or Naver?

> "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit"

It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.

It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.

To me all signs point to Reddit never having been a commercial venture, but rather an influence and propaganda machine for United States government agencies. So they already have their budget paid.

What are "all signs"? Shit you made up in your head? It's owned by China for godsakes, what a half-baked conspiracy theory

It’s well known that the US government outsourced psyops to China! Because, uh, you see, there are these lizard people…

Reddit isn't owned by tencent, where did you get that from?

> In February 2019, a $300 million funding round led by Tencent brought the company's valuation to $3 billion.[16]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit

Nearly all of Reddit is ultra left wing. No opposing view points are tolerated.

Individual topic sub Reddit’s are okay if they are strict about keeping on topic.

Anything front page is insanity.

How does that relate at all?

So because its a three letter agency hustle, thats why Tencent bought in to it? ... JFC

Where's the conflict? Do you think American and Chinese interests never align?

And to be clear, I think large parts of Reddit is of no interest to government agencies.

> Do you think American and Chinese interests never align?

You know that is impossible to prove or disprove so that argument is worthless.

I don't see Chinese communist party buying Reddit stocks as proof against US government agencies using Reddit to influence the population, that's what I mean.

I'm sure government agencies all over the world are quite popular on Reddit.

The CCP even has its own subreddit. It's called /r/worldnews.

Don't forget Maxwell Hill.

>>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!

Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues.

Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.

When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I need to go manually into each review set and compare the quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically avoid shopping there for entire categories.

Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".

People have been astroturfing on reddit for a long time, the only reason it's not a cesspool is that reddit has a hardcore anti-marketing bent in a lot of subs and they'll aggressively out shills. I expect that GPT powered reddit bots will make the shills a lot harder to identify though.

It has always been a cesspool for a long time though. Only fit for consuming memes, cat pics, and financially motivated stunts like when Keanu Reeves was there the other day, using the social media account of the company for his upcoming film in a few weeks.

Each subreddit is controlled by a few essentially random people that likely have personal gain as one of their motivations.

If you think you aren't being advertised to on reddit just because the spam isn't as obvious as elsewhere, think again. The advertising there is more sophisticated than bots dropping links in comments.

There was a leak a while ago showed one of the moderators of wallstreetbets that was posting fake options gains, and it still gave him a massive following which he used to sell them a newsletter or something.

There are many subreddits where there will be a link in the sidebar to a monetized website affiliated with one of the mods.

And even 10 years ago, I remember at least 1 moderator of the programming subreddit somehow always had his blog posts highly voted and ending up on the front page, while any other submissions, especially ones that might counter his claims, would end up being stuck in the "spam filter". And if you messaged to have it unblocked, they'd only respond 1 day later, which means it would never show up on the front page due to the age factor of the ranking algorithm.

The humans on reddit are often indistinguishable from bots as well.

What could possibly motivate them to drop the ball on crypto ads? Hmmm…

So, assuming that this "mismanagement" is not just happening in the crypto space, but across the board in other spaces too, they are missing out on short-term money, but are more valuable for the searches that users are now doing (including me). So.. is it actually bad execution?

The mismanagement is not between quotes since all compliance was filled and acknowledged.

Could you please elaborate on your question? Since our issue was supposely solved filling all the requirements there is no difference about the different spaces. This is bad execution by the book.

>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!

I would love something like swurl [1] but just with those three!

[1] https://swurl.com/

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