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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anyone talk about search discoverability. Many, many people add "site:reddit.com" when searching for product reviews and other information to weed out the garbage, and so far as I know, it currently isn't possible to search usenet with Google, Bing, etc.

I think it'd basically mean there was an easy way to access usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for the average Joe to access usenet.

Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet. Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but that's actually a problem IMO.

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When I first read this comment, my initial thought was that it would be neat if there were a forum-provider that made it easy for nontechnical users to create and run forums on their platform. That way if you wanted to do a site:forumprovider.com search you’d search across all forum instances. Then I realized that’s exactly how Reddit was originally designed and used!

Anyway, the forums of the aughts were discoverable through search and anecdotally used to be more highly ranked in search queries until they mysteriously started getting derailed by Google I think around 2016 or so. They solve the moderation and spam problem by have forum moderators just like Reddit - unlike Reddit these were usually real people from the forum + owners, and not powermods. Power mods I think do all kinds of shady stuff to monetize their control, with forums that’s less necessary as you can just put up banner ads, sponsored content, etc without running afoul to Reddit policies. And unlike with Reddit, there is no huge incumbency/landgrab advantage from controlling a common term like “politics” because you’re not running on a single site. I was surprised not to see it mentioned more here or on the current top Reddit post also discussing this, I guess most Reddit users are too young to have had exposure to them, but besides Digg it’s actually what Reddit replaced as it grew in the early 2010s.

I see this oft repeated...but why do we pretend companies and advertisers didn't figure this out long ago and start gaming the system? Because they absolutely do.

Anymore you have to verify each response, look into their history, etc. Which puts it back on par with Amazon reviews, really.

When I do this, I'm reading the contents of the reviews, both on Amazon and on Reddit. I want to know how people used the machine/whatever, and how it performed. Fluff reviews that say everything was great don't mean much to me, and neither do reviews where the person clearly didn't know how to use the thing properly.

Putting site:reddit.com in the search removes a ton of garbage from the results. While companies might still game Reddit, they absolutely flood Google with fake pages and Google seems to do nothing to filter them out. Most of those pages don't even try very hard and are obviously fake... There's just so many of them that looking past them is painful.

Unfortunately you can't do site:old.reddit.com , It is a tragedy as old version loads more comments and has better UI.

Why can't you?

It just isn't indexed nearly as well.

But you can still do it, right?

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