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Comment by xkbarkar | Hacker News Reader

I dont think I have ever got a quality search result by appending reddit. Cant for the life of me figure out how HN users find useful results there.

chatgpt has improved search for me by orders of magnitude. Especially since google has started to border on useless.

Bur searching reddit? Meh. Not for technical stuff at least.

Niche high quality subs may point me in the right direction. Like r/ponds for example. Wonderful little sub.

r/doggroomers is absolute shit mostly full of shaming dog owner pics and toxic comments.

r/programming was great 8 years ago. Now I doubt any human over 18 posts there.

Honestly if reddit never comes back again I think the interwebs have gained a level in quality as it is just a toxic echo chamber for young people who think they are some form of superiour liberals.

Good riddance.

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Reddit is one of the few places where you can find an honest (on average) discussion between common people about a variety of topics. This is very unique if you understand that the world is a complex beast and yes/no or authoritative answers may not be the best way to learn about it. Having perspective of many people that you can parse and apply to your own world model is very powerful, be it politics, local events or headphone reviews, personal experiences, relationships.

I would like to see an example of that. I dont remember a single time I found anything useful on reddit other than info copy pasted from some website that had actually usable UX.

I was thinking about using specialized earplugs in my daily life to isolate myself from the street and neighbour noise.

Found reviews of a couple of products and then chatted up someone who said a couple of days earlier was gonna test some of them. It feels like a community of people who care about stuff.

I think you're just bashing it for the sake of it.

I've recently been looking into getting a UTV, and reddit discussions are great for subjective decisions like this. A few threads that I found helpful are below:

https://old.reddit.com/r/UTV/comments/q9mqyo/looking_to_buy_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/UTV/comments/13li1iq/is_3500_lb_eno...

Frankly, I'm stunned you haven't had a single time where something useful came from a reddit discussion; sure, topical forums are usually better for very specific knowledge but for many cases it's great. And obviously you need to be able to sift through the bullshit but we deal with that already daily with Google results.

The pattern that I run into a lot is that I'll find a reddit post which reproduces useful information found on a personal blog/website, but I would've had no prayer finding that blog in the first place thanks to SEO spam. Reddit's UI is not very good, which is why I don't spend my day surfing Reddit, but that's completely besides the point. The problem people are trying to solve is discoverability and trustworthiness: I no longer trust google's search results, and while I know that astroturfing happens on reddit, I trust the stated opinions of nerds with 100,000s of posts about niche hobbyist topics a lot more than the pages of SEO-optimized garbage that google spits out.

I challenge you to provide me a better resource than reddit for finding reliable product reviews and discussions for just about anything you can buy.

Depends on the product. For Game Reviews, Steam reviews are better.

The problem with reddit is that just because someone recommends a product, doesn't mean they actually bought/experienced it. That being said it is a great way to find a product's defects, as people usually post to reddit.

4chan general threads. /g/ for tech, /diy/ or /out/ for tools and gear, /ck/ for cooking and more.

If you need to actively find a review for some item you want to buy it's probably not that great of an item imho.

I'm not entirely sure what that implies. It's in the consumer's best interest to check reviews of products when selecting something to buy. How else would you wade through competing options?

Furthermore, 4chan has no search feature so I don't know how that's even equivalent.

There's a search function in the catalog that can fulltext search all threads.

/g/ has "an audiophile general" for example that comes with recommended places to buy, tierlists and reviews.

Consumer Reports: <https://www.consumerreports.org/>

I append reddit for my gaming related queries. If you are looking for game suggestions or genre-specific games or queries related to them and want to avoid SEO spam then appending reddit is the only genuine option.

Game wikis are much better than this. Game reddits are incredible echo chambers where completely new players ask questions that should be typed into google and not an internet forum.

I disagree. Some wikis are better, sure, but some are wildly outdated or flat out wrong.

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