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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby.

It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it.

What are the alternatives? Facebook and Discord are walled gardens. Quora is a shithole. The rest of the internet is blogspam and significantly more dubious than your average Reddit comment!

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To be fair, I found the best alternatives are just friends, and Twitter.

In Twitter you can follow people whose content you find useful. If you're a Blender user, for example, you can follow 5 Blender tech artists and your feed will be now full of cool tips and art.

With friends, with more or less the same skillset and hobbies as you have, you can ask them whatever you wanna ask. Heck, you'll learn a lot from them without even asking!

I'd just avoid using Reddit or forums to decide if I'm gonna use or buy something.

For example, if you ask what's the best OS on the internet, people will say Linux. Best DAW? Reaper. Best game engine? Godot. Best headphones? whatever is new and costs 100$ in Amazon.

Meanwhile, friends who make money and are in the industry and have businesses just prefer Windows, FL Studio and Unity. They aren't on the Reddit saying that the software or hardware they use - they just use them and make money. :)

I like my friends a lot but we don't always agree. With reddit I can read like 5 opinions of a game I want to play and I can instantly feel like "this person doesn't like it and their reasons are similar to things that I don't like too" and make an informed opinion.

The point you make about "professionals don't have time to use Reddit" definitely applies though. /r/synthesizers for example is a great sub if you want to spend thousands on hardware. Not so good for making real music! Although I do feel like there are a lot of Unity game devs on there. Maybe you just need the right community.

Literally anything else. Having seen the general/highly upvoted Reddit opinions on things I have domain expertise in, and having seen the outsized effect that angry subs can have on media opinions, there is absolutely nothing I trust on Reddit at face value or without having interacted in very small subs long enough to know who has useful opinions.

The only consistently good advice I see on Reddit is "call a local expert/call a lawyer." Anything else is almost certainly abject nonsense.

Don't look at highly upvoted opinions. Look for barely upvoted opinions of everyday users and aggregate them.

> Quora is a shithole

It's actually funny how much this is true. They used to be a quality source of info, but these days the default option is to show "all related" so you don't even get direct answers to the question you searched for, ads from top to bottom (and even somewhere in between) and just hordes of bots answering nonsense. At least they made it official with Chatgpt integration now lol.

Quora is a shithole because you can earn money answering, so people who have no knowledge at all are putting together convincing articles (probably with ChatGPT). And the mixing of unrelated questions into the answer stream is extremely annoying. I added it to my uBlacklist, anyway...

I make it a point to downvote and report as spam the promoted answers that have no relation to the current question.

Agreed -- before making any major purchase I start at Reddit. The Internet as you say is a dumpster fire of blogspam top-10 lists where the top of the page is just STR."Updated in \{current_year}!"

> walled gardens

Walled garden is marketing speak. Don't use it. Use curated/controlled/whatever described the closed nature.

It spins what would otherwise be a negative term into one that gives images of delicious fruits, vegetables and beautiful flowers.

My favorite alternatives are email and going outside.

Going outside is a great alternative to mindlessly consuming Reddit, but we're talking about researching opinions here. That's something that Reddit is actually good for.

Perhaps GP meant that since desire is the root of suffering, that rather than desire that your server work and suffer and strive to return it to functionality, you could go outside and mediate on the grass until you relinquished your desire for a working server.

Or your desire for an umbrella that doesn't break in the wind, or the best public estimate of when Starship will launch, or any of the myriad other desires that cause people to append "reddit" to their searches.

Yeah, I could just meditate the entire day instead of doing anything. Why have desires at all?

So is going outside though. In fact, I think talking in person is usually a much better way of actually understanding someone else's opinion, because normative rules of social behaviour tend to stop the discussion from becoming a flamewar.

I could spend hours just neutrally asking someone questions about a particular view they hold, why they hold it, etc. I think you gain a lot more insight into how people think this way than through an online forum.

Who cares about "particular views they hold"? We're talking about fridge or tv brands, not some personal stuff.

>Who cares

I do.

I'm sure random passerby is great information on how to configure network equipment /s

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