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Comment by whamlastxmas | Hacker News Reader

Appending site:Reddit.com to everything bc Reddit search sucks

Reddit search sucking is a feature - it's trying to protect you from the Reddit content, that's what really sucks. There was a brief moment it had some good advice on products and services, until SEO jerks got wind of it and astroturfed over the whole thing.

Yeah, Reddit is the most astroturfed place on the internet. There's a thriving market in "high karma" accounts that are bought and sold by PR firms, SEO companies, and guerilla marketers -- and a huge fraction, if not an outright majority, of product-related posts are engineered from such sources with undisclosed interests. These days, it's one of the cheapest, and one of the "best," ways to advertise.

I don't think that Reddit was ever good. (The upvote/downvote system stifles real discussion, and even normal people treat it like a game -- exaggerating and making up stories for upvotes.) But today it's unambiguously terrible.

Finding genuine product reviews is borderline impossible these days. Search results are usually just worthless affiliate link spam, even from supposed "reputable" outlets. Are there any other places on the internet that try to solve this problem in a way that can't be easily gamed by marketers?

At risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, think back to how you would've browsed the internet before Google. You probably would've grown your own web-directory of bookmarks, right? That's also how you explore the non-SEO-paved parts of the internet now.

I haven't learned to find product reviews yet, but I imagine that a trick would be to know which forums to go for certain kinds of products, e.g. maybe https://xdaforums.com/ for Android devices.

There is also the search engine https://boardreader.com/ which ONLY searches proper forums--sometimes you find neat threads, sometimes not.

Forums are a good one, but they're surprisingly hard to find these days. It really feels like we're back to word of mouth again.

This boardreader search engine sounds promising though! I'll give that a try next time I'm shopping in an unfamiliar market.

I used AltaVista.

Forums, surprisingly, are still quite good resources for product recommendations. I suspect it's because forums tend to be _slightly_ nerdier and more focused than more mainstream resources like Reddit. I do a lot of car restoration, and forums are goldmines of product recommendations and information.

I thought it was pretty good / relatively unexploited before diggs collapse, but I surely have rose colored nostalgia glasses.

Didn't Digg collapse in 2012 or 2011? The internet was a different place back then. Forums, in general, have gone downhill since then, mostly on account of low-effort phoneposters. (A trend heavily promoted by Reddit.)

Yeah but they enshittified Reddit too, so many links are to "unreviewed" subreddits that force you to login.

If it was not for Kagi putting some sanity back into search, Google and Reddit going to shit would have had me seriously reconsider this career and spending so much time online.

I think it is abhorrent borderline criminal to place yourself at the centre of the Internet experience, and one day decide to make it shittier for everybody because of short sighted lust for money and inept PMs.

Yeah exactly. Using reddit as a qualifier works only until everyone starts doing it. Thankfully for now we have old.reddit.com, until they deprecate that with some bullshit excuse in PR-english (who knows what will happen after the IPO). Then there's teddit, libreddit, etc., but they only work as long as reddit doesn't make a change. Feels like everything is a cat and mouse game these days.

teddit/libreddit are basically as good as dead after the API changes last summer. It's all gone to the dogs.

Most people in tech aren't even using old.reddit.com

Ever notice people posting completely broken markdown? That's because they use new reddit, which disagrees about markdown newlines. I would guess >70% of programmers/tech people are using new reddit.

I use old reddit with an extension that forces it and don't even know what unreviewed subreddits are.

> I think it is abhorrent borderline criminal to place yourself at the centre of the Internet experience, and one day decide to make it shittier for everybody because of short sighted lust for money and inept PMs.

Putting into words the thought I’ve been having recently.

I think Google is winding down on search. I wonder how important it is to them these days. There’s no way being this crap is not intentional.

I more often want the opposite, because reddit sucks for answering the sort of questions I usually search for.

You don't need google for that, Works with duckduckgo aswell.

> Appending site:Reddit.com

Or, with DDG, append !r

DDG supports both, but they do different things. 'site:google.com' is a DDG search that returns Google results, '!g' is a google search that returns any results.

Similarly, !r uses reddit's search

I personally am seeing issues with this too. Any time I search for something niche, and hence want some real world feedback, adding reddit to the search returns bot postings. Half the time you'll read comments that are fake reviews and the equivalent of Amazon bot reviews, in reddit comment form.

I long for the internrt of old. Everything is enshittified

Brave Search usually put Reddit Posts on top. Furthermore the Reddit post answer are now visible right in the search engine, so no need for the Reddit tracking. The only issue is you can only see OP title Post and answers, but not OP full question.

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