It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.
That's not true for the kind of searches we're talking about here. If you are looking for "best mechanical keyboard" or "reviews of shimano bicycle gearsets", reddit will regularly be of higher quality than the median google first page.
The problem with reviews is that on Reddit, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re reading a PR company’s post. Starting 2020, marketing agencies have been openly advertising that they game Reddit threads for product placements. If you know anyone working in those departments, just ask around.
Then guru-influencer-like people started selling growth hack tactics. Pretty much, again, openly discussing purchasing old Reddit accounts, how to make posts that are not obvious product placements and etc. Like if you see a list of suggested products, it’ll be:
1. Competitor
2. Your product
3. Competitor
With some pros/cons listed with the hopes to skew the result towards the second choice.
There are exceptions, like very hardcore tiny moderated subreddits, but I really wouldn’t take product recommendations from Reddit very seriously.
> The problem with reviews is that on Reddit, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re reading a PR company’s post.
Sure. But, in the comments, you will find out that if you press both control and m and backspace at the same time, the keyboard explodes. Unlike Google, that when searching about explodey keyboards it gives you 37 pages of "10 reasons why this is the best keyboard that totally doesn't explode".
The comments are absolutely astroturfed to fuck as well, but you're right, there's at least some small signal in there, whereas average Google results have an amount indistinguishable from zero.
And you think the top google results are not gonna be PR astroturf too? SEO is the whole reason I append Reddit in the first place, it just killed google.
Exactly. Like the other person said, reddit is great if it is some niche. It is garbage on the more popular areas.
Wirecutter is like: "we tested the top ~10 results on Amazon for ten minutes each and picked one."
Whereas reddit is either: "we're so obsessed with flashlights we know the exact part number of the best LEDs to use (after you remove the cap from it)" or "haha I also remember the lyrics to that old top 40s hit song haha."
Yep. As poor as the signal to noise ratio is, for many things it’s substantially better there than elsewhere.
Though as of late, that’s been eroded too. Increasingly the most useful answers are in older threads more than newer ones, an effect I’d at least partially attribute to the APIpocolpyse a while back that drove away some of the site’s best and most prolific contributors. It’s becoming filled with the same mindless drivel found everywhere else.
I do some game development research on reddit sometimes, and with fairly high frequency I find the highest quality results are something like 10+ years old. Occasionally I find something insightful in more recent threads but it's often heavily downvoted or hidden; it almost seems like difficult-or-controversial-but-content-heavy-meaningful answers automatically get thrashed by readers.
Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?
if you look for non controversial topics it can have some good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so you have to use google or something else
