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Comment by not2b | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly right: if Reddit ever decided to build a search engine they'd wind up destroying their site, because everyone would try to game the results and fill Reddit with crap to do it.

The point it is that search engines are adversarial: people who are skilled and determined are actively trying to replace good results with their results.

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one advantage that reddit has is that its content is community moderated. People may have an incentive to game search, but communities have an incentive to keep the content authentic. Not to mention that Reddit as a platform also has some means to restrict spam accounts.

Google if it does this sort of clean-up at all has to do so algorithmically which is kind of shoddy. Reddit basically gets a human workforce for free, so I'm not so sure the comparison holds.

Their site has been thoroughly trashed already. It's an absolute cesspool of bots and groupthink. When I joined back in 2007, it was a completely different site full of actual discussion and not just cringey self deprecating nerd jokes and memes.

It's a shame, but that's how things go. Once a thing gets that big, it gets its soul sucked out.

It's true, early reddit was rather similar to HN actually. I can even pinpoint one of the cataclysmic events, reddit's "Eternal September" so to speak, where things accelerated downhill: When digg 4.0 was rolled out and failed spectacularly, leading to an influx of digg users to reddit.

Prior to that I checked digg out every once in a while and got immediately annoyed of all the "cringey self deprecating nerd jokes and memes". And suddenly they were everywhere on reddit.

Yup. I bounced from slashdot, to reddit, and now here.

Your experience on reddit is 100% the result of the subreddits to which you subscribe. Unsub ALL default reddits and you'll be surprised at how quickly the quality goes up.

Yeah, I unsubbed the main subreddits years ago. I only stuck around for the tech stuff. And as they all grow bigger they turn into meme fests, "hey guys can you be Google for me?", stupid one liner in-jokes, and lowest common denominator shit posting.

Avoid r/Canada just a toxic community where mods delete anything that offends them and goes against their beliefs. I honestly think it is also overrun by bots trying to steer an narrative. Everyone just argues and fights now it seems.

I think a lot of the Canada-based subreddits are so political and group-thinky, for lack of a better term, that they are better off avoided at this point. /r/Ontario is the most glaringly obvious example of an echo chamber that I see no point in ever checking it, even though I live in Ontario. My small town's subreddit is decent though, just for the odd news stories every now and then.

Best advice for reddit I can give is to stick to small, focused subreddits. In my case I only visit gaming/tech/dev/podcast related subreddits. The site is only usable like this now, imo.

This is a good point I'd never considered before. The better your search, the more people will try to game it, the worse your results will get.

yes, however there is an element of real feedback: if an subreddit turns out to be garbage, then people will choose a different subreddit with a different moderation policy. It is possible to prioritize by number of point or by some dynamics over the popularity of an subreddit - that would incorporate this feedback.

You (and the OP) are echoing Goodhart's Law, which describes one of the reasons that I've lost faith in the wisdom of markets.

I've seen people game bad search engines just the same.

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