Hacker News Reader

Comment by zelias | Hacker News Reader

I append the word "reddit" to most non-technical google searches. Platform has been around long enough that _someone_ on it has discussed the issue I'm looking for

View on HN

Yeah, I’m horrified but it’s wound up being the only way to find quality amateur writing about dog breeds. Most websites in that subject matter seem to be semi algorithmic content farms that echo the same uncited information.

Not to mention, most of those websites are loaded up to the hilt on a bunch of annoying adware. You can read 2-3 sentences, then you hit ad add you have to scroll past to read another 2-3 sentences to hit yet another ad you have to scroll past.

You browse the web without an adblocker? Courageous.

Reddit falls in that category as well unless you use old.Reddit.com

Oh god don't give this away, or it will be ruined.

I've said it before but for me the best search I ever used was back in the day when delicio.us was a thing and everyone used it. Basically curated tags/websites, I could find really good, niche things that google would never find for me.

Basically, human powered indexing is almost always better than algo/crawler search which only surfaces popular/gamed pages - it's a fundamental flaw of pagerank type crawling.

This is also kinda why ChatGPT is good, because it's basically a model trained on places like reddit, not using link popularity or whatever. So it's basically a model which builds an index of information from actual humans. I think it's the future of search, albeit with its own anti SEO challenges.

For now we have site:reddit.com, site:news.ycombinator.com, site:stackoverflow.com, site:wikipedia.com to actually get useful info out of Google.

This is my go to search hack too. Recently, I've started to see it becoming more and more ineffective. Corps have figured out that reddit is the new SEO hack. Now there's a sudden influx of 'ad' posts by corps. Lots and lots of posts with a title "Samsung's new Galaxy 28 is cool!". Minimal upvotes, no comments.

IMO it’s not just astroturfing, the general sickness of social media has spread into every subreddit now. Lots of unqualified, angry comments, or none at all. I think during the pandemic and the Ukrainian war the user base and engagement dynamics have changed. I find Reddit to be less useful for anything recent. There is a void of quality content for the last two years. It’s not just burrowed. The frontpage is only bot-reposts, ragebait and violence porn, now, and I think many sane people left Reddit or became rage junkies themselves.

When you think about it, adding "reddit" is a kind of counterpart mechanism to the rise of AI and generated content in a general sense. There's a real thirst for answers coming from real, genuine people, and adding "reddit" is the last resort we have to maximize the likelihood of it.

I believe there's likely a lot of AI and generated content there too.

Hardly, reddit, in its current form, will die because of LLMs. It is too easy to get an account and post. They will have to wall the garden or trash will fill it. :(

It is amusing I uninstalled the Reddit app because I use google as an entry-point so often and it’s really a pain universal links forced me to open the app for a worse experience.

Stupid product strategy to ignore Google!

Universal links?

When clicking on a link in any browser, if the URL matches an app that you have installed - it will switch to the app rather than stay in the browser. So anything reddit.com will bring up the Reddit app.

But you can change which app is the default. I use RiF for example.

Presumably the ability for an app to register itself as the handler for links matching a pattern. So, when you click a link to a reddit thread from a search result, it opens in the reddit app rather than the default browser.

Is it possible to do that with Chrome/Chromium on a Linux desktop? I would like to reroute certain URL to different browsers.

Not that I am familiar with. You could try an extension like this one, though I haven't tried it myself. It looks like you would click the link, then click the toolbar button. https://add0n.com/open-in.html

Use alternative reddit app. I recomment Boost.

site:reddit.com

edit: it's better to use site:reddit.com/r/ to remove some spam from /users/

site:old.reddit.com FTW! :-D

edit: its a joke..it would save me manually changing the url, cuz I'm too lazy to install the plugin to auto-change it for me.

Ever since Firefox from Android removed the ability to install any extension, I now have to edit it manually every f***ing time.

Surely someone who works on Firefox for Android is reading this, please add that extension back!

I wonder how many people actually use/prefer old.reddit.com ?

Seems like everyone I know uses it ... Even the ones with reddit accounts.

In our tech bubble, yes.

Go to /r/popular to get a sense of the average Reddit user, they don’t use old.

Is reddit's interface really better if you login?

I've never bothered creating an account...

No, the redesign is awful no matter what.

old.Reddit.com works whether you’re logged in or not.

The average anything user never bothers themselves to even look at settings. The average user just don't know any better.

I bet a majority of people who do change settings and know about old.reddit, would primarily use old.reddit

I recommend https://f-droid.org/packages/ml.docilealligator.infinityforr...

It's much better than trying to use any version of reddit in the mobile browser.

Does anyone know of a reddit viewer with tabs, like a web browser?

On PC there are extensions to automatically rewrite Reddit.com to old.Reddit.com if you didn’t know, saves a lot of time and aggravation.

yeah - too lazy/paranoid to deal with it. Luckily, reddit is a pretty small part of my search stuff.

tbh, I think github is becoming one of my favorite 'search engines' / discovery sites. So much cool stuff buried in there ...

Even then it’s getting worse. Google is indexing “top posts” sidebars as well as the subreddit postured for a given timeframe. It’s polluting results worse by the day.

Another one is "-best" when looking for just about anything.

If I -best -top -2023 with an adblocker, I often get zero results. It's incredible.

Re: Reddit -- I'd love for YC to issue a Request For Startups around verified human identity - soon it will be hard to distinguish people from AI that posts comments, participates and then astroturfs sites like reddit. Account creation date will help as a band-aid but isn't the right solution.

You mean like worldcoin, by yc's very own Sam Altman?

I’ve never seen any indication that Worldcoin is more than a dystopian scam. Even on HN the stories are negative.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-16/worldcoin...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I've been doing this too with additional step to check the user's post history to make sure it's not some SEO spam. Most of the time, the advice is legit.

> I've been doing this too with additional step to check the user's post history to make sure it's not some SEO spam

How exactly you do this? People sell their "organically grown" reddit accounts all the time, so they look like normal users, while just a specific post is the ad itself, then the account is dumped after that.

You can sell your Reddit account? Where and for how much?

PlayerUp.com, Signals.sh, EpicNPC.com, the number of sites you can sell your social media account is endless. Don't expect to get too much from it though.

it doesn't work for me. The only threads I can find on reddit are those that are dead and unanswered :(

Google used to have a "forums" search type option which brought up some great results from forums. The "reddit" trick seems similar to that.

That is sadly what I do now.

you could use this https://redditle.com/

Metafilter is another possibility

Not sure why reddit has been able to resist the ever present corruption of money, but I think that's also why reddit is one of the few remaining politically progressive strongholds.

It hasn't, have you seen the new design and forceful push to the app where your data gets sold. They haven't gotten rid of old. yet but they will. Not sure about the progressive stronghold or if it's a woke heaven, that might be your subreddit

gah - the new layout drives me batty. I guess its worse when you're not logged in (like me) - it won't just display the full thread in simple chronological order. old.reddit is better though

> reddit has been able to resist the ever present corruption of money

Ah yes the small family businesses of Condé Nast and Tencent.

I wasn't clear. The point I was trying to make is about what we're discussing in this thread, how reddit is somehow still useful for search and hasn't been completely ruined by seo and ad spam.

The thankless job and passion projects of subreddit moderators.

Most large subs will curate the content via their opinionated rules and enforce them. There's teams of humans that are basically cleaning up the garbage.

What exactly is progressive about Reddit compared to other tech companies?

And is that the only possible explanation we can think of?

My understanding is that the marketing is more subtle - tell a hiking story where footwear is important but dont mention the branx, wait for some one to ask, suddenly you have a product placement that looks and feels natural.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com