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Comment by assimpleaspossi | Hacker News Reader

I always advise people to never, ever use Reddit as a reference for anything.

Why and what reference do you rec instead? Even this site gets fake news that stays up for hours.

I would avoid and distrust most social forums, such as reddit, that have Pookas which are fond of rumpots, crackspots and how are you bix6? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeEsx2QLJ40

I think that's the point. If you have to go looking for a reference and don't easily find one, it's probably fake.

Books, and your grandma’s notes on making jam, I guess.

Sure, ‘knee-jerk’ reddit is unreliable, but many upvotes over time with supporting comments can be a strong signal of truth

What do you mean? I can post whatever I want on Reddit and I can make it have as many upvotes as I need. They basically make bot farms undetectable, by hiding histories and automatic username selection. Literally nothing should be considered truth with Reddit as its only source

> Literally nothing should be considered truth with Reddit as its only source

Don’t get me wrong: I completely agree that Reddit should not be the only source, and go further that nothing should be assumed to be true based on Reddit signals (such as upvotes and comments). This is why I carefully chose my words: these can be strong signals of truth.

I think it’s also worth parsing out that I don’t think this is valid across all subreddits.

It’s unfortunately only a symbol of bot activity or popularity with the crowd in the subreddit.

Why? Their system is literally mined for its Q&A merit by search engines. If it was all very bad information, NYSE: RDDT would not exist.

Stock prices are based on earnings, not on factual accuracy of content.

If that were true, all the AI companies would have negative stock prices. Promises of (best case) future earnings are part of stock prices.

Future earnings are earnings, in the future.

In Reddits case the stock price is based on nobody noticing that most of the users fled. Now they have to AI translate Indian content into English (and vice-versa) to keep up the illusion that people still use it.

At some point this will drive away the remaining users and it will just be bots and Reddits machine translations of those bot posts. At that point AI companies will just be paying to train on machine translated versions of content they generated to begin with.

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