You know when you needed an answer to something and wanted the opinion of the masses. You could search “[how to topic] reddit” or filter with “site:reddit.com”.
So what now? Could i still do “best table Lemmy” or “how to do this Lemmy”?
This was my favorite use of reddit where you could get a bunch of answers for different topics.
people actually did this?
16-years there, I’ve never considered reddit a good gauge on what the “masses” think. Usually its in its own crazy bubble, most social is but reddit, being an insular community to start with, never really lost that quality.
It can only be seen as the masses with a large grain of salt and extremely colored glasses.
Search the internet in general, expand your search on social to include all social sites google can see. Be sure to educate yourself on how each network usually has its own bias and culture.
There are two distinct things I could want when searching for stuff on [Insert Search Engine Here]:
Niche “Expert” Opinion: If I am trying to figure out what maple syrup to buy, I am not going to go to someone’s advertised maple syrup blog with sponsored posts and a bajillion ads. I am going to go to r/maplesyrup. While they might all be snobby dudes with highly opinionated takes, I at least know it’s from people who care enough to be angry about maple syrup on reddit. And most of the time, they give good advice that will point me towards an informed purchase.
Troubleshooting: Reddit has great troubleshooting threads imo. If I threw my issue into the search engine, and I didnt get a Stack Overflow response, I could add reddit and someone will have at least asked a relevant question before. Sooooooo many of my issues have been assisted in the people asking questions on reddit.
Both of these things I think needs to be replicated elsewhere, especially the Niche “Experts”. I would love for my searches to end in “lemmy” or “kbin” or whatever ends up winning, as long as its a federated platform
The troubleshooting can be key, reddit sort of took out a lot of the old forums (or Facebook idk I just know they’re disused if existent).
Google’s become largely useless in recent years due to SEO spam and autgenerated content. Appending
redditat the end of a query at least helped get some actual responses from human beingsim an RTFM and RTFC fan, never noticed a difference except when id dip into something new for the first time. Feels, and annoying.
It was very useful for queries along the lines of “which x is the best”, “which x to buy”, etc. You can guarantee that there was a discussion about pretty much anything on Reddit
Bingo. Researching product choices was one of my best use cases for adding
site:reddit.comto search queries. Avoids spammy articles and gives you actual discussions with legitimate dissenting opinions.I found out that by adding reddit to the end of a search i get a solution to most of my problems in top 3 results. If not, I’ll usually have to dig trough an AI generated article.
undefined> 16-years there, I’ve never considered reddit a good gauge on what the “masses” think. Usually its in its own crazy bubble, most social is but reddit, being an insular community to start with, never really lost that quality.
this is a bit circular…a lot of people on Reddit are young people; they typically do not see things as echo chambers
no, the echo chamber is what the elders (my contemporaries) running the site are doing. its only maintained through direct manipulation of the site and a bot army i suspect is at some level supported by reddit.