It seems like maybe both large format and laser printer is such a niche product that any site actually talking about it does not have enough SEO juice to overpower these spam sites despite relevancy. The sad thing is these articles seem to be just keyword stuffing because those printers mentioned on that website are all literally not laser printers despite the text saying they are...
The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.
I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).
So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.
I find it curious that everyone trots out this idea that Reddit is a google killer etc.
Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam.
Am I just unlucky? Or is that as good as it gets?
It is a shame as I loved Reddit in the old digg-era, but the quality nose-dived IMHO shortly after they introduced the subreddits and I never really go back any more if I can avoid it, mainly due to the community.
Even if you manage to bypass the problems you mention (by bypassing the popular subreddits), Reddit has become a terrible source of information in general.
The old "site:reddit.com" trick doesn't work that well anymore. Well, it returns old results, so there's that.
Smaller Subreddits have not only become echo chambers, but they now seem to cater to people trying to get into the field rather than the previous mix of professional and semi-professionals. And I have the impression that 90% of the advice being give is being done by amateurs who never earned any money from the field they're giving advice of and are rehashing echo-chamber advice. It's like a worse Quora.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
The worse part: when there is any marketable skill related to the niche, the only discussions there will be about how to market it. RIP music production and game development subreddits.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
I feel like this is a product of Reddit's built-in recency bias, where unless a thread is sticky then no one really sees or uses older threads. Classic web forums were a lot better at this; old threads with in-depth technical info and discussions would keep rising to the top, where "hey look at this keyboard I just bought" threads would get one or two replies and be quickly forgotten.
> It's been downhill since all the subreddit bans a couple years ago.
Out of the list on Wikipedia [1], the utter majority of banned popular subreddits were far-right, terrorist, violence-oriented or dealt with questionably or outright illegal sexual material (jailbait, fappening).
As for r/consumeproduct, there's a Google doc floating around detailing its links to the far-right and transphobes [2]. Doesn't sound surprising to me that they got banned.
The vast range of content being banned (largely by subject and tone) created a chilling effect throughout the entire site. Also, a lot of good posters were also bad posters, so after they left because they couldn't talk about how much they hated fat people, they also stopped posting detailed reviews about e.g. laser printers.
I think Reddit is just a symptom. I don't think it's going to be a Google killer but the fact that people are looking to it to fix Google's problems is a sign of the problem at hand. They are abandoning something bad for something slightly less bad at solving the problem at hand, or just desperate for any method. And Reddit is definitely unintentionally doing this. The only reason Reddit isn't gamed (or maybe it is?) is because it's a new phenomenon so far.
What you're complaining about has nothing to do with the reason reddit is actually more useful than google.
The problem with google is that for any query remotely commercial or product related the results are useless garbage.
Reddit is better in that respect because subreddits devoted to hobbies or sections of industries have real people who somewhat know what they're talking about and are moderated to suppress the spam/shilling.
Is it perfect? No. Is it way better than whatever the hell google is doing? Oh yes.
Reddit is a cesspool compared to what? Certainly not here. Sure, r/gaming is garbage, but overall my experience with Reddit is fairly positive. Especially if you’re looking for things like product advice, but it’s also the main source for eg. trans surgery and fashion advice. Things that are literally scary to discuss here.
But also community? People really over use that word. There is no Reddit (or HN) community. Some subreddits to communities, but most are just strangers passing each other in the fog. And that’s fine. I’m trying to buy a touring bike and plan by gender affirming surgeries, not find friends.
I don’t think you’re leveraging Reddit correctly. I use Google, search for something like “Kokatat icon drysuit site:Reddit.com” and am going to find far more useful human, real-world info than if I just use google to search the naked Internet, where the results would be half a page of ads and half a page of marketing, SEO-optimized sales or affiliate sites.
So I don’t think the paradigm people are referring to is going to Reddit and browsing about (Reddit’s own search engine is pretty crap, too), it’s targeted searches using Google but constraining results to a particular resource, in this case Reddit, but it works with any sufficiently good community, whether hacker news or f150forums.com, for example. It’s about going where the real users are.
Obviously ymmv depending on what you’re searching for. Insanely broad topical searches like “inflation” probably will yield crap results and dick pics from Reddit.
The general idea is that Reddit has small communities that care about niche topics. If you want to know about mechanical keyboards or looking after a rare pet, you'll find a community there that talks about it. They'll probably ban you if you talk about anything other than the specific topic, you regularly see stern warnings added whenever a topic escapes the niche area and gets exposed to the wider Reddit audience, but that's why they are useful.
Could it depend on the types of subreddits you visit? In my experience, Reddit is pretty nice. Not great perhaps, but fairly tolerant, friendly and supportive. But quite often focused on a specific topic and moderated to stay on topic, that is true. Some moderators are definitely more restrictive than others, but if they overstep, people leave and form new subreddits to compete with the old one.
Odds of searching for "[obscure proper noun] [issue in fewest words] site:reddit.com" solving a problem is good. "site:5ch.net" sometimes works too for certain deeper topics by the way, and Reddit is a sunny day in a park compared to 2ch.net/5ch.net.
Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on.
Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from the start. It also allows for better formatting.
The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
> The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
I think the voting system acts as another major difference, with ambiguous effect.
Usenet had no concept of 'likes' or even views, so threads implicitly sorted by most recent reply. In the modern sense, its only measure of engagement was replies. Low-effort posts that would receive plenty of upvotes on Reddit (or equivalently here) but few replies would still quickly disappear, implicitly discouraged.
On the other hand, a reply-only measure of engagement also gave birth to the original (high-effort) trolls and flamebait. Voting systems allow more passive suppression of this content, at least on topics where the "popularity contest" side effect is not a negative.
The karma system is definitely the difference that mostly influences the quality of the discussion and visibility of non mainstream topics.
Another thing I personally hate is daily threads. Anything not deemed worth a normal thread as per each subreddit gatekeeping rules is directed to these huge threads where the attention span is even lower, if you're not lucky to intercept the right set of eyes in a few minutes your post will be quickly forgotten.
> a niche product that any site actually talking about it
Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content.
Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by monetizing/incentivizing ultra-low quality leadgen masquerading as content.
When Pagerank was invented the internet was a lot nicer and less spammy. I think its showing its age and maybe Pagerank just doesn't work for commercial content.
Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.
It gets into a conspiracy theory territory a bit, but it makes more than zero sense if all the Google services ~2007 had been a civilian clone of an existing, "non-cooperative" library indexing system for spy agencies. There will be a huge accumulation of documents of unknown importance, and occasionally needs arise to extract information with a word or a phrase as a key.
Google Search and Books does exactly that.
And it collapses the moment its "enemy" becomes aware of the system and starts to knowingly populate the library with false information or score skewing tactic - which sounds like exactly what had happened.
Sure but most of the time reddit is completely unable to provide a decent answer to any non banal search. And whenever I tried to directly ask something specific in a dedicated subreddit it always ends up in one of the following:
- I'm violating one of their moderator rules
- wrong subreddit try this one, you try that one and they recommend the first
- not enough upvotes for the question to be seen by anyone
- short attention span, if you don't get an answer in a couple of hours your question won't be seen by anyone
- hivemind bandwagoning, each subreddit has its set of default recommendations and everyone just repeats those forever
- US centric, especially frustrating for DIY searches where you can find only information specific to US common practices and regulations
I agree it's far from perfect, but I'll happily take the hivemind over SEO spam, especially if I know very little to begin with.
Anything "non banal" and I'm more likely to go read a book or consult a professional. Tradesmen on reddit don't owe me answers for my hard to google DIY question.
It is frustrating navigating the sea of people who want to help but are also just googling, but you get an eye for that after a while.
It’s been said the best way to get answers promptly online is to provide an incorrect one. Maybe a strategy to overcome the attention span issue would be to open a sockpuppet account to intentionally seed misinformation until someone catches it and feels compelled to respond?
But to aulin's fifth point, often you won't get answered with the correct information. Instead you will get "corrected" with the local mythos, as the most repeated answer to a question usually becomes the preferred knowledge of a group.
just trying to go directly to the main manufacturers websites... it's really hard tot find a large format laser printer. So it seems anything talking about large format printer is going to dominate, and any mention of "laser" on those pages is going to do well if you search for laser also. I get lots of hits on the large format page where "laser" is another menu option. I found some on xerox, surprised that didn't rank better.
I think the idea is that "laser" should have filtered out the results he was seeing, but it didn't. Furthermore the content on the pages is explicitly lying about the fact that they are laser printers and drowning out the pages that aren't lying. It could just be that Pagerank doesn't work for this type of information organization anymore. It may not be a Google problem but an internet search and Pagerank problem, especially if Bing and Duck Duck Go aren't any better in this regard.
People add Reddit to their searches specifically to add some social context to this information retrieval, rather than purely spam-filled Pagerank-based information retrieval.
The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.
I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).
So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.