[Frank]

posted a few months ago

this conversation has been increasingly common during and after COVID which seemed to coincide with a huge increase in work-from-home and huge increase in advertising on Google SERPs and algorithm changes that is making narrow search prompts less effective

[Kayla]

this is why everyone is now appending “…Reddit” to all their Google searches.

[Anna]

2022 thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719

Some really good thoughts here. I’ll summarize the ones that hit me:
– “Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.”

This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren’t trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads. The “best” recipe for pancakes is only what’s trending on instagram right now. The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web. The same for trending programmer tools.

– “It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines…”

What I’m shocked by is that Google somehow maintained a balance on this for so long. Well, at least a good enough balance that people still use it primarily.

– “Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant” …”

This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.

– “There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory…”

I hadn’t heard of this. Now that’s some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today’s world it seems totally plausible.

[Carol]

I didn’t know how bad it was getting until I purchased a new laptop and was setting up my Chrome and AdBlocker hadn’t activated properly yet… HOLY S**T

The amount of ads is insane now.

It literally takes up the top 75% of my screen or more on many searches.

Now I’m running multiple ad-blockers in my browser.

[Larry]

Sundar Pichai is a horrible CEO

[Evelyn]

if Reddit was smart they would improve their horrible search function…

[George]

Reddit is overrated, it’s politically-correct zoomer teenagers now and lonely nutter Millennials who never got married and are now angry leftists. If you’re looking for any advice and relying solely on Reddit, you should think twice.

P.S. makes it worse than like only 3-4 power trip moderators are in charge of entire subreddits for millions of users.

[Emma]

“Topic clusters” the latest SEO buzzword

[Patricia]

really good video 🤓

[Author]

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