I've searched for Reddit in the past because Reddit is the only site where I can get community answers to an important question. In those cases, the community aspect mattered to me - for example, I recently moved to Boston, so I solicited Bostonian's recommendations from r/boston; my partner and I were having troubles, and I wanted to hear from people who'd gone through similar experiences; I wanted to learn about compiler construction and went looking for other smart folks who were interested in the same topic.
I would never do a code search on Reddit. I would never search for "restaurants near me" on Reddit. I would almost certainly never solicit medical advice from Reddit, or type in a new term I'd heard to get all the information about it, or try to shop for things from Reddit links. I just don't think that's what Reddit's for.
That's why I find both this response and the original so bizarre in their thesis. Search isn't homogeneous, and, while I have noticed declining quality in a few areas I search frequently, those areas almost never overlap with my Reddit-specific search areas. Reddit wouldn't replace my Google any time soon, even if it built a better search engine.
Reddit doesn't replace all of search, but for me it does effectively replace search engines when I'm looking for an opinion. Life is short... I don't have time to weigh all the facts about something and make my own decision. While I do that a lot, when getting started with something, an initial opinion to go on is very useful.
Search engines have become really bad at surfacing genuine opinions. Crappy GPT-2 generated blogs have overwhelmed the ability of search engines to surface human generated blogs, and even the human ones are often clearly just someone's hour of research on a topic with the conclusion being "decide for yourself". Sites like Quora make it too easy for someone to insert their opinion without it being adequately tested in the public space. YouTube was once a fairly decent place to hear opinions but, like with regular search, it's currently optimized for the equivalent of low-effort blog posts: videos that are ~12 minutes long with little valuable information.
Reddit has many issues, but at least it's still a useful place to find opinions that are also openly tested against their respective subcommunities. The usual blog type content doesn't last long in most Reddit communities without becoming substantially downvoted. If I want to know why people are choosing a particular programming language, for instance, I can do `site:reddit.com why use c++` and actually get some concise and even nuanced opinions. An equivalent search across all sites on a search engine usually leads to long treatises with little value appearing first above the fold.
If I couldn't use `site:` syntax on DDG or Yandex, I'd probably go directly to Reddit's own search engine a lot of times. So Reddit wouldn't necessarily replace all of my searching, but it definitely would replace a large portion of it.
And I wish that wasn't so. I wish more of what appeared in search engine results could either be Reddit-type content or academic articles as opposed to all the flotsam we get that's somewhere in between those two yet fulfilling the needs of few readers.
EDIT: Somehow I forget how I'll also use HN in a similar way, though less often for some reason.
From the article, "The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue."
You know who shares valuable knowledge? Other humans who have personally experienced the knowledge I'm trying to acquire. In this context, Reddit IS the website that shares REAL knowledge. I agree I wouldn't search "restaurants near me" on reddit but what I do search locally, and every single time I visit a new city is, "favorite restaurants in city x". The result is real crowd-voted feedback, from real humans that has almost always been extremely reliable, google doesn't do this, effectively.
Another example. I was trying to buy new skis. Google any query and you get SEO'd results which are almost always useless or sponsored reviews/content. Now, try reddit, you get real testimonials from people who have actually used the product and often provide insights I wasn't originally even aware i should be considering.
The reddit dataset is already a search engine, it just doesn't have a pretty UI. It's like trying to buy Gucci shoes at Nordstrom Rack vs. the Gucci store.
While there's a powerful inclination to take Reddit recommendations, it's also increasingly dangerous. Just from normal usage, it's increasingly apparent that a disturbing proportion of comments are astroturf. There's a flood of accounts that have generic names in the form of word-word-number or word_word_number, usually are only a few days or weeks old with little karma, and run around threads responding to everything until they're banned or cycled out for a new account.
This happens not just on political topics, but things related to brands. It's very clear that paid actors are out there attempting to manage public opinion about brands or advertise products.
IIRC, part of the original supposition was that produce related search results were flooded with spam sites promoting products...but the bar is far lower to do the same with Reddit accounts. You don't even need an email to create one, let alone a domain name or hosting.
There's a very real spam problem, but spam-fighting is stuck in the past.
That is why Google was worried about Social Media / Facebook eating them, and hence the creation of Google+. When most of the important, or valuable answer are on the social network, search engine will cease to be the entry point of internet. And in many countries, Facebook and Whatsapp really is "the" Internet.
And after that there seems to be a gentleman agreement, Zuckerberg wont enter search. And Google wont enter Social.
And actually I use HN for searches as well. From Product recommendation to many other niche subject.
This thesis is off. It's not as if Reddit just appeared on the internet yesterday. It's been a place people look for this kind of info for a long time, and people have been trying to game it for just as long. And it already has a good search engine - that just happens to be Google. So it still leaves the question: why does Reddit still have such a high signal-to-noise ratio.
A few things I've noticed:
1. A lot of conversations happen before that many people are interested. Subreddits tend to attract mavens, and they often discuss things months or years before people really care (or the marketing team for whatever is being discussed is even looped in). Pay attention to when the posts you're looking at occurred. In a lot of cases, they were there earlier than you'd expect.
2. There is incredible dispersion in where conversations on a topic occur. It's not uncommon to have 10s or 100s of different communities discussing the same thing, and its not clear which is going to end up being the place people trust. Many of the sub-communities are also somewhat mutually exclusive(geography, android vs ios, etc), meaning it's going to look incredibly insincere if the same account is posting in a bunch of them.
3. Reddit posts allow negative feedback in a way few other venues due, especially not pages optimized for SEO and controlled by a single entity.
4. It is one of the few platforms with an appetite for long-form content. It is almost an anti-Twitter. Meaningfully moving a Reddit discussion on a single popular post could take hours if it could be done at all. For communities with more lasting artifacts like a wiki, it could be practically impossible.
5. As others have pointed out, the subreddits aren't controlled by and don't have the same incentives as Reddit Inc. Optimization tools aren't going to generalize well since what it takes to get to the top of each is different.
The antidote outside of ruthlessly moderated special-interest "walled gardens" is a system no one really wants I think. It would need to avoid mechanisms that give community or interest groups powers to promote some content over others. It would need to avoid algorithms that automatically determine and recommend certain content. Other than pruning illegal contributions and obvious spam, it would need to avoid giving virtually any moderation powers to select individuals or the community. It couldn't allow paid promotion or require payment to participate as that merely enables those with greater financial means to contribute and have their content seen.
Introduce any one of these things and the whole system becomes gameable. Within these constraints it seems the outcome would be a loose graph of content tied to known individuals. It would grow amorphously over time, be largely undirected, and lacking the capability of being fully gamed, would probably avoid the attention of marketers and influencers. And probably general users too, since it wouldn't be easy to find interesting and relevant stuff and be quite boring for the average attention span.
The constraints bring to mind the early 90s web which basically had all of these properties. Outside of bulletin boards and UseNet that is. People wanted more convenience, hence search engines became the defacto way of finding entry points into these networks, which caused changes in how these networks presented and arranged themselves, point being even if we designed the perfect ungameable system, as you alluded to if any search engine or aggregator crawled and ranked its content, it would just be meta-gamed into uselessness.
Personally I've come to the conclusion we just have to accept that for the majority of online community-driven content, high SNR is here to stay, and we have to take what value we can individually as it comes. Unless we're willing to forgo conveniences like search, or relevant content recommendations, which I think for the majority of the web is a big old no.
For enthusiasts, building their own walled gardens with in-tune moderation is probably the way to go. Hacker News I think though not perfect is a good example of this, the SNR here is fairly decent compared to the broader web.
I mean the example given is something about a car review. If it wasn't for reddit, it's likely the search query would be suffixed with a community name (like traditional forums), or a (to the searcher) known car review site. That said, the difference is that reddit has forums for everything, so you can expect to find a community about cars on there; if you're a noob at cars, you probably don't know which communities there are, what they're called, or if they're reliable.
I think it's just that Reddit threads the needle on openness and moderation.
Subreddits are moderated by the subreddit community. Well moderated subs attract and produce good content. Multiple subs on the same topic can exist, often a poorly moderated sub will be replaced by a better one.
Marketer perspective: you can not build a communication tool you find useful that won't end up being used to make money. It will get figured out.
I could go into a bit more philosophical angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think it's much simpler to consider the following: between politics (where once any division in population is found, it becomes valuable instantly), classical business marketing (where once anyone makes purchasing decision informed by something, it becomes valuable), capital markets (where once anything can be used to predict anything about any company or asset class, it becomes valuable) and more personal scams (where once you figure out someone's niche interest, it becomes valuable) there just isn't anything left. Go ahead, try to find something.
Reddit is being constantly targeted. I still use it, because what else?, but if the method isn't obvious, here's what you do: you are hired by/own small company making niche potato chips dip sold via Amazon. You go to google keywords and check 'potato chips dip', you google all you can find there and some of your ideas, you write down all top10 results and check every now and then (well, your SEO monitoring app does it for you). Whatever you find that allows for user input, you generate that input - accounts are cheap - and maybe do some external SEO (thus beating 99,9% of social media results online).
That's it, it's easy. What Reddit (and any mildly aware SM company) does, is they try to offer marketers access to audience for a price that's lower than cost of what I just described. There will be edge cases, especially on international markets where value of time for various business owners differs vastly, which will lead to sites slowly getting more clogged up with ads, but that's the general gist. If you can imagine using similar method to get in front of your eyes when you're looking for something, then it would just be quite weird if nobody ever did it.
What if you explicitly target it with respect to the money?
Most of the crap on Google is going to be monetized sites. If you just block/downrank all the sites with e.g. ads, then the profit motive for spam goes down - the more value you extract, the less value you are able to extract.
> However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now. SEO stuffed websites.
I help run a Reddit website and open source project for managing scheduled posts [1] and we see a lot of garbage there, sadly. Over the years the site has processed nearly half a million posts and has tens of thousands of registered Redditors. In the early days it was pretty cool, we had a lot of individual users with various interesting projects. I remember early on there were some musicians using it and a few book authors that would release their books one chapter at a time - using our service to schedule the posts so they didn't have to do it manually.
But, as time went on, the entire platform has been just swamped with mostly live sex workers and people shilling bullshit products. I'm not judging the sex workers or saying they shouldn't be allowed on the platform and we don't ban them, but I would say now literally 99/100 of new users are just trying to push their Only Fans accounts to porn subreddits. Regarding the weird product shills, we've seen a few really odd campaigns. There was one guy who would post to various left-leaning and "green" oriented subreddits on the terrible nature of plastics while also promoting his own metal straw sales. Again, none of it is illegal and I'm not even sure if any of it is unethical or immoral since it really depends on if you think people are doing these things in bad faith, etc.
Either way, the project has for sure taken a backseat for us. If the server stays up and everything works, cool, if not, that's fine too. I have no interest in trying to monetize the service anymore whereas in the early days we took donations.
My point is the world of gamifying and commercializing Reddit content is already very very well established and there are large players doing it at a very large scale. If you measure it the porn industry is virtually all of it, but if you exclude them and look a bit harder you'll find other industries that have also carved out their niche in exploiting the platform.
This is already happening. Advertisers create normal looking fake accounts, and subtly inject product placements into discussions.
The best way to market a thing is to not make people realize they are being marketed with.
I remember a few years ago, there was a post (AMA) by someone who does this and his whole job was to maintain hundreds of normal looking accounts and post SEO friendly stuff, good words about products, etc on reddit.
> I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results.
I'm old enough to remember when Google came, and the main difference was this:
With Google you did not have to flip through 3 pages of completely unrelated search results; that were paid for. Google used to display advertisements on the right as well, i.e. not among the regular search results.
This made Google so much better (and more popular) then their competition.
The early search engines (Webcrawler, Lycos, ...) ranked "relevance" based on some silly metric like "the more times the search term appears on the page, the more relevant the page must be".
So the result was that the first pages were full spam sites that just used search terms as hidden text. Then Altavista came and it was a huge change for the better. They at least made some effort of trying to rank actual relevance. Of course, Page/Brin's invention that made Google what it is today is PageRank, and none of the competition were close to an idea that good.
So PageRank'ed pages, good spam detection filters and ads on the side = Good Google. A search engine that stood out against the competition.
Now Googlee has horrible site spam detection, shows ads in the main result list (some times it's all you see). Google now has very little edge against the competition. Even just 1-2 years ago DDG and Bing were a lot worse than even the modern day Google. But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. Google search has never had peers at any point since it was launched.
The competition at the time was relying on HTML meta tags' keywords. It was purely based on faith that the web developer would be honest and help classify pages. Which was reasonable at the time, before the Web was so commercial, but that ship has long since sailed. Keyword-stuffing was already a thing that was happening, and other sites simply neglected to tag pages. Some search engines were starting to read the page content and count keyword frequency, so a page that had "apple" many times on it would be deemed relevant to a search for "apple."
Google's whole thing was it did something smart, and treated the Web as the big graph it is and more or less measured the in and out degrees of the vertices to rank their popularity. The idea that something relevant would be linked frequently. This was the subject of an academic paper and had associated patents for awhile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank It was a big deal at the time, but once again the Web has changed.
Google's search relevance is a function of the changing Web and how it's now highly commercial and populated by everyone instead of being the world's largest community of nerds. Links aren't a measure of popularity, because gulf between the average user and people who operate web sites has widened...and the common denominator has dropped to the point that optimizing for popularity is questionable in the first place.
But the practice of appending 'reddit' to your Google search isn't depending on Reddit building a better search engine. It's using Google's search engine, and trying to direct it to a database that you hope has the answer you're looking for. So there's that. Of course, if that practice became widespread, then people could still try to stuff Reddit posts with junk in the hope that it gets picked up by Google in these searches, and then the Reddit folks would have to try to filter that out.
> people could still try to stuff Reddit posts with junk in the hope that it gets picked up by Google in these searches
This is already happening. I search for reviews and help on Reddit via Google often, and it's not that uncommon for the first result to be SEO spam: a Reddit post with no votes or comments, just lots of keywords and a link to a product or another site.
There was a post, which trended on HN yesterday (2000+ upvotes) that stated Reddit is sitting on a gold mine and they can build a better search engine because people are appending 'reddit' at the end of it.
This is a response to the original post, explaining why the logic behind is it false.
I built https://www.unscatter.com using Reddit to source links for the search index. Last year I added Twitter as another source.
I don't think it's a "better" search engine. It's a different lens through which to search. Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about. This is why I limit my index to articles that have popped in my Reddit/Twitter input in the last 30 days, deleting anything older.
I've actually had it up for years now, just don't know what to do with it. Been focused on my career in IT rather than entrepreneurism because well, life. I can say just this morning I saw "Stanytsia Luhanska" pop as a trending term on the front page of Unscatter and at the time mainstream media has not picked up the story of the school being hit by Russian shells.
I think over all the quality results still come from Reddit. Twitter often gets gamed and I see content terms pop up in the trending list. However, Twitter overnight (my time, US East) gets a more international flavor with lots of Korean and other Asia Pac country content bubbling to the top during that time because of Twitter.
Very cool site! Is there a way to get the words in a list instead of a cloud?
I am interested in what your thoughts are about being in an echo chamber and getting out of it, but this is a great way to get a high level view of whats happening on reddit.
This is pretty cool but am wondering, how are you choosing which subreddits/tweets are indexed?
I notice for instance "manga updates" is in the word cloud but a search for "kanye west" doesn't return any relevant results despite him being in the news a bunch lately for being kind of nuts.
> Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about.
It's a source of information for what Reddit and Twitter owners want you to see. Both websites are heavily manipulated in a myriad of ways. (The simplest one is via massive amounts of accounts banned for wrongthink.) This is blatantly obvious if instead of passively absorbing news you deep-dive into a specific issue and then look up the discussions and trends, especially on Reddit. Sometimes discussions for major events just aren't there, which is nigh impossible organically on a website with tens of millions of users.
A lot of "influencers" get paid good money to shill on Reddit.
It has a huge social media site.
Of course, it is not ignored by the industry.
Products, fads and politics.
Over the last several years it has become quite infested.
All is not lost.
There are some really good smaller subreddits.
For smaller subreddits who have been around for a long time
social meia influencers are easier to spot.
Some subreddits are so focused on an obscure niche that it is not
worth money to try.
Well paid reddit influencers are well trained in "propaganda".
One might have several accounts and the information comes "organic"
from a "group effort". Some will not even name a product directly
but give enough hints.
You also have negative influencers that work had to hurt the credibility
of others and brand.
>Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge. And there is no financial incentive associated with it. They know that do it to share their knowledge.
I completely disagree with some of the points here. There seems to be this weird assumption from people that Reddit is some organic source of information that hasn't been polluted by advertisers and SEO. But the truth is that it absolutely has, the difference is that the way you game the system is different. Google is this crazy algorithm and no one really knows how it works, so people just throw shit at it. Keyword spamming, link farms, etc. All this auto-generated content. It's much more difficult to manipulate Google, but as an algorithm google doesn't object to people trying. The result is an obvious explosion of rubbish that raises the noise floor.
Reddit is different, they don't have algorithms. They have moderators. You don't need to figure out some crazy complicated way of manipulate things, you just have to either bribe or trick a couple of unpaid part time staff. And we've seen this so many times - moderators who use their position for their own gain. Now the result is different, this is what's misleading. On reddit because it's all manually moderated spamming is heavily penalized. So you don't get the noise floor of rubbish content. What you do get though, is highly unreliable information about anything that could be monetized.
It's exactly the same way on twitter, your energy company will be perfectly happy treating you like crap and keeping you on hold for 3 hours, or your airline company will throw your bags into a skip in Timbuktu and tell you you're on your own. But suddenly if you have a following on twitter and complain you get the red carpet treatment. Why? Because they've found a very easy way of cheating their customer service reputation.
This is a weird article to me. I somehow agree with the conclusion but disagree with all of its points.
Unless my memory is failing me (possible, it’s late), it straw mans the article it’s referencing by implying Reddit would want to do something like that anyway. It also fails to offer a compelling narrative for what makes Reddit good to me because frankly, and I feel that a lot of people seem to be overlooking this here too, Reddit has plenty of its own problems.
Reddit is owned by Condé Nast and is largely used as a content mill to prop up its existing properties. Reddit is dominated by the Pareto principle. 80% of its content is generated by a very small subset of users. Reddit doesn’t have the best track record for free expression. Many subreddits have crazy moderators that volunteer for some Machiavellian rush and use their power to stifle or twist the narrative of public sentiment. Reddit doesn’t want to kill the golden goose, so when this kind of controversy arises or when controversial subreddits crop up they kill it with fire to protect their investment. Lastly, Reddit users more than half a decade ago were already lambasting the amount of corporate shilling and guerilla advertising that takes place on Reddit daily. A lot of this is, in fact, orchestrated by those users I mentioned who produce 80% of the content because yes, they have discovered a financial incentive to do so.
I wouldn’t deny that Reddit has any sincere users any more than I would deny that we have any sincere users here (I’m certainly not getting paid for this), but I’ve been a bit perturbed by the amount of whitewashed, positive vibes Reddit seems to be getting around here lately. I stick Reddit on the end of search queries too, but I feel like I still wade into results with a similar level of skepticism to that which I carry around most of the rest of the web.
Reddit doesn't really need to build a search engine, they could just have an algolia instance like HN does: https://hn.algolia.com/.
While not perfect, it does a pretty good job, in my experience.
However, the article makes a valid point -- the moment people start using it heavily, we'll get a reddit comment equivalent of SEO, with keyword stuffing and whatnot.
I absolutely love the HN Algolia search. I am amazed by its sheer speed, and that it does exactly what you'd expect, lets you sort by popularity and filter by time, and does no neural-network-deep-learning-garbage query rewriting.
I'm thankful for its existence, and I hope they get plenty of clients due to this HN demo of their power.
I hope they can afford to keep it alive forever. I use it instead of the " reddit" suffix in Google, usually HN has what I'm interested in, and in any case has much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Algolia was the first thing I though about when the post was made yesterday.
I commented this elsewhere but I don't think Reddit wants a good search option. Users tend to repost a non-trivial amount of content/questions/etc., and if those users could find the original content with a better search, it's likely reddit would see less user engagement.
Greed killed the golden goose and this article points this out in a simple and convincing way.
> The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge
This doesn't immediately provide a solution because knowledge sharing does need infrastructure (which needs to be developed and maintained etc.) But as the (relatively) tiny budgets of organizations like wikimedia indicate, if you have the right incentives less might be more.
There is room for money to made in the digital economy, lots of it actually, but it will require us to pull the plug on adtech and all the ways it has degenerated. In broad brush we need to cleanly bifurcate into 1) trully free commons and 2) pay-to-play services that respect and are accountable to the client/user
Thanks for posting op, it's interesting to think about.
> Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge.
I would offer a bit of a different perspective here, I think maybe even most do it for what you could call self-soothing.
For example, a lot of people share knowledge, but it's _their knowledge_, which can also be defined as _sharing their subjective past_ and that's known to be a very soothing thing for people who may even be troubled by the unknown in their personal lives. Hop online, boom, you're a domain expert in your own past. Find a place that's _about your past_, be it /r/linux or /r/formula1 or whatever, and there you go, it's comfy. You generally get an upvote + reply vibes dopamine bonus just for being there, due to your relevant past.
So, Reddit's sooth-sayers (so to speak) are kind of lazy but incentivized-lazy in some ways, which I think can also speak to some issues with the platform surrounding cognitive blind spots and what some here have called the echo chamber effect. That's an opportunity for a new search engine, in some ways, but it also may offer insights to new services that could be even more effective.
> And there is no financial incentive associated with it. [posting on Reddit]
There is though. I mean I've myself been financially incentivized into doing it, as have probably many, many others. Nothing sneaky, even.
You've got people posting their stuff all over the place, and the more community or indie or niche it is, the more welcomed is the post-as-advertisement or comment-as-advertisement. And that's not even going into corporate efforts to operate on the platform, which can be very subtle.
> However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity,
Perhaps--but Google was _really_ good for a very long time. That was worth a lot to millions of people.
I like to think that in the future, an ecosystem-mindset toward incentive systems could really help, like planning for different emergent systems that incentivize good results.
> I would offer a bit of a different perspective here, I think maybe even most do it for what you could call self-soothing.
>
> For example, a lot of people share knowledge, but it's _their knowledge_, which can also be defined as _sharing their subjective past_ and that's known to be a very soothing thing for people who may even be troubled by the unknown in their personal lives. Hop online, boom, you're a domain expert in your own past. Find a place that's _about your past_, be it /r/linux or /r/formula1 or whatever, and there you go, it's comfy. You generally get an upvote + reply vibes dopamine bonus just for being there, due to your relevant past.
That's a bit too psycho-analytical. A lot of what gets shared on technical/domain-expertise subs are simply technical knowledge. Most posts on such subs are questions, and upvoted comments are typically answers. If you accuse people of feeling good about helping others with their knowledge, well, I'd say that the joy is well-earned by the generous act.
In fact, if we are talking about the exhilaration of being upvoted, it's much easier to farm karma on reddit by lying. There are many big subs that are purely made up stories.
Despite all of its drawbacks like the obnoxious mobile app pushing and deterioration of communities after they pass a certain size it is still the closest equivalent I know of for the early 2000's forum culture.
It is the only social network I know (apart from HN) that does not exclusively deals in bite-sized dopamine hits.
Lets hope that the upcoming IPO does not compromise the incentives there.
> However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now
I mean, you don't have to imagine this, it already happens. People do game Reddit to inject ads, create bots that farm karma then use it to post their content and get them to the front page, etc. The only problem is that (at least some) redditors are incredibly sensitive to this and will go full internet detectives on you. See /r/HailCorporate.
There is already a great search engine, it is Google.
The problem is that it contains an overwhelming volume of spam and auto-generated sites.
To solve that, we all use the best search engine and apply site filters. Sites where we know other humans may have already discussed it.
We filter for forums - and Reddit is the largest of those - and we filter for specific websites we already trust.
Sometimes I filter `site:news.ycombinator.com companyname`, sometimes it's `site:dcrainmaker.com best gps watch`, sometimes it's `site:lfgss.com bottom bracket cable guide de rosa`.
But if I don't know about a specialist website, then it's `site:reddit.com searchterm`.
The search engine exists, it's just full of garbage with no effective way to search minus the garbage.
I'd take another DMOZ, a human curation of specialist sites. Then I'd have something better than Reddit too... I'd have the right filter to make every search useful.
As someone who appends "Reddit" to his Google queries - SEO spammers have already caught up on this trend. I've seen it on several occasions that some blog site will have the word "Reddit" in the title.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... I think building better search goes against everything Reddit wants to be. Reddit doesn't want to be Google or Wikipedia. Reddit wants to be a mix between Discord, TikTok, and Instagram.
The redesign they did years ago pushed a more Instagram like design. Things like chat and rPan are meant to keep you on the site interacting with other users in real time. Their new video player is just a TikTok rip off. They give away awards every day and started pushing award karma in hopes that you'll give them to other users. Reddit wants you on their site, interacting with other users in real time and building a better search goes against that goal.
If I'm looking for a new pair of boots, there's two paths I can take on the reddit site. I can search "best boots" or I can go make a post on /r/boots. If their search is fantastic and I find a post that's 2 years old, there may be some great information there, but I'm probably not going to comment. Even if I do comment, I'm probably not going to get a lot of responses. If their search is shit (intentionally or unintentionally) it pushes me toward making my own post and drives up their engagement metrics.
It would be a massive undertaking to improve their search and there's very little incentive. Reddit wants users who just want to browse and that's not what the users coming in from a specific Google search are doing.
There is massive incentive, since Google earns over $50B per quarter selling ads to people who want to buy stuff. Targeting these queries effectively would be hugely more valuable than my current ad selection of increasingly desperate shitcoin/NFT shilling and pleas to buy Reddit gold.
[+] [-] AkshatM|4 years ago|reply
I would never do a code search on Reddit. I would never search for "restaurants near me" on Reddit. I would almost certainly never solicit medical advice from Reddit, or type in a new term I'd heard to get all the information about it, or try to shop for things from Reddit links. I just don't think that's what Reddit's for.
That's why I find both this response and the original so bizarre in their thesis. Search isn't homogeneous, and, while I have noticed declining quality in a few areas I search frequently, those areas almost never overlap with my Reddit-specific search areas. Reddit wouldn't replace my Google any time soon, even if it built a better search engine.
[+] [-] ravenstine|4 years ago|reply
Search engines have become really bad at surfacing genuine opinions. Crappy GPT-2 generated blogs have overwhelmed the ability of search engines to surface human generated blogs, and even the human ones are often clearly just someone's hour of research on a topic with the conclusion being "decide for yourself". Sites like Quora make it too easy for someone to insert their opinion without it being adequately tested in the public space. YouTube was once a fairly decent place to hear opinions but, like with regular search, it's currently optimized for the equivalent of low-effort blog posts: videos that are ~12 minutes long with little valuable information.
Reddit has many issues, but at least it's still a useful place to find opinions that are also openly tested against their respective subcommunities. The usual blog type content doesn't last long in most Reddit communities without becoming substantially downvoted. If I want to know why people are choosing a particular programming language, for instance, I can do `site:reddit.com why use c++` and actually get some concise and even nuanced opinions. An equivalent search across all sites on a search engine usually leads to long treatises with little value appearing first above the fold.
If I couldn't use `site:` syntax on DDG or Yandex, I'd probably go directly to Reddit's own search engine a lot of times. So Reddit wouldn't necessarily replace all of my searching, but it definitely would replace a large portion of it.
And I wish that wasn't so. I wish more of what appeared in search engine results could either be Reddit-type content or academic articles as opposed to all the flotsam we get that's somewhere in between those two yet fulfilling the needs of few readers.
EDIT: Somehow I forget how I'll also use HN in a similar way, though less often for some reason.
[+] [-] costcofries|4 years ago|reply
You know who shares valuable knowledge? Other humans who have personally experienced the knowledge I'm trying to acquire. In this context, Reddit IS the website that shares REAL knowledge. I agree I wouldn't search "restaurants near me" on reddit but what I do search locally, and every single time I visit a new city is, "favorite restaurants in city x". The result is real crowd-voted feedback, from real humans that has almost always been extremely reliable, google doesn't do this, effectively.
Another example. I was trying to buy new skis. Google any query and you get SEO'd results which are almost always useless or sponsored reviews/content. Now, try reddit, you get real testimonials from people who have actually used the product and often provide insights I wasn't originally even aware i should be considering.
The reddit dataset is already a search engine, it just doesn't have a pretty UI. It's like trying to buy Gucci shoes at Nordstrom Rack vs. the Gucci store.
[+] [-] redwall_hp|4 years ago|reply
This happens not just on political topics, but things related to brands. It's very clear that paid actors are out there attempting to manage public opinion about brands or advertise products.
IIRC, part of the original supposition was that produce related search results were flooded with spam sites promoting products...but the bar is far lower to do the same with Reddit accounts. You don't even need an email to create one, let alone a domain name or hosting.
There's a very real spam problem, but spam-fighting is stuck in the past.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
That is why Google was worried about Social Media / Facebook eating them, and hence the creation of Google+. When most of the important, or valuable answer are on the social network, search engine will cease to be the entry point of internet. And in many countries, Facebook and Whatsapp really is "the" Internet.
And after that there seems to be a gentleman agreement, Zuckerberg wont enter search. And Google wont enter Social.
And actually I use HN for searches as well. From Product recommendation to many other niche subject.
[+] [-] dionian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Anunayj|4 years ago|reply
Any reasons why, I often check reddit for reviews for thing I plan to buy.
[+] [-] conjecTech|4 years ago|reply
A few things I've noticed:
1. A lot of conversations happen before that many people are interested. Subreddits tend to attract mavens, and they often discuss things months or years before people really care (or the marketing team for whatever is being discussed is even looped in). Pay attention to when the posts you're looking at occurred. In a lot of cases, they were there earlier than you'd expect.
2. There is incredible dispersion in where conversations on a topic occur. It's not uncommon to have 10s or 100s of different communities discussing the same thing, and its not clear which is going to end up being the place people trust. Many of the sub-communities are also somewhat mutually exclusive(geography, android vs ios, etc), meaning it's going to look incredibly insincere if the same account is posting in a bunch of them.
3. Reddit posts allow negative feedback in a way few other venues due, especially not pages optimized for SEO and controlled by a single entity.
4. It is one of the few platforms with an appetite for long-form content. It is almost an anti-Twitter. Meaningfully moving a Reddit discussion on a single popular post could take hours if it could be done at all. For communities with more lasting artifacts like a wiki, it could be practically impossible.
5. As others have pointed out, the subreddits aren't controlled by and don't have the same incentives as Reddit Inc. Optimization tools aren't going to generalize well since what it takes to get to the top of each is different.
[+] [-] pojzon|4 years ago|reply
Example:
„What is the cheapest best cooling for cpu now?”
All discussions point to product that more experienced users know its crap.
But still the wrong product is at the top with most (botted) upvotes.
Companies realized that ppl look for opinions on reddit -> that created demand for those services -> bots companies implemented new strategy.
Its getting very very hard to get honest expert opinion. Seems like the only way now is to belong to specific closed communities.
[+] [-] parksy|4 years ago|reply
Introduce any one of these things and the whole system becomes gameable. Within these constraints it seems the outcome would be a loose graph of content tied to known individuals. It would grow amorphously over time, be largely undirected, and lacking the capability of being fully gamed, would probably avoid the attention of marketers and influencers. And probably general users too, since it wouldn't be easy to find interesting and relevant stuff and be quite boring for the average attention span.
The constraints bring to mind the early 90s web which basically had all of these properties. Outside of bulletin boards and UseNet that is. People wanted more convenience, hence search engines became the defacto way of finding entry points into these networks, which caused changes in how these networks presented and arranged themselves, point being even if we designed the perfect ungameable system, as you alluded to if any search engine or aggregator crawled and ranked its content, it would just be meta-gamed into uselessness.
Personally I've come to the conclusion we just have to accept that for the majority of online community-driven content, high SNR is here to stay, and we have to take what value we can individually as it comes. Unless we're willing to forgo conveniences like search, or relevant content recommendations, which I think for the majority of the web is a big old no.
For enthusiasts, building their own walled gardens with in-tune moderation is probably the way to go. Hacker News I think though not perfect is a good example of this, the SNR here is fairly decent compared to the broader web.
[+] [-] nicoburns|4 years ago|reply
0. Unlike the majority of the web, Reddit is moderated by actual humans.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayd16|4 years ago|reply
Subreddits are moderated by the subreddit community. Well moderated subs attract and produce good content. Multiple subs on the same topic can exist, often a poorly moderated sub will be replaced by a better one.
[+] [-] groceryheist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nowado|4 years ago|reply
I could go into a bit more philosophical angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think it's much simpler to consider the following: between politics (where once any division in population is found, it becomes valuable instantly), classical business marketing (where once anyone makes purchasing decision informed by something, it becomes valuable), capital markets (where once anything can be used to predict anything about any company or asset class, it becomes valuable) and more personal scams (where once you figure out someone's niche interest, it becomes valuable) there just isn't anything left. Go ahead, try to find something.
Reddit is being constantly targeted. I still use it, because what else?, but if the method isn't obvious, here's what you do: you are hired by/own small company making niche potato chips dip sold via Amazon. You go to google keywords and check 'potato chips dip', you google all you can find there and some of your ideas, you write down all top10 results and check every now and then (well, your SEO monitoring app does it for you). Whatever you find that allows for user input, you generate that input - accounts are cheap - and maybe do some external SEO (thus beating 99,9% of social media results online).
That's it, it's easy. What Reddit (and any mildly aware SM company) does, is they try to offer marketers access to audience for a price that's lower than cost of what I just described. There will be edge cases, especially on international markets where value of time for various business owners differs vastly, which will lead to sites slowly getting more clogged up with ads, but that's the general gist. If you can imagine using similar method to get in front of your eyes when you're looking for something, then it would just be quite weird if nobody ever did it.
[+] [-] yanmaani|4 years ago|reply
Most of the crap on Google is going to be monetized sites. If you just block/downrank all the sites with e.g. ads, then the profit motive for spam goes down - the more value you extract, the less value you are able to extract.
[+] [-] chaxor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddtaylor|4 years ago|reply
I help run a Reddit website and open source project for managing scheduled posts [1] and we see a lot of garbage there, sadly. Over the years the site has processed nearly half a million posts and has tens of thousands of registered Redditors. In the early days it was pretty cool, we had a lot of individual users with various interesting projects. I remember early on there were some musicians using it and a few book authors that would release their books one chapter at a time - using our service to schedule the posts so they didn't have to do it manually.
But, as time went on, the entire platform has been just swamped with mostly live sex workers and people shilling bullshit products. I'm not judging the sex workers or saying they shouldn't be allowed on the platform and we don't ban them, but I would say now literally 99/100 of new users are just trying to push their Only Fans accounts to porn subreddits. Regarding the weird product shills, we've seen a few really odd campaigns. There was one guy who would post to various left-leaning and "green" oriented subreddits on the terrible nature of plastics while also promoting his own metal straw sales. Again, none of it is illegal and I'm not even sure if any of it is unethical or immoral since it really depends on if you think people are doing these things in bad faith, etc.
Either way, the project has for sure taken a backseat for us. If the server stays up and everything works, cool, if not, that's fine too. I have no interest in trying to monetize the service anymore whereas in the early days we took donations.
My point is the world of gamifying and commercializing Reddit content is already very very well established and there are large players doing it at a very large scale. If you measure it the porn industry is virtually all of it, but if you exclude them and look a bit harder you'll find other industries that have also carved out their niche in exploiting the platform.
[1]: https://cronnit.com
[+] [-] kumarvvr|4 years ago|reply
The best way to market a thing is to not make people realize they are being marketed with.
I remember a few years ago, there was a post (AMA) by someone who does this and his whole job was to maintain hundreds of normal looking accounts and post SEO friendly stuff, good words about products, etc on reddit.
[+] [-] notRobot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjarneh|4 years ago|reply
I'm old enough to remember when Google came, and the main difference was this:
With Google you did not have to flip through 3 pages of completely unrelated search results; that were paid for. Google used to display advertisements on the right as well, i.e. not among the regular search results.
This made Google so much better (and more popular) then their competition.
[+] [-] alkonaut|4 years ago|reply
So the result was that the first pages were full spam sites that just used search terms as hidden text. Then Altavista came and it was a huge change for the better. They at least made some effort of trying to rank actual relevance. Of course, Page/Brin's invention that made Google what it is today is PageRank, and none of the competition were close to an idea that good.
So PageRank'ed pages, good spam detection filters and ads on the side = Good Google. A search engine that stood out against the competition.
Now Googlee has horrible site spam detection, shows ads in the main result list (some times it's all you see). Google now has very little edge against the competition. Even just 1-2 years ago DDG and Bing were a lot worse than even the modern day Google. But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. Google search has never had peers at any point since it was launched.
[+] [-] redwall_hp|4 years ago|reply
Google's whole thing was it did something smart, and treated the Web as the big graph it is and more or less measured the in and out degrees of the vertices to rank their popularity. The idea that something relevant would be linked frequently. This was the subject of an academic paper and had associated patents for awhile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank It was a big deal at the time, but once again the Web has changed.
Google's search relevance is a function of the changing Web and how it's now highly commercial and populated by everyone instead of being the world's largest community of nerds. Links aren't a measure of popularity, because gulf between the average user and people who operate web sites has widened...and the common denominator has dropped to the point that optimizing for popularity is questionable in the first place.
[+] [-] 300bps|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvetching|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Finnucane|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangrossman|4 years ago|reply
This is already happening. I search for reviews and help on Reddit via Google often, and it's not that uncommon for the first result to be SEO spam: a Reddit post with no votes or comments, just lots of keywords and a link to a product or another site.
[+] [-] rukshn|4 years ago|reply
This is a response to the original post, explaining why the logic behind is it false.
[+] [-] jrussbowman|4 years ago|reply
I don't think it's a "better" search engine. It's a different lens through which to search. Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about. This is why I limit my index to articles that have popped in my Reddit/Twitter input in the last 30 days, deleting anything older.
I've actually had it up for years now, just don't know what to do with it. Been focused on my career in IT rather than entrepreneurism because well, life. I can say just this morning I saw "Stanytsia Luhanska" pop as a trending term on the front page of Unscatter and at the time mainstream media has not picked up the story of the school being hit by Russian shells.
I think over all the quality results still come from Reddit. Twitter often gets gamed and I see content terms pop up in the trending list. However, Twitter overnight (my time, US East) gets a more international flavor with lots of Korean and other Asia Pac country content bubbling to the top during that time because of Twitter.
[+] [-] nivethan|4 years ago|reply
I am interested in what your thoughts are about being in an echo chamber and getting out of it, but this is a great way to get a high level view of whats happening on reddit.
[+] [-] pr0zac|4 years ago|reply
I notice for instance "manga updates" is in the word cloud but a search for "kanye west" doesn't return any relevant results despite him being in the news a bunch lately for being kind of nuts.
[+] [-] gambler|4 years ago|reply
It's a source of information for what Reddit and Twitter owners want you to see. Both websites are heavily manipulated in a myriad of ways. (The simplest one is via massive amounts of accounts banned for wrongthink.) This is blatantly obvious if instead of passively absorbing news you deep-dive into a specific issue and then look up the discussions and trends, especially on Reddit. Sometimes discussions for major events just aren't there, which is nigh impossible organically on a website with tens of millions of users.
[+] [-] ThinkBeat|4 years ago|reply
It has a huge social media site. Of course, it is not ignored by the industry. Products, fads and politics.
Over the last several years it has become quite infested.
All is not lost.
There are some really good smaller subreddits. For smaller subreddits who have been around for a long time social meia influencers are easier to spot.
Some subreddits are so focused on an obscure niche that it is not worth money to try.
Well paid reddit influencers are well trained in "propaganda". One might have several accounts and the information comes "organic" from a "group effort". Some will not even name a product directly but give enough hints.
You also have negative influencers that work had to hurt the credibility of others and brand.
>Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge. And there is no financial incentive associated with it. They know that do it to share their knowledge.
[+] [-] Traster|4 years ago|reply
Reddit is different, they don't have algorithms. They have moderators. You don't need to figure out some crazy complicated way of manipulate things, you just have to either bribe or trick a couple of unpaid part time staff. And we've seen this so many times - moderators who use their position for their own gain. Now the result is different, this is what's misleading. On reddit because it's all manually moderated spamming is heavily penalized. So you don't get the noise floor of rubbish content. What you do get though, is highly unreliable information about anything that could be monetized.
It's exactly the same way on twitter, your energy company will be perfectly happy treating you like crap and keeping you on hold for 3 hours, or your airline company will throw your bags into a skip in Timbuktu and tell you you're on your own. But suddenly if you have a following on twitter and complain you get the red carpet treatment. Why? Because they've found a very easy way of cheating their customer service reputation.
[+] [-] CSSer|4 years ago|reply
Unless my memory is failing me (possible, it’s late), it straw mans the article it’s referencing by implying Reddit would want to do something like that anyway. It also fails to offer a compelling narrative for what makes Reddit good to me because frankly, and I feel that a lot of people seem to be overlooking this here too, Reddit has plenty of its own problems.
Reddit is owned by Condé Nast and is largely used as a content mill to prop up its existing properties. Reddit is dominated by the Pareto principle. 80% of its content is generated by a very small subset of users. Reddit doesn’t have the best track record for free expression. Many subreddits have crazy moderators that volunteer for some Machiavellian rush and use their power to stifle or twist the narrative of public sentiment. Reddit doesn’t want to kill the golden goose, so when this kind of controversy arises or when controversial subreddits crop up they kill it with fire to protect their investment. Lastly, Reddit users more than half a decade ago were already lambasting the amount of corporate shilling and guerilla advertising that takes place on Reddit daily. A lot of this is, in fact, orchestrated by those users I mentioned who produce 80% of the content because yes, they have discovered a financial incentive to do so.
I wouldn’t deny that Reddit has any sincere users any more than I would deny that we have any sincere users here (I’m certainly not getting paid for this), but I’ve been a bit perturbed by the amount of whitewashed, positive vibes Reddit seems to be getting around here lately. I stick Reddit on the end of search queries too, but I feel like I still wade into results with a similar level of skepticism to that which I carry around most of the rest of the web.
[+] [-] notRobot|4 years ago|reply
While not perfect, it does a pretty good job, in my experience.
However, the article makes a valid point -- the moment people start using it heavily, we'll get a reddit comment equivalent of SEO, with keyword stuffing and whatnot.
[+] [-] danuker|4 years ago|reply
I'm thankful for its existence, and I hope they get plenty of clients due to this HN demo of their power.
I hope they can afford to keep it alive forever. I use it instead of the " reddit" suffix in Google, usually HN has what I'm interested in, and in any case has much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
[+] [-] bduerst|4 years ago|reply
I commented this elsewhere but I don't think Reddit wants a good search option. Users tend to repost a non-trivial amount of content/questions/etc., and if those users could find the original content with a better search, it's likely reddit would see less user engagement.
[+] [-] streamofdigits|4 years ago|reply
> The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge
This doesn't immediately provide a solution because knowledge sharing does need infrastructure (which needs to be developed and maintained etc.) But as the (relatively) tiny budgets of organizations like wikimedia indicate, if you have the right incentives less might be more.
There is room for money to made in the digital economy, lots of it actually, but it will require us to pull the plug on adtech and all the ways it has degenerated. In broad brush we need to cleanly bifurcate into 1) trully free commons and 2) pay-to-play services that respect and are accountable to the client/user
[+] [-] themodelplumber|4 years ago|reply
> Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge.
I would offer a bit of a different perspective here, I think maybe even most do it for what you could call self-soothing.
For example, a lot of people share knowledge, but it's _their knowledge_, which can also be defined as _sharing their subjective past_ and that's known to be a very soothing thing for people who may even be troubled by the unknown in their personal lives. Hop online, boom, you're a domain expert in your own past. Find a place that's _about your past_, be it /r/linux or /r/formula1 or whatever, and there you go, it's comfy. You generally get an upvote + reply vibes dopamine bonus just for being there, due to your relevant past.
So, Reddit's sooth-sayers (so to speak) are kind of lazy but incentivized-lazy in some ways, which I think can also speak to some issues with the platform surrounding cognitive blind spots and what some here have called the echo chamber effect. That's an opportunity for a new search engine, in some ways, but it also may offer insights to new services that could be even more effective.
> And there is no financial incentive associated with it. [posting on Reddit]
There is though. I mean I've myself been financially incentivized into doing it, as have probably many, many others. Nothing sneaky, even.
You've got people posting their stuff all over the place, and the more community or indie or niche it is, the more welcomed is the post-as-advertisement or comment-as-advertisement. And that's not even going into corporate efforts to operate on the platform, which can be very subtle.
> However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity,
Perhaps--but Google was _really_ good for a very long time. That was worth a lot to millions of people.
I like to think that in the future, an ecosystem-mindset toward incentive systems could really help, like planning for different emergent systems that incentivize good results.
Anyway, fun to think about, thanks again.
[+] [-] powersnail|4 years ago|reply
That's a bit too psycho-analytical. A lot of what gets shared on technical/domain-expertise subs are simply technical knowledge. Most posts on such subs are questions, and upvoted comments are typically answers. If you accuse people of feeling good about helping others with their knowledge, well, I'd say that the joy is well-earned by the generous act.
In fact, if we are talking about the exhilaration of being upvoted, it's much easier to farm karma on reddit by lying. There are many big subs that are purely made up stories.
[+] [-] halotrope|4 years ago|reply
Lets hope that the upcoming IPO does not compromise the incentives there.
[+] [-] caaqil|4 years ago|reply
I mean, you don't have to imagine this, it already happens. People do game Reddit to inject ads, create bots that farm karma then use it to post their content and get them to the front page, etc. The only problem is that (at least some) redditors are incredibly sensitive to this and will go full internet detectives on you. See /r/HailCorporate.
[+] [-] buro9|4 years ago|reply
The problem is that it contains an overwhelming volume of spam and auto-generated sites.
To solve that, we all use the best search engine and apply site filters. Sites where we know other humans may have already discussed it.
We filter for forums - and Reddit is the largest of those - and we filter for specific websites we already trust.
Sometimes I filter `site:news.ycombinator.com companyname`, sometimes it's `site:dcrainmaker.com best gps watch`, sometimes it's `site:lfgss.com bottom bracket cable guide de rosa`.
But if I don't know about a specialist website, then it's `site:reddit.com searchterm`.
The search engine exists, it's just full of garbage with no effective way to search minus the garbage.
I'd take another DMOZ, a human curation of specialist sites. Then I'd have something better than Reddit too... I'd have the right filter to make every search useful.
[+] [-] skilled|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemothekid|4 years ago|reply
This statement aged me 10 years
[+] [-] rasz|4 years ago|reply
Reddit cant build any search functionality whatsoever. Current search is so broken It cant even find my own posts.
[+] [-] superfrank|4 years ago|reply
The redesign they did years ago pushed a more Instagram like design. Things like chat and rPan are meant to keep you on the site interacting with other users in real time. Their new video player is just a TikTok rip off. They give away awards every day and started pushing award karma in hopes that you'll give them to other users. Reddit wants you on their site, interacting with other users in real time and building a better search goes against that goal.
If I'm looking for a new pair of boots, there's two paths I can take on the reddit site. I can search "best boots" or I can go make a post on /r/boots. If their search is fantastic and I find a post that's 2 years old, there may be some great information there, but I'm probably not going to comment. Even if I do comment, I'm probably not going to get a lot of responses. If their search is shit (intentionally or unintentionally) it pushes me toward making my own post and drives up their engagement metrics.
It would be a massive undertaking to improve their search and there's very little incentive. Reddit wants users who just want to browse and that's not what the users coming in from a specific Google search are doing.
[+] [-] thematrixturtle|4 years ago|reply