> - "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."
Haha, the noobs. I use HN instead sunglasses cool face
A bit more seriously: I fully agree with this. And if HN doesn't have what I'm looking for then I use Reddit as well. But if HN has some info on the topic with a few highly upvoted threads, damn, it always impresses me.
When I'm looking into some project or piece of software I'm unfamiliar with, I really do search for HN posts on it. Fastest way to cut through (enough) of the biased material and get something genuine. Even hyped stuff usually has enough contrarian posts to give you an idea of where to look for the skeletons.
HN has now been around a while, is really popular, and is starting to catch the attention of ad/marketing companies now, though - how do you know what here is genuine?
Even the heuristic of "only trust accounts older than n years" isn't perfect, as eventually a few people will undoubtedly sell their old accounts on a dark web market for a little extra cash...
And it's not just the spammers. Any topic that touches domestic or international politics in any way almost instantly brings out a lot of bad-faith actors, here or anywhere else on the internet.
> Even the heuristic of "only trust accounts older than n years" isn't perfect, as eventually a few people will undoubtedly sell their old accounts on a dark web market for a little extra cash...
Yikes, I hadn't thought of that angle. That would explain some of the long-dormant accounts on Some Other Place that suddenly start spewing out-of-character garbage, assuming they weren't password-guessed, data-breached, or keylogged by some rando.
Hmm, I think for now it's relatively easily distinguishable. I've noticed that HN'ers feel "like me". So I look for that specific signal. I look for signals that care about curiosity and an insane hunger for the truth. Also, it's tough to mimic "Oh yea, I was at Xerox Parc programming this language that was posted about, let me give some nuanced insights into what was stated in the article" (that quote was made up for the sake of example).
The only marketeer that would be able to consistently fool me might be a marketeer that was a developer. But last time I applied for a junior marketeer position I was asked: given your resume, don't you want to be a developer instead? So devs seem to get pidgeonholed into always being devs.
Me too I even have a bookmarklet in Firefox so that I can use a prefix (hn) and the search is rewritten as site:news.ycombinator.com, to make sure all results are limited to HN.
I also have the same kind of bookmarklet for Reddit and Google Scholar.
Haha, the noobs. I use HN instead sunglasses cool face
A bit more seriously: I fully agree with this. And if HN doesn't have what I'm looking for then I use Reddit as well. But if HN has some info on the topic with a few highly upvoted threads, damn, it always impresses me.