8 ms·

I think a much bigger point can be summarized with this sentence from the article: > Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which reall

I think a much bigger point can be summarized with this sentence from the article: > Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which really makes you question the objectivity of the advice. This is true when searching for pretty much everything in Google nowadays, that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

atwork95 7y ago
I usually search for recommendation on reddit because they seems to be more legit and so far it has always worked
disiplus 7y ago
and that's mostly thanks to subreddit moderators, if they weren't that aggressive it would be full of spam. u can notice that on some subreddits when moderators are away or some that have lax rules.
- read_if_gay_ 7y ago
  That's because of the voting system.
  - fullstop 7y ago
    That can be manipulated too, though.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  It's only a matter of time I think before subreddits and / or moderators are replaced by sales / marketing representatives. It's probably already the case in e.g. the political subreddits. Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another.
  - DelightOne 7y ago
    > Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another. What would you do here, specifically?
    - jerf 7y ago
      If you are implying that it can be difficult to investigate a particular person like, say, a reddit mod with very little biographical information and no particular post history, then I'd suggest that finding that someone giving advice is not themselves investigatable is itself an answer. Yeah, that metric will have false positives, but, alas, fewer and fewer over time as a site grows.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    The political subreddits are mostly echo chambers of a single party that has taken over there especially in "nonpartisan" groups, especially in news subreddits like politics, news, and worldnews. Even moderates aren't really welcome and I've seen anyone who said something even slightly conservative get ripped to shreds and moderators are like "I'll allow it", pretty crazy. There are many, many good informational forums though, like the article mentioned you just have to look out for marketeers and snake oil a bit.
    - FrozenTuna 7y ago
      Its not even as open as a single party right now. Its single candidate.
    - jahlove 7y ago
      /r/moderatepolitics is my new /r/politics.
lawlorino 7y ago
> that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results. Agreed, I often default to Reddit or HN for a lot of stuff although there are an increasing number of obvious adverts disguised as genuine posts (see r/hailcorporate for some examples). More difficult to spot are marketing firms who curate a bunch of fake accounts, make them seem like "real people" by posting random content but interspersing this with subtle ads. There was an AMA recently from someone working at a firm that does this, they even gave their accounts personalities by posting in specific related subs (e.g. hiking, outdoors) in order to advertise boots. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, but still my point is that even though Reddit generally leads to better advice take it with a grain of salt. Edit: Found it, wasn't an AMA but just a comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/f9rjh0/he_dressed_up_as_a_bulldozer_for_a_jungle_themed/fitzl9u/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/f9rjh0/he_dressed_up_... Although I don't see a reason not to trust this comment, the line about "we have seen great success with this method" had me wondering how they measure the impact of this strategy? It seems this would be quite time and effort intensive, therefore expensive. How do they know they can attribute sales to this since presumably they aren't providing affiliate links as that'd be too obvious?
- nhumrich 7y ago
  Almost all of marketing statistics/metrics are correlation, not causation. They are mostly just looking at stats over time, trying only one new thing per quarter. No way to know for sure if the new channel was actually the reason for success, but you can be fairly confident
- speeder 7y ago
  I dated a woman that had this job, but using Facebook (this was some years ago too). It was not just marketing, but PR too, for example she bragged about when Whirlpool had a serious problem with one of their washing machines in my country, and it was going viral, so Whirlpool paid the marketing agency to make all fake profiles (even ones not belonging to their campaigns) make other viral posts to drown out the washing machine one. She bragged about two things: 1. It worked, the "counter-viral" campaign successfully made people ignore the washing machine issue. 2. They got paid ludicrous amounts of money (she hinted that each account with 5000 followers, that was Facebook limit, was worth some thousands USD, and that they had many, many accounts, precisely to go around that 5000 follower limit, for example if a company ordered 50.000 followers from them, they would setup 10 fake accounts and try to attract 5000 real people in each, each account with different hobbies to try to attract different people). EDIT: some other interesting info: * They had a huge cache of personal photos, to make it look like the person was real, there are even stock photo agencies that create these photos, for example take a female and a male actor to tourist destinations and take pictures to make them look like a couple doing romantic things, then they would release the photos slowly, so people wouldn't notice it was fake, and to stretch their money for photo purchases. * They would get sometimes employees with real hobbies, and have them take care of fake accounts with same hobbies, so a surfer for example would have some 8 accounts under her care, each for a different company, and write some surfing content that is real, but tweak and then repost on all 8, with differences, and adjusting to fit each profile. * Another technique at the time was the sale of "instantaneous company profile", you made a fake profile, and made it get genuinely popular with a target demographic, then you sold it to someone, after the sale you could edit the account to turn it from a person to a fan-page, with the category correct for the company that bought it, so a company could buy a fan-page for them with 5000 real followers that actually are about the subject. I never asked how often people would realize what happened and unfollow... but I guessed most people wouldn't bother with unfollowing anyway.
semicolonandson 7y ago
I just finished listening to an engaging series of podcasts by Michael Lewis (author of Flash Boys, The Big Short etc.) about the loss of referees in our society. It's called Against the Rules: https://atrpodcast.com/ https://atrpodcast.com/ Much of reddit still has functioning referees in the form of its moderators, but I'm seeing signs of it cracking — e.g. when I researched the backgrounds of certain moderators I found out that they produced content in some space and would allow their own stuff to get posted while blocking other people's submissions.
- NegatioN 7y ago
  To me it seems like this is an enternal struggle of /having to be/ a "hipster", and move to the newest services/forums. In the sense that the only untainted grounds will be the ones where there's not that many people yet, or people joining/promoted to influencial positions are scrutinized. It takes very few bad actors to poison the well. At least on Reddit, there's a myriad of small subreddits which makes it more difficult to infiltrate all of them effectively.
- arvinsim 7y ago
  I have actually read that some country specific subreddits that are moderated by people who are not from the respective country.
  - CapsAdmin 7y ago
    In game communities I've managed there's always a strong desire from the people within the community to become a moderator for IMO the wrong incentives. (wrong being standing out and sometimes power) I've tried to combat this but it seems very difficult. The thing that works best is to really hide the status and let people make their own ways of standing out. I also very rarely gave moderator status to anyone who asked. It would mostly be people I see could be a good fit and also make sure there are no obligations to actually use power.
  - modo_mario 7y ago
    It makes sense if it's not solely that Like r/europe has a Canadian and Brazilian if i remember well to handle night time stuff.
ehnto 7y ago
I often use google to search specific sites, because of this reason. The simple issue is that people who make money from being first page on Google can afford the money it takes to game the index to their benefit. This would be true of other search engines too if they were as popular as Google, so I don't blame them for it. Nor do I envy their task. I imagine making SEO gaming harder would be in Google's benefit, so they could sell more advertising. Commerce has ruined Google's results consistently for years now. It is just what commerce does to everything, when there is money to be made from it. You can't even fly on a plane you paid to be on without being advertised at as thanks for your patronage.
gonzo41 7y ago
That sentence would probably hold true if you went to ten financial advisers.
skepticmoron1 7y ago
I find blind app to be a lot more objective. Your company information is required to sign up. This primary property of the app makes it is easier to differentiate an ad vs real advice.
- mdns33 7y ago
  if you can filter out the noise (takes effort). It is a decent guide.
neves 7y ago
You can say this about any advice. My brother worked in a bank. They gave bonus for everyone that sold a specific financial product for the clients. The internal name of the product was "good for suckers".
- icedchai 7y ago
  Let me guess.. annuities? VULs?
  - neves 7y ago
    It was in Brazil, I don't know the equivalent. The name here was "capitalization title", it has terrible profitability, liquidity, but you can win "prizes". Almost a lottery.
blackandblue 7y ago
this is so true! but we have ourselves to blame for it. these days i don't get mad at google search results anymore. i knew someone gamed the result in order to try to sell me something... here's one the has started to puzzle me: TED talks have become the ground for people trying to sell you something. but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right? wrong! at least to me. this feels wrong.
- P_I_Staker 7y ago
  >but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right? Are they really selling these things versus their revolutionary new book, trying to get attention for their research, or some good/service? I agree. I think TED and similar pop-science programming is dangerous. People think they're actually learning something meaningful. I see it as the granola bar of media. They're filled with sugar and only minor nutritional value. You feel like you're getting something healthy, but you're not doing much better than a snickers bar.
moksly 7y ago
I didn’t think much about it, but now that you mention it, I’ve been typing “reddit” after my google queries almost every time I search for something that isn’t a technical problem or me looking to buy something.
- mgerb 7y ago
  I've been doing the exact same thing for quite some time now. Google is filled with so many garbage results. For most things I want to see short and sweet answers by real people. Just yesterday I searched for "index funds vs etf reddit", as I'm really new to any sort of investing. The first reddit result on google has a simplified response that is to the point. Now try searching google for "index funds vs etf" and the results are littered with investing sites and long lists of information, that is more than likely helpful, but much more verbose.
  - Goronmon 7y ago
    Google is filled with so many garbage results. In this case I would just replace 'Google' with 'the internet'. Switching search providers isn't going to make a marked difference the vast majority of the time, as at the end of the day, if the vast majority of the internet is filled with 'garbage' a search engine can only do so much to avoid it.
    - cle 7y ago
      Stop trying to deflect blame from Google. They go out of their way to show garbage. They sacrifice their search results as much as they can get away with, in order to show more ads. Reddit does not do this nearly to the degree as Google. It’s not even close. There are ways to filter through the noise, it just doesn’t involve companies with financial conflicts of interest.
      - three_seagrass 7y ago
        >They go out of their way to show garbage. Citation needed. Searching "index funds vs etf" on Bing gives ads for the first five results, while Google shows a card thing and organic results. If you're going to accuse them of deflecting, at least show evidence that it's not just the whole internet.
rgovostes 7y ago
Virtually every blog post I've ever found on a well-known brand of orthodontic clear-aligner treatment includes a note, "by the way this post was sponsored but this is my honest opinion." Have to hand it to the marketing team. The reviewers seem to believe they are unbiased but your satisfaction with the results may differ if you had spent $5,000 versus if you had spent nothing.
koboll 7y ago
>searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results. Well, search on reddit has always been pretty terrible. I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results.
- gniv 7y ago
  > I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results. That works, but for many searches will include results from other sites, since the operator works on the entire URL, not just the domain. If you want to limit to just reddit.com, use `site:reddit.com`.
bityard 7y ago
While you don't get as much "blogspam" on Reddit, it has a very different problem today: The amount of misinformation and echo chambering of said misinformation on Reddit is simply staggering. Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over. The other problem is that when someone does ask for advice, the quality of the advice is usually somewhere between mediocre to terrible. I think this is largely because there is no incentive for experts to stick around in subs to provide good answers. And because they are tired of giving the _same_ advice over and over. This gives space to the non-experts who don't _really_ understand the concepts behind the advice they are giving and end up giving bad (and sometimes dangerous) advice because that's what they were told by other non-experts in the same situation.
- Domenic_S 7y ago
  > As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over. I answer questions in r/personalfinance's "new" area, and the split is something like: "I am upside down on my car loan/loan is too expensive/want to get out of my current car" - 40% "How do I do I make [some crazy ROI]? I have [$small amount] to invest" - 20% "I have no money and need to pay my bills" - 20% "Can I afford to buy this house?" - 10% Novel questions - 10% So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.
  - bobloblaw45 7y ago
    I noticed a good amount of of young people humble-bragging too. Like "I just got out of college and I make 6 figures, should I eat lentils or splurge and get Sizzler?" To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past.
    - InitialLastName 7y ago
      > To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past. I wonder if that's usable as an indicator?

atwork95 7y ago

I usually search for recommendation on reddit because they seems to be more legit and so far it has always worked

disiplus 7y ago

and that's mostly thanks to subreddit moderators, if they weren't that aggressive it would be full of spam. u can notice that on some subreddits when moderators are away or some that have lax rules.

read_if_gay_ 7y ago
That's because of the voting system.
- fullstop 7y ago
  That can be manipulated too, though.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
It's only a matter of time I think before subreddits and / or moderators are replaced by sales / marketing representatives. It's probably already the case in e.g. the political subreddits. Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another.
- DelightOne 7y ago
  > Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another. What would you do here, specifically?
  - jerf 7y ago
    If you are implying that it can be difficult to investigate a particular person like, say, a reddit mod with very little biographical information and no particular post history, then I'd suggest that finding that someone giving advice is not themselves investigatable is itself an answer. Yeah, that metric will have false positives, but, alas, fewer and fewer over time as a site grows.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  The political subreddits are mostly echo chambers of a single party that has taken over there especially in "nonpartisan" groups, especially in news subreddits like politics, news, and worldnews. Even moderates aren't really welcome and I've seen anyone who said something even slightly conservative get ripped to shreds and moderators are like "I'll allow it", pretty crazy. There are many, many good informational forums though, like the article mentioned you just have to look out for marketeers and snake oil a bit.
  - FrozenTuna 7y ago
    Its not even as open as a single party right now. Its single candidate.
  - jahlove 7y ago
    /r/moderatepolitics is my new /r/politics.

lawlorino 7y ago

> that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results. Agreed, I often default to Reddit or HN for a lot of stuff although there are an increasing number of obvious adverts disguised as genuine posts (see r/hailcorporate for some examples). More difficult to spot are marketing firms who curate a bunch of fake accounts, make them seem like "real people" by posting random content but interspersing this with subtle ads. There was an AMA recently from someone working at a firm that does this, they even gave their accounts personalities by posting in specific related subs (e.g. hiking, outdoors) in order to advertise boots. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, but still my point is that even though Reddit generally leads to better advice take it with a grain of salt. Edit: Found it, wasn't an AMA but just a comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/f9rjh0/he_dressed_up_as_a_bulldozer_for_a_jungle_themed/fitzl9u/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/f9rjh0/he_dressed_up_... Although I don't see a reason not to trust this comment, the line about "we have seen great success with this method" had me wondering how they measure the impact of this strategy? It seems this would be quite time and effort intensive, therefore expensive. How do they know they can attribute sales to this since presumably they aren't providing affiliate links as that'd be too obvious?

nhumrich 7y ago
Almost all of marketing statistics/metrics are correlation, not causation. They are mostly just looking at stats over time, trying only one new thing per quarter. No way to know for sure if the new channel was actually the reason for success, but you can be fairly confident
speeder 7y ago
I dated a woman that had this job, but using Facebook (this was some years ago too). It was not just marketing, but PR too, for example she bragged about when Whirlpool had a serious problem with one of their washing machines in my country, and it was going viral, so Whirlpool paid the marketing agency to make all fake profiles (even ones not belonging to their campaigns) make other viral posts to drown out the washing machine one. She bragged about two things: 1. It worked, the "counter-viral" campaign successfully made people ignore the washing machine issue. 2. They got paid ludicrous amounts of money (she hinted that each account with 5000 followers, that was Facebook limit, was worth some thousands USD, and that they had many, many accounts, precisely to go around that 5000 follower limit, for example if a company ordered 50.000 followers from them, they would setup 10 fake accounts and try to attract 5000 real people in each, each account with different hobbies to try to attract different people). EDIT: some other interesting info: * They had a huge cache of personal photos, to make it look like the person was real, there are even stock photo agencies that create these photos, for example take a female and a male actor to tourist destinations and take pictures to make them look like a couple doing romantic things, then they would release the photos slowly, so people wouldn't notice it was fake, and to stretch their money for photo purchases. * They would get sometimes employees with real hobbies, and have them take care of fake accounts with same hobbies, so a surfer for example would have some 8 accounts under her care, each for a different company, and write some surfing content that is real, but tweak and then repost on all 8, with differences, and adjusting to fit each profile. * Another technique at the time was the sale of "instantaneous company profile", you made a fake profile, and made it get genuinely popular with a target demographic, then you sold it to someone, after the sale you could edit the account to turn it from a person to a fan-page, with the category correct for the company that bought it, so a company could buy a fan-page for them with 5000 real followers that actually are about the subject. I never asked how often people would realize what happened and unfollow... but I guessed most people wouldn't bother with unfollowing anyway.

semicolonandson 7y ago

I just finished listening to an engaging series of podcasts by Michael Lewis (author of Flash Boys, The Big Short etc.) about the loss of referees in our society. It's called Against the Rules: https://atrpodcast.com/ https://atrpodcast.com/ Much of reddit still has functioning referees in the form of its moderators, but I'm seeing signs of it cracking — e.g. when I researched the backgrounds of certain moderators I found out that they produced content in some space and would allow their own stuff to get posted while blocking other people's submissions.

NegatioN 7y ago
To me it seems like this is an enternal struggle of /having to be/ a "hipster", and move to the newest services/forums. In the sense that the only untainted grounds will be the ones where there's not that many people yet, or people joining/promoted to influencial positions are scrutinized. It takes very few bad actors to poison the well. At least on Reddit, there's a myriad of small subreddits which makes it more difficult to infiltrate all of them effectively.
arvinsim 7y ago
I have actually read that some country specific subreddits that are moderated by people who are not from the respective country.
- CapsAdmin 7y ago
  In game communities I've managed there's always a strong desire from the people within the community to become a moderator for IMO the wrong incentives. (wrong being standing out and sometimes power) I've tried to combat this but it seems very difficult. The thing that works best is to really hide the status and let people make their own ways of standing out. I also very rarely gave moderator status to anyone who asked. It would mostly be people I see could be a good fit and also make sure there are no obligations to actually use power.
- modo_mario 7y ago
  It makes sense if it's not solely that Like r/europe has a Canadian and Brazilian if i remember well to handle night time stuff.

ehnto 7y ago

I often use google to search specific sites, because of this reason. The simple issue is that people who make money from being first page on Google can afford the money it takes to game the index to their benefit. This would be true of other search engines too if they were as popular as Google, so I don't blame them for it. Nor do I envy their task. I imagine making SEO gaming harder would be in Google's benefit, so they could sell more advertising. Commerce has ruined Google's results consistently for years now. It is just what commerce does to everything, when there is money to be made from it. You can't even fly on a plane you paid to be on without being advertised at as thanks for your patronage.

gonzo41 7y ago

That sentence would probably hold true if you went to ten financial advisers.

skepticmoron1 7y ago

I find blind app to be a lot more objective. Your company information is required to sign up. This primary property of the app makes it is easier to differentiate an ad vs real advice.

mdns33 7y ago
if you can filter out the noise (takes effort). It is a decent guide.

neves 7y ago

You can say this about any advice. My brother worked in a bank. They gave bonus for everyone that sold a specific financial product for the clients. The internal name of the product was "good for suckers".

icedchai 7y ago
Let me guess.. annuities? VULs?
- neves 7y ago
  It was in Brazil, I don't know the equivalent. The name here was "capitalization title", it has terrible profitability, liquidity, but you can win "prizes". Almost a lottery.

blackandblue 7y ago

this is so true! but we have ourselves to blame for it. these days i don't get mad at google search results anymore. i knew someone gamed the result in order to try to sell me something... here's one the has started to puzzle me: TED talks have become the ground for people trying to sell you something. but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right? wrong! at least to me. this feels wrong.

P_I_Staker 7y ago
>but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right? Are they really selling these things versus their revolutionary new book, trying to get attention for their research, or some good/service? I agree. I think TED and similar pop-science programming is dangerous. People think they're actually learning something meaningful. I see it as the granola bar of media. They're filled with sugar and only minor nutritional value. You feel like you're getting something healthy, but you're not doing much better than a snickers bar.

moksly 7y ago

I didn’t think much about it, but now that you mention it, I’ve been typing “reddit” after my google queries almost every time I search for something that isn’t a technical problem or me looking to buy something.

mgerb 7y ago
I've been doing the exact same thing for quite some time now. Google is filled with so many garbage results. For most things I want to see short and sweet answers by real people. Just yesterday I searched for "index funds vs etf reddit", as I'm really new to any sort of investing. The first reddit result on google has a simplified response that is to the point. Now try searching google for "index funds vs etf" and the results are littered with investing sites and long lists of information, that is more than likely helpful, but much more verbose.
- Goronmon 7y ago
  Google is filled with so many garbage results. In this case I would just replace 'Google' with 'the internet'. Switching search providers isn't going to make a marked difference the vast majority of the time, as at the end of the day, if the vast majority of the internet is filled with 'garbage' a search engine can only do so much to avoid it.
  - cle 7y ago
    Stop trying to deflect blame from Google. They go out of their way to show garbage. They sacrifice their search results as much as they can get away with, in order to show more ads. Reddit does not do this nearly to the degree as Google. It’s not even close. There are ways to filter through the noise, it just doesn’t involve companies with financial conflicts of interest.
    - three_seagrass 7y ago
      >They go out of their way to show garbage. Citation needed. Searching "index funds vs etf" on Bing gives ads for the first five results, while Google shows a card thing and organic results. If you're going to accuse them of deflecting, at least show evidence that it's not just the whole internet.

rgovostes 7y ago

Virtually every blog post I've ever found on a well-known brand of orthodontic clear-aligner treatment includes a note, "by the way this post was sponsored but this is my honest opinion." Have to hand it to the marketing team. The reviewers seem to believe they are unbiased but your satisfaction with the results may differ if you had spent $5,000 versus if you had spent nothing.

koboll 7y ago

>searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results. Well, search on reddit has always been pretty terrible. I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results.

gniv 7y ago
> I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results. That works, but for many searches will include results from other sites, since the operator works on the entire URL, not just the domain. If you want to limit to just reddit.com, use `site:reddit.com`.

bityard 7y ago

While you don't get as much "blogspam" on Reddit, it has a very different problem today: The amount of misinformation and echo chambering of said misinformation on Reddit is simply staggering. Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over. The other problem is that when someone does ask for advice, the quality of the advice is usually somewhere between mediocre to terrible. I think this is largely because there is no incentive for experts to stick around in subs to provide good answers. And because they are tired of giving the _same_ advice over and over. This gives space to the non-experts who don't _really_ understand the concepts behind the advice they are giving and end up giving bad (and sometimes dangerous) advice because that's what they were told by other non-experts in the same situation.

Domenic_S 7y ago
> As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over. I answer questions in r/personalfinance's "new" area, and the split is something like: "I am upside down on my car loan/loan is too expensive/want to get out of my current car" - 40% "How do I do I make [some crazy ROI]? I have [$small amount] to invest" - 20% "I have no money and need to pay my bills" - 20% "Can I afford to buy this house?" - 10% Novel questions - 10% So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.
- bobloblaw45 7y ago
  I noticed a good amount of of young people humble-bragging too. Like "I just got out of college and I make 6 figures, should I eat lentils or splurge and get Sizzler?" To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past.
  - InitialLastName 7y ago
    > To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past. I wonder if that's usable as an indicator?