For products? I dunno. It all depends entirely on what it is. Because while I wouldn't go to reddit for advice on what washer and dryer to buy, I have certainly seen a lot of people go to reddit to discuss in world use of tech and whether it would fit their lifestyle or user requirements. I appreciate that using reddit to be the next Amazon reviews is not the way. I don't think it should be the next Google AdSense. But I wouldn't say it doesn't belong in search results.

These days it's much easier and the information you can find on places like reddit is often better informed than most other Google search results because they've doubled down on making ad revenue. I don't use reddit anymore but I can certainly see why some people do.

Misinformation is certainly a problem pretty much everywhere on the Internet that isn't tiny and niche. The reason smaller less populated forums are often more welcoming and have less misinformation is due to the small percentage of people who use them and the fact that maintaining them is usually work that only someone who cares about the content will take on. Lemmy has pretty much all the same problems as reddit does but at a much smaller scale because it's just not as big. Would you suggest Google use Lemmy?

Lemmy also has an additional problem. Even when there is a one to one community for something mirrored here from reddit, the content often is not. So say I need information on a game, or a coffee maker, or a specific type of tea that needs to be translated so I can find a similar one. I won't necessarily be able to find that info here.

And reddit basically ate a lot of smaller forums as it rose in popularity over the last 15 or so years. I've had 3 different reddit accounts in the time I've used the site. One of them I used a school email to sign up for and don't have access to, and two others for various reasons including giving away stuff on animal crossing from both my island and my sister's island.

I can appreciate how much it's changed. I can definitely say that I do miss the smaller forums and the people who took care of them and kept them going. I can also remember having to build karma on a lot of them before I could make a post, ask a question, leave a comment. The bar to entry as a new person on smaller forums was often high.

I think the solution is to force people to use critical thinking skills and vet sources and generally use reddit only as one of many different resources to find info on products which is what most people should be doing anyway. It's time consuming but the problems you and the article both highlight are part of people being lazy and relying heavily on convenience over factual useful information.

Of the resulting 122 URLs, 63 have a top comment with a self-promotional affiliate link. Often written months after the original thread was created.

Injecting (posting and manipulating) affiliate links is lucrative for affiliates - Reddit could resolve it by disallowing or automatically clearing affiliate links of links (URL shorteners would be a secondary concern that could be automatically handled too)

Without affiliate spam, it would or could still be lucrative for sellers and product sellers. Which is harder to resolve.

I find their repeated "I'm not outing anyone", "I'm not here to out anyone" irritating, especially for evading sourcing examples. I guess it's a very evasive, non-confrontational approach. But to me, that's not necessarily a good thing. Either way sourcing isn't likely to resolve the overall systematic (Reddit- and Google-sided) issue anyway.

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