Reddit benefits from having bad search because it increases engagement with the site. If you can’t find it by searching, people start a new post, even if it’s just rehashing something that’s been discussed 100s of times before. The new post brings new comments, and more page views. There’s also a user benefit as the information has less chance to become outdated (a new discussion might bring new information, avoiding the Stack Overflow problem).

I've been switching to Lemmy.

It's like Reddit but not owned by a public corp.

Reddit still has more users but Lemmy is more like old school distributed web, not just an ad product pushed by coked out MBA accountants.

It's reddit-like BUT it doesn't have the same mass adoption and that's why I go to reddit. I don't have time to be a saint and help their numbers, so I just go to reddit and read what I want. Really HN is the only SM platform that I actually participate both ways with. I just read thing on other SM sites to catch up with friends or topics (like reddit). Comments there are mostly a trash heap but on something you want to know about you can find a gold nugget every now and then.

Before: They were small. It was hard. Defer to Google.

Now: By having bad search, Google rewards them.

There's no money in it. It's expensive in both compute and storage to provide the tool, and they want most users to just be mindlessly consuming the front page or popular subreddits.

That’s my issue with Reddit nowadays. Most subreddits content is just the same question thrown over and over, and Reddit nowadays changes the home page to be just random algorithm selected stuff. And now I don’t have a choice to use Apollo anymore.

you could always side load apollo

Reddit had a great search engine called PushShift which was maintained and run by one guy. That service doesn't work since their API changes, unfortunately.

Why would they, google does it for free. Spend money making google crawlers more efficient, not copying google.

For me, search is the least of reddit's problems since it is easily worked around by using a search engine.

The changes to the API pricing were the final nail in the coffin for me, but the content has been going downhill for a decade anyway.

Reddit is a cesspool, at least the standard subreddits. It’s worse than Twitter. It also has a moderation culture that kind of promotes toxic traits and petty power trips. Used to be pretty good for finding niche info, but most of it for my uses was deleted back when everyone left. Can’t imagine still using Reddit nowadays

I find decent info in plenty of subs, you just have to stay away from the front page/popular subs, Especially the comments in those items. Total garbage full of people ranting. I give it a go a couple times a year but nothing ever changes. Just people raging at each other.

Sure, there's a lot of valuable information and I often append my web searches with “reddit”.

But I no longer go to reddit to spend time there, without looking for specific information.