> where real people hang out and have real conversations
I don't consider the discussions there to be "real" in any meaningful way, thanks to the extensive moderation.
From what I've seen, there typically ends up being a small handful of moderator-enforced narratives that are deemed "acceptable" for a given subreddit, and any commenters deviating from those narratives get banned, or their comments end up as "[removed]" by "[deleted]", or the comments get obscured with the "comment score below threshold" notice.
It's generally some of the most one-sided and blandest discussion around. Given that there's often no meaningful back-and-forth involving differing perspectives of any sort, I'm not even sure if it should be considered "discussion". It's more like regurgitation and repetition.
I've found the situation to be particularly bad on the Canadian locale-specific subreddits, for example, but a enough of the tech-oriented ones I've seen seem to end up like that, too.
I think Reddit lost that kind of authenticity a while ago. Advertisers know the "search:reddit.com <product>" trick, and when you look at the number of upvotes, it costs _pennies_ to get your product trending in the comments.
I don't search reddit for <product> though I search it for <highly technical issue with product> because reddit is the only place where real people discuss such issues and the solutions to them.
Its not strange to me. Every single time I've followed a Reddit link from search results, I've got a short and fairly useless conversation that doesn't help me at all. So I have never understood why people like it.
Obviously, people do see value in it, or they wouldn't keep saying so! I would happily exclude Reddit links from search results though.
Yeah, but each sub to a greater or lesser degree, has its own hivemind you'll be run out of town (or possibly even banned) for challenging. And the average member of Reddit is quite willing to spout off confidently incorrect BS and downvote people into the ground who actually know what they're talking about.
Not exactly always a reliable source of info outside uncontroversial niche topics or places like /r/AskHistorians that actually moderate. And even there I've seen the occasional humdinger.
