Just wanted to add this -- reddit was the perhaps the tool that I had access to growing up (I'm an older Gen-Z, the oldest) that equalized the power differential for me when it came to researching a new product or a service. The ability to hop on to very niche subreddits discussing the very thing I was going to make a purchase decision on -- with some of the posts being written by folks who genuinely knew what they were talking about -- made a huge difference, aside from the general good vibes of feeling part of a community (monthly megathreads, stickies, etc.).
I use AI tools now and run lots of 'deep research' prompts before making decisions, but I definitely miss the 'community aspect' of niche subreddits, with their messiness and turf wars. I miss them because I barely go on reddit anymore (except r/LocalLLaMA and other tech heavy subs), most of the content is just obviously bot generated, which is just depressing.
The irony of leaving a community where "most of the content is obviously bot generated, which is just depressing" to going full-on into zero community bot-generation via LLM is fascinating.
It does sound paradoxical, but it's the difference between steering information to things that serve you, versus having others steer the information you see to things that serve them.
Reddit right now is in a very bad place. It's passed the threshold where bots are posting and replying to themselves. If humans left the platform it would probably look much the same as it does now.
The result is a noticeable uptick in forums moving to discord or rolling their own websites. Which is probably a good thing for dodging the obvious commercial manipulation, propaganda and foreign influence vectors.
At least you get to prompt the llm, as opposed to consuming content where you don’t know what the prompt was and could have been intended to misinform.
At least the response doesn’t have an ad injected between each paragraph and is intentionally padded out so you scroll past more ads…
Works on firefox mobile too, just have to go to extensions for all firefox (as opposed to the default mobile firefox extensions page), and add it from there.
I was generalizing to more sites than just reddit.
Mostly I see a ton of ai slop that pollutes google search results, you’ll see an intro paragraph that looks vaguely coherent, but the more you scroll, the more apparent you’re reading ai slop.
With LLMs, I'm viscerally aware that it's a bot generating output from its pre-trained/fine-tuned model weights with occasional RAG.
With reddit, folks go there expecting some semblance of genuine human interaction (reddit's #1 rule was "remember the human"). So, there's that expectation differential. Not ironic at all.
How is that ironic? If I was in a place with Indian and Thai restaurants and then it turned out all the Thai restaurants have only Indian food, I would rather go to an Indian restaurant for the food. That's about the most non-ironic thing ever.
Yep, exactly, but there isn't any. The places saying they serve Thai food serve Indian food. If so, I'll go get my Indian food from where it's actually done well.
Just like SEO ruined search, I expect companies to be running these deep researches, looking carefully at the sources, and ensuring they're poisoned. Hopefully with enough cross-referencing and intelligence models will be relatively immune to this and be able to judge the quality of sources, but they will certainly be targeted.
Or the LLM companies will offer "poison as a service", probably a viable business model - hopefully mitigated by open source, local inference, and competing models.
Deep research is still search behind the scenes. The quality of the LLM’s response entirely depend on what’s returned. And I still don’t trust LLMs enough to tell fluff from truth.
Yeah but Deep Research, at least in the beginning (I feel like it's been nerfed several times) would search often on the orders of 50+ websites for a single query, and often times reading the whole website better than what an average human could.
Deep Research is quietly the coolest product to come out of the whole GenAI gold rush.
The google version of Deep Research still searches 50+ websites, but I find it's quality far inferior to that of OpenAI's version.
I do check the RAG sources from deep research, but you're very right in that it's easy to start taking mental shortcuts and end up over relying on LLMs to do the research/thinking for you.
Reddit is mostly trash now, but here's the thing though: If people stop talking to each other, what are all the AIs going to train on?
Like say a hot new game comes out tomorrow, SuperDuperBuster (don't steal this name). I fire up Chatgrokini or whatever AI's gonna be out in the next few days and ask it about SuperDuperBuster. So does everyone else.
Where would the AI get its information from? Web search? It'll only know what the company wants people to know. At best it might see some walkthrough videos on YouTube, but that's gonna be heavily gated by Google.
When ChatGPT 5 came out, I asked it about the new improvements: it said 5 was a hypothetical version that didn't exist. It didn't even know about itself.
Claude still insists iOS 26 isn't out yet and gives outdated APIs from iOS 18 etc.
I think you need to answer this by looking from the other end of the telescope.
What if you are the developer of SuperDuperBuster? (sorry, name stolen...)
If so, then you would have more than just the product, you would have a website, social media presence and some reviews solicited for launch.
Assuming a continually trained AI, the AI would just scrape the web and 'learn' about SuperDuperBuster in the normal way. Of course, you would have the website marked up for not just SEO but LLM optimised, which is a slightly different skill. You could also ask 'ChatGPT67' to check the website out and to summarise it, thereby not having to wait for the default search.
Now, SuperDuperBuster is easy to loft into the world of LLMs. What is going to be a lot harder is a history topic where your new insight changes how we understand the world. With science, there is always the peer reviewed scientific paper, but with history there isn't the scientific publishing route, and, unless you have a book to sell (with ISBN number), then you are not going to get as far as being in Wikipedia. However, a hallucinating LLM, already sickened by gorging on Reddit, might just be able to slurp it all up.
Before Reddit, Facebook, and other massively centralized forum hosting, the thousands of independent, individual forums and discussion boards didn't seem to have too much of a spam/bot problem. Just too much diversity, too much work to get accounts on thousands of different platforms to spew your sewage.
"Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Facebook" was the beginning of the end.
I'm sure a LLM would have no problem creating an account on all 1000 if someone cared enough to try. Sign in with google is the easy way, but it wouldn't be hard to do sign up for each individually.
Some of them are doing that, but they are either not getting many members (not always a bad thing), or they accept everyone who can act human (which a LLM can do close enough). Sometimes there is a probation period, but it wouldn't be hard for LLMs to write enough to seem real.
Yeah, I'm a bit young for bulletin boards. I did use classic forums (LTT and similar tech/pc building ones), but the old reddit was just far too convenient and far too addicting.
> most of the content is just obviously bot generated
Either my BS detector is getting too old, or I've subscribed to (and unsubscribed from default) subreddits in such a way as to avoid this almost entirely. Maybe 1 out of 10,000 comments I see make me even wonder, and when I do wonder, another read or two pretty much confirms my suspicion.
Perhaps this is because you're researching products (where advertising in all its forms has and always will exist) and I'm mostly doing other things where such incentive to deploy bots just doesn't exist. Spam on classic forums tends to follow this same logic.
For an example, AskElectricians recently has been invaded by an LLM which generates authoritative-sounding but 95% accurate electrical advice. It’s worse than useless.
Interesting. To be fair, the same could be said about much of the human activity there (at least as many armchair electricians than licensed ones, who do know a lot, but not everything). Although I suspect the 5% of bad advice is quite different... probably code-compliant but non-functional for the LLM, and functional but not code-compliant for the unlicensed humans.
>which generates authoritative-sounding but 95% accurate electrical advice. It’s worse than useless
So basically the exact same thing the humans it replaced were doing but without the "I know better than you" attitude" and "call a professional" as a crutch for not knowing things.
They're fine if you need help troubleshooting residential electrical, but so is any old AI
I use AI tools now and run lots of 'deep research' prompts before making decisions, but I definitely miss the 'community aspect' of niche subreddits, with their messiness and turf wars. I miss them because I barely go on reddit anymore (except r/LocalLLaMA and other tech heavy subs), most of the content is just obviously bot generated, which is just depressing.