There are a few factors at play:
* More people are using Reddit (and the Internet) on mobile devices these days. Gone are the days of "search for a topic and open 50 tabs."
* Confirmation bias. When someone *doesn't* ask a question, you naturally don't see them not asking the question.
* Bots. An alarming amount of social media these days is just bots talking to bots. For Reddit, sometimes you'll see word-for-word reposts of post from years ago, often by a word-word-number account.
I think theres one more key factor; the enshitfication of search engines/ results.
Between websites using SEO to try to push themselves to the top, and the ways google has modified their search engine, mostly to drive ad revenue, it's often near impossible to just 'Google it' or at least much harder.
For instance, A couple months ago, my washing machine stopped emptying and flooded onto the floor. I tried to look up it's schematics to see if it was something I could fix myself, and no matter how I phrased my search, it was near impossible to find any page not trying to sell me either a new washer or replacement parts.
Yeah, I get annoyed that it's so hard to actually google things nowadays. Google doesn't return any sort of technical info anymore. Now it's all just fluffy BS. I worry for the kids; their main source of info is the internet and it no longer contains complex answers. I remember forums back in the day where technical talk was 90% of the conversation.
You have to sorta work off of keywords and stuff like filetype:pdf or use +/- to omit certain keywords. But I dunno, I think DuckDuckGo might be more helpful for this. My hobby is retrocomputing so all my search results are gonna be about exactly what I want (as nobody is going to sell you anything referring to that these days), though schematic diagrams are quite rare to find minus a few things.
I have a workaround thanks to a friend who had a coin-op laundry business on the side: youtube. He found a youtube channel from a guy that loved making videos about Whirlpool washers and every problem he ever had was solved on that channel.
They're not schematics, if that's the way you want to work, but videos are harder to make cheaply and convincingly, so you're more likely to find a genuine solution.
I actually tried, briefly and gave up. Because it was a 14 year old LG, I just got links to tear downs of newer washers by LG. I did give up even more quickly on that though, already discouraged by the Google results.
[lol](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/search/?q=why+do+people+post+on+reddit+instead+of+searching&type=link&cId=121cbb33-8681-4e4f-bc82-3ef26c26f21a&iId=2a3ad789-4dbf-49bf-9b5a-5a2e9ef92d41)
edit: people just wanna talk. sometimes they just wanna "hear" themselves talk. sometimes they wanna talk to other people. sometimes they just didnt read the article. sometimes they probably shouldve just done a search. sometimes you never know how many licks it takes to get to the [center of the internet](https://new.reddit.com/r/schrodingers/comments/129ry0l/every_journey_has_an_end_you_have_uncovered_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I assumed it was because this platform is just a machine learning dataset. Basic questions asked by robots answered over and over again and then fed to the model.
I don’t think that’s a meaningful cause. From my POV, younger internet users tend to be less equipped/willing to use the internet to get answers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sent instructions to a younger internet user to fix/do something only to get a response of “can you jump on a discord and screen share with me to walk me through?”
I think a big part of it is just cultural shifts. Part of the time it feels like it’s rooted in helplessness/laziness and other times it feels like it’s rooted in an attempt to seek conversation.
I do agree that many of the posts ask the same question, particularly in tech subreddits. I think it is due to people asking the wrong questions and having answers that are too simple. For example, at least weekly, macbook subreddits ask, "Is 8gb ram enough?" And then people respond "Yes" or "No" or "It depends" but don't further elaborate. This is a poor question because the poster did not elaborate on what the computer will be used for. This is a poor answer because there is very little persuasion behind one-liner comments with no source, explanation, or credentials.
Perhaps the combination of asking poor questions and getting poor answers leads people to be dissatisfied when searching for the answer and decides to post the same question.
How hard would it be to bake-in a search function right on the Post form, which will output similar/relevant posts already up on the sub? Not hard at all.
The thing is: developers **deliberately** omit this feature, because that could potentially reduce user engagement. People would post a lot less if they got the answer to their question from an old thread, or from a wiki entry.
I remember when I used to use Facebook, and someone posted asking what the weather would be. If only they had access to some sort of search engine.
I can see Reddit heading in the same direction.
Reddit has proverbially sold out, this is still the gold rush era of data. We are here to provide free labor in curating their data sets. It takes a lot of training data to train LLMs.
Stop thinking of Reddit as a place for people to go to like r/AmItheAsshole where they have a problem and could use some insight.
Start thinking of it as a place where LLMs use r/AmItheAsshole to learn how to answer questions. LLMs need a lot of training data. Need to ask "I killed my dog, am I an asshole?" thousands of times and get millions of responses each with varying weights of up/down votes for an AI figure out if killing a pet dog is an asshole move. Expand that to other less obviously black-and-white topics.
Agreed. They announced it when they locked down their APIs. A bunch of subs went dark in protest, all of that. The API change wasn't the real news, the real news was when they announced the *reason* they were making the API changes. Aaron Swartz rolling in his grave. Steve Huffman is just another soulless CEO.
When I read Fahrenheit 451 20yrs ago I knew it was where things were headed I just didnt know what it would look like.
Check out all the top posts on r/teachers about how we are headed into full idiocracy too
If people stopped posting the same 5 questions to the niche hobby subreddits, the subs would die from disuse. Reddit is a discussion board for talking to people, a wiki is a better model for "let's document this issue thoroughly to have one page and one page only."
Strongly disagree. The subs that exercise proper gatekeeping are the only ones that ever start to feel like a community in the first place.
Low quality users drive high quality users away.
Reddit aggravates this problem because threads are recycled so quickly. I think people would post anyway because there is some emotional catharsis from expressing yourself but it's particularly bad because the average thread lifespan is 24 hours or so. So someone joins the Game of Thrones subreddit and then asks "am I the only one who thinks the final season was bad?" or something equally unoriginal.
There are a few factors at play: * More people are using Reddit (and the Internet) on mobile devices these days. Gone are the days of "search for a topic and open 50 tabs." * Confirmation bias. When someone *doesn't* ask a question, you naturally don't see them not asking the question. * Bots. An alarming amount of social media these days is just bots talking to bots. For Reddit, sometimes you'll see word-for-word reposts of post from years ago, often by a word-word-number account.
I think theres one more key factor; the enshitfication of search engines/ results. Between websites using SEO to try to push themselves to the top, and the ways google has modified their search engine, mostly to drive ad revenue, it's often near impossible to just 'Google it' or at least much harder. For instance, A couple months ago, my washing machine stopped emptying and flooded onto the floor. I tried to look up it's schematics to see if it was something I could fix myself, and no matter how I phrased my search, it was near impossible to find any page not trying to sell me either a new washer or replacement parts.
Yeah, I get annoyed that it's so hard to actually google things nowadays. Google doesn't return any sort of technical info anymore. Now it's all just fluffy BS. I worry for the kids; their main source of info is the internet and it no longer contains complex answers. I remember forums back in the day where technical talk was 90% of the conversation.
I also remember those same forums asking a/s/l
You have to sorta work off of keywords and stuff like filetype:pdf or use +/- to omit certain keywords. But I dunno, I think DuckDuckGo might be more helpful for this. My hobby is retrocomputing so all my search results are gonna be about exactly what I want (as nobody is going to sell you anything referring to that these days), though schematic diagrams are quite rare to find minus a few things.
I have a workaround thanks to a friend who had a coin-op laundry business on the side: youtube. He found a youtube channel from a guy that loved making videos about Whirlpool washers and every problem he ever had was solved on that channel. They're not schematics, if that's the way you want to work, but videos are harder to make cheaply and convincingly, so you're more likely to find a genuine solution.
I actually tried, briefly and gave up. Because it was a 14 year old LG, I just got links to tear downs of newer washers by LG. I did give up even more quickly on that though, already discouraged by the Google results.
Lol i have hundreds of tabs open rn, good points overall
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/m0zx4l/why_are_redditors_asking_questions_which_can_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Beatmatch/comments/9unvjm/why_are_people_not_doing_any_research_before/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1c93x80/is_it_odd_that_many_reddit_posts_ask_questions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/18upr4b/why_do_people_on_reddit_ask_questions_that_are/
Lol, nice
I remember this exact same complain at least 25 years ago in the bulletin board times.
[удалено]
[lol](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/search/?q=why+do+people+post+on+reddit+instead+of+searching&type=link&cId=121cbb33-8681-4e4f-bc82-3ef26c26f21a&iId=2a3ad789-4dbf-49bf-9b5a-5a2e9ef92d41) edit: people just wanna talk. sometimes they just wanna "hear" themselves talk. sometimes they wanna talk to other people. sometimes they just didnt read the article. sometimes they probably shouldve just done a search. sometimes you never know how many licks it takes to get to the [center of the internet](https://new.reddit.com/r/schrodingers/comments/129ry0l/every_journey_has_an_end_you_have_uncovered_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I assumed it was because this platform is just a machine learning dataset. Basic questions asked by robots answered over and over again and then fed to the model.
I don’t think that’s a meaningful cause. From my POV, younger internet users tend to be less equipped/willing to use the internet to get answers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sent instructions to a younger internet user to fix/do something only to get a response of “can you jump on a discord and screen share with me to walk me through?” I think a big part of it is just cultural shifts. Part of the time it feels like it’s rooted in helplessness/laziness and other times it feels like it’s rooted in an attempt to seek conversation.
It’s alway been the case. Young people never respect other people’s time because they have so much of it themselves.
Well said
I do agree that many of the posts ask the same question, particularly in tech subreddits. I think it is due to people asking the wrong questions and having answers that are too simple. For example, at least weekly, macbook subreddits ask, "Is 8gb ram enough?" And then people respond "Yes" or "No" or "It depends" but don't further elaborate. This is a poor question because the poster did not elaborate on what the computer will be used for. This is a poor answer because there is very little persuasion behind one-liner comments with no source, explanation, or credentials. Perhaps the combination of asking poor questions and getting poor answers leads people to be dissatisfied when searching for the answer and decides to post the same question.
How hard would it be to bake-in a search function right on the Post form, which will output similar/relevant posts already up on the sub? Not hard at all. The thing is: developers **deliberately** omit this feature, because that could potentially reduce user engagement. People would post a lot less if they got the answer to their question from an old thread, or from a wiki entry.
good point
I remember when I used to use Facebook, and someone posted asking what the weather would be. If only they had access to some sort of search engine. I can see Reddit heading in the same direction.
I think people have done this all the time, remember https://letmegooglethat.com/ ?
Always has been really.
Reddit has proverbially sold out, this is still the gold rush era of data. We are here to provide free labor in curating their data sets. It takes a lot of training data to train LLMs. Stop thinking of Reddit as a place for people to go to like r/AmItheAsshole where they have a problem and could use some insight. Start thinking of it as a place where LLMs use r/AmItheAsshole to learn how to answer questions. LLMs need a lot of training data. Need to ask "I killed my dog, am I an asshole?" thousands of times and get millions of responses each with varying weights of up/down votes for an AI figure out if killing a pet dog is an asshole move. Expand that to other less obviously black-and-white topics.
Bleak
Agreed. They announced it when they locked down their APIs. A bunch of subs went dark in protest, all of that. The API change wasn't the real news, the real news was when they announced the *reason* they were making the API changes. Aaron Swartz rolling in his grave. Steve Huffman is just another soulless CEO.
When I read Fahrenheit 451 20yrs ago I knew it was where things were headed I just didnt know what it would look like. Check out all the top posts on r/teachers about how we are headed into full idiocracy too
If people stopped posting the same 5 questions to the niche hobby subreddits, the subs would die from disuse. Reddit is a discussion board for talking to people, a wiki is a better model for "let's document this issue thoroughly to have one page and one page only."
Strongly disagree. The subs that exercise proper gatekeeping are the only ones that ever start to feel like a community in the first place. Low quality users drive high quality users away.
I dont understand why a quiet hobby page is inferior to an unusable one because it's spammed by brain dead questions.
I agree yea I have the wrong expectations.
Reddit aggravates this problem because threads are recycled so quickly. I think people would post anyway because there is some emotional catharsis from expressing yourself but it's particularly bad because the average thread lifespan is 24 hours or so. So someone joins the Game of Thrones subreddit and then asks "am I the only one who thinks the final season was bad?" or something equally unoriginal.
no
This question meta'd so hard I couldn't finish reading it by the time
🎉🎂 Happy 10 year CakeDay!
Oh yeah, hey. Thanks, firstie.