Comment by Quothling

9 months ago

I know I buy sort of expensive products, but most of the things I've bought recently like my christiania bike all have youtube channels detailing their products. I think that is frankly the only real way for brands to advertise to people like me who'll maybe look at reddit threads or similar, but these days you can barely even trust many of those. We bought a Baby Brezza based on recomendations, they have a semi decent youtube with a mix of useful information and advertisement.

A good example of the reddit bit is the robock s8 we bought. 95% of the reviews on reddits tell you to buy the big version with the huge dock... But then there was this one person in one thread who posted about how it was easy to just empty it without the station and that the station was known to rot or mold (not sure how you say that in english). So we bought the smallest s8 version we could and whoever that redditor was, they were absolutely right that it was so easy to maintain it without any of the addons. Roborock doesn't have a good youtube channel, they do have one, but it's really just advertisement.

Anyway, I agree with you. I don't even really use google anymore. I switched to ecosia (it also sucks) out of spite, but it's been as good as google for anything except for when I want to do site:blabla.com in which case I'll !g. Before you recommend it I've used the duck before and it doesn't work for me. Likely because I'm Danish.

Reddit is 99% schill bots. Heaven help you if you're researching baby products. The entire scandalous baby product market has commandeered Reddit with accounts like this one that I found just because I kept seeing the name pop up relentlessly hawking the same products:

https://www.reddit.com/user/ErinElizabeth1187/

  • 99,9% of the time, a username in the format NameNameNumber is a bot. The probability goes up as the value of Number increases.

    • This used to be the case, but at some point in the last few years Reddit started suggesting usernames like that to new human users. It'll generate stuff like "Fine_Ad6357", "Unhappy-Benefit8521", and "SuccessfulShape2454".

      I believe they started doing this because Reddit got really popular and all the normal usernames were eventually taken. I wouldn't be surprised if they implemented this after noticing that a significant number of signup attempts were aborted due to multiple attempted usernames already being taken.

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