Comment by dlenski
5 hours ago
> I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of my questions are already answered by LLM.
That's a bizarre and self-sabotaging path to take. Almost all LLMs get a substantial portion of their knowledge from Reddit. In order to evaluate the quality of those LLM responses, you'll have to click through to the Reddit threads and critically evaluate the quality of the underlying discussions.
If you just blindly accept LLM responses without evaluating the sources, you'll be accepting a lot of garbage, and it'll show.
> And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
I spend quite a lot of time reading and writing on Reddit, and while I encounter plenty of low-quality posts and comments, I'd say that essentially none of them are written by bots.
You can ask gpt/claude to verify multiple sources online and never to guess. You can even set up a project that always does that with anything you ask it. It's probably better as reddit can be very opinionated.
It’s just crazy to think that Reddit and the massive volume of text it allowed to be created helped lead us here….
I agree with them. In many of the subs I used to frequent, the outrage is high and the signal is low. LLM really is the best way to consume the content there. Retrieve the new posts of the day/week, filter out the outrage and politics and low-effort Reddit in-jokes/copypasta, then summarize the various comment threads. My time is too valuable to sift through the utterly mind-numbing nonsense to get the occasional new piece of info. If you want to dig deeper, ask the LLM to dig in. Or have it regurgitate verbatim a pre-filtered selection of comments.
Reddit is a good source of new happenings and discussions, but I’m willing to spend some tech company’s compute to clean it up for me. For example, I often want to branch out from a particular musical artist. Reddit has many good recommendations. LLM is perfectly capable of gathering these.
To many bots on reddit, so your solution is to go directly to the bot!!?
If bots bury the signal in noise then an LLM is only going go back and give you the summary of the noise.
The bots (and humans) I’m trying to weed out are the pot-stirring permanently outraged/bitter commenters. For example on a “car overturned on X road” post, people getting into fights about whether BMW or Subaru or Tesla drivers are worse. That’s all noise. I want to know when it happened, which direction of traffic, if it’s cleared up yet, etc. LLM works well to remove the off-topic garbage. If someone is botting the actual content (recommendations, reviews, etc) and the up/downvoters are unable to identify it as a bot, I probably won’t be able to either. So I’m not worse off using the LLM.
Worst case I get some pre-digested garbage and I waste less time, best case the LLM pulled out a few good nuggets of info. It’s not a perfect system yet. There’s a lot to tune with how deep to go, what constitutes garbage vs signal, and so on. At least it’s fun :)
I'm a moderator on a moderately popular and active subreddit, and I can assure you that there is an unreasonable amount of bot activity on reddit. They range from just spam (usually obvious) to bulk astroturfing. We try to stop what we can, but plenty gets through.
Any ideas to mitigate?
Call your buddy and come up with a meeting spot.
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