Maybe this was good advice in 2015. This is terrible advice in 2020. Reddit is astro-turfed up to it's eyeballs and the parts that aren't are people with little to no experience in niche X giving generally bad and nuance-free advice on niche X. The more niches you develop proficiency in the more you will see this.
Maybe this is true, but without any sort of evidence or detail it reads far more like you status signalling how above-it-all you are than a meaningful comment.
I don't use reddit much, so maybe I've got this completely wrong. (But the post doesn't say "use reddit", it says "search reddit".)
Look at frying pans.
Reddit will tell you that cast iron is the only option. Carbon steel is wrong ("home burners don't get hot enough", stainless steel is wrong ("too hard for you to use"), aluminium non stick is wrong ("only good for beginners who don't know what they're doing"), aluminium with ceramic non-stick is wrong (ok, they're right about this one).
Ask about boots, or hammers, or any of dozens of products.
Reddit fetishizes some products and disdains others and there's not much reason to it, it's mostly memetic.
Most redditors don't have the money to buy 8 different pans or 7 different pairs of boots. They tend not to work in these industries, so they can't give that experienced view point. And most redditors are young so they just haven't lived long enough to give a credible review of how long something lasts.
A 40 year old person who works with a tool 8 hours a day, and who's used a wide range of those over the years, will tend to give a better review than a 20 year old who works with a tool for a few hours a week.
Realize that the days of quickly finding good information on the internet are gone. Search engines are gamed, product review sites are gamed, most popular forums such as reddit are gamed, many blogs are gamed.
Seeking out niche enthusiast websites, authoritative sources, mailing lists, or actually doing your own research at the libarary are about the only ways you can get anything remotely reliable. If it's easy, it's probably been gamed.
I'd still recommend digging through reddit results, personally. The signal:noise ratio may not be great but you can still often find valuable reviews of things if you look at a lot of different posts.
Searching HN can also sometimes be good. Slightly higher signal:noise than reddit, generally.
Look for proofs, details and independent sources. If you see something short, flashy, buzzwords, slogans, it's probably not very solid. Propaganda still follows Goebbels' scheme, you can simply reverse it.
Google/DDG/Bing it and read some forum threads. Sure you can't get people to spoon feed you answers that way but do you really want to be spoon fed by people who don't actually know anything?
> Sure you can't get people to spoon feed you answers that way but do you really want to be spoon fed by people who don't actually know anything?
Or you know, people want to spend 10 minutes looking for the best product, rather than spending a few days going down a rabbit hole of their own personal research.
How do I know if forum threads are written by people with enough experience? Especially if they are giving conflicting advice. I don't have the expertise to make that call myself. If I had, I wouldn't need to look it up.
> Especially if they are giving conflicting advice.
That's the most useful scenario.
When you have people debating one thing being better than another, gives you specific claims you can follow up on and think about which factors are most important to making your decision.
If everyone agrees, or only one option is argued for, I would be more suspicious of the advice.
