Companies are adapting to this too - marketers are increasingly purchasing or grooming high-rep accounts for astroturfing select subreddits related to company products

Let's hope reddit users catch on to this and downvote such posts / comments.

There's been a influx of "memes" that just say things like "when you buy new sunglasses from x.com" and it's just a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio making a face. My own friends repost these things on social media because they are "funny". Not only do people not see problem, they literally see ads as worthy of being reshared.

Yes, companies on Reddit have learned to use memes to promote their product organically on that site. And if a meme is particularly good, soon you have unaffiliated users happily parroting it, just like that "Hotel? T***" which I've seen mentioned so many times on that site from random users.

Or just have a memelord managing your Twitter, and soon your latest funny post will find its place all over the internet. I have never eaten at Wendy's in my life nor stepped on US soil once, yet I have seen their "memes" dozens of times.

They don't, honestly this stuff goes to the top and its been this way for a long long time. Any niche interest subreddit that has gear or products has a sidebar with some stuff that's ordained by the moderation team to be "The best X for Y" and therefore incessantly recommended in the comments and all over the subreddit. Sometimes you will even see metathreads where the users are complaining about the recommendations listed in the subreddit's official wiki or faq page.

A combination that works well for product recommendations:

    site:reddit.com inurl:bifl

You can just use a single "site" parameter in this case:

    site:reddit.com/r/bifl

You can also do `site:reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife`

Why bifl? What's for?

Buy It For Life. Subreddit aimed at buying once vs the modern buy cheap, buy twice.

It's unfortunately a lot of survivor bias, but I like looking at photos of turn of the century items.

> It's unfortunately a lot of survivor bias

In this case, isn't that the selection criteria rather than an interfering bias?

It's both, I think. If the goal is to find high quality items survivor bias can definitely interfere with the results. The items must survive long enough to count as something you can use "for life" and it's possible, even likely, that they only survived due to low use or extraordinary care.

What does inurl:bifl do?

Searches for "bifl" within the URL. As others have said though, I find it easier to only use "site:". Like "site:reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife"

Åh I see, I didn't realize what bifl means. That's helpful, thanks!

I don't know what you people are on about. I have never found useful information at Reddit. I frequently use "-site:reddit.com" to avoid the nonsense.

Serious question:

Why don't you go straight to reddit, and search there?

reddit search is awful and has been since the beginning. Im hoping they spend some of the money theyve raised on improving that as a priority.

They seem to be fixated instead on forcing a terrible UI front end and ... not much else.

Maybe some moderator tool updates after a decade that were also user hostile.

At reddit they decided that you should not have to option to restrict your search to a specific subreddit anymore. Why they did that? It's a terrible idea!

For me reddit defaults to "search in current subreddit", with a link to "Show results from all of Reddit" at the top?

Bec Reddit search itself is worse than google

Worse than Google is putting it lightly... It's more or less useless.

If you get an account on you.com you can set that preference once and your preferred sites will always come up higher.