Google’s AI results show “According to a Reddit user…” now, including for things like health / wellness searches. It’s horrifying. Reddit is a cesspool of the commons. It’s an information garbage dump where uninformed people are upvoted by uninformed people. It’s the Yahoo Answers of our day.
This is absolutely horrifying, that is the correct word to use here.
I've experienced it firsthand. Reading about a topic that I have very little knowledge about, nodding along thinking that this makes sense. Then doing some research and finding that the comment wasn't entirely wrong, but just wrong enough to cause harm to a users understanding.
It is very easy to see when it is a topic with which you are intimately familiar. Seeing people on video game subreddits confidently discuss game development and being not just wrong about game dev, but wrong about any software development practices.
If Google is really promoting Reddit comments as answers to real search topics... as cliche as it sounds, Idiocracy is upon us.
