Like, for example I have a specific issue with a digital audio converter by a popular brand but their customer service is awful. A simple google prompt followed by site:reddit.com would yield solutions almost every time. In fact I would say I did 90% of my googling that way. How do I break this cycle and do you feel this is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing? If anything, Reddit remains the biggest repo of easily accessible solutions for anything. We’re seeing right now what happens if this is being taken away by subs going private. Vanilla Google is a shitshow.
This has been my mindset as well. This is an awkward phase where Reddit alternatives are still being built out and millions of people are trying to find their home. Once the dust settles and communities build up, I hope to use the fediverse as I did site:reddit.com.
But for now, I think its okay to get information from reddit and bounce right after. Depending on what you’re looking for, ChatGPT does seem to be a decent alternative to both Google and Reddit at the same time, though.
A detail to remember with this, however, is that it’s not a search engine, but a robust text composition/“generation” tool. I recognize that it does tend to get certain info correct rather consistently, but it’s both error-prone and a basic misuse of it to use it for research imo.