Smujtab 15 hours ago |

Hello hackers, me and brother have been building this project for the last month and would love some feedback from you guys.

We were tired of digging through reddit threads and google searches to find out what people really thought about a subject. So we decided to write an app that solves just that. We find the most relevant comments to your questions off the bat and tally up the upvotes based to show your what most people agree or disagree with. This way we are able to get a big picture of what people really think about topic.

We would really really really appreciate any feedback, or criticism you have of the project.

thanks

smcin 13 hours ago | root | parent |

It's a decent start. Might aspire to be something like a GroundNews of Reddit comments.

* I asked "Did Mark Carney intervene in central bank policy for political reasons?"

Either it simply reacts to the name and ignores the rest of the question, or it doesn't handle relevance well over recency: the answers I got were not about his interventions as central bank governor at either Bank of England (2013-2020) or previously Bank of Canada (2008-2013); they weren't about central bank policy or intervening in central bank policy. They were simply recent (2020-current) Reddit threads about him in private equity and recent political comments and interview in the Liberal Party leadership challenge.

* So to test relevance I asked "Did Mark Carney publish a recipe for green jelly?" 0 of the answers were about Mark Carney, they were all taken from a recent AmA by Mark Hamill about Star Wars stuff. (I'm guessing this it what happens when all search results have very low relevance - it tries to guess which are the least bad instead of saying "No discussions found for X")

* Then I asked "Who is Mark Carney?" and the comments were relevant enough, although basic, and didn't find answers that were longer, more authoritative or had citations (although that's probably outside its scope; all comments valued equally).

* As a stretch goal I asked "Did most fire hydrants in the recent Los Angeles fires run dry?" (note the key word 'most') and got comments from r/environment:

"78% believe that Low water pressure, not empty hydrants, was the main issue. | 12% believe that Inadequate infrastructure caused low water pressure. | 0% believe that Power outages caused low water pressure" (there's a missing 10% somewhere).

* Then I asked "Qui va gagner l'election canadienne?" expecting answers to the (as-yet-uncalled, but imminent, 2025 Canadian federal election), but because I asked in French I only got answers from r/Quebec to "Intentions de vote au fédéral 2024-09-15" which was apparently an obscure by-election in 9/2024 in the Riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun

So: has potential, show us your next iteration to play with...

Smujtab 11 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

I see thanks a ton for feedback. yeah narrowing down searches either by date or subreddits is definitely something we will be looking to implement