Sometime in the last couple of years, you started noticing it, and then you couldn't stop. You search for something real, a product recommendation, a how-to, a "is this thing actually good," and the top of the results is Reddit. Then more Reddit. Then a forum, then Reddit again. The independent blogs that used to answer these questions, the enthusiast sites, the people who actually knew things and wrote them down, they've been shoved down the page or off it entirely, and in their place sits a wall of pseudonymous strangers arguing in a thread from 2019. And a lot of people looked at this and said Google got worse. I want to argue something slightly different and more unsettling: Google didn't get worse at its job. Google gave up on part of its job and hired a mob to do it instead.
The Job Google Stopped Doing
For twenty years, the core promise of Google was that it could identify quality. That was the miracle of PageRank and everything built on top of it: out of the chaos of the web, the algorithm would surface the good stuff, the authoritative stuff, the trustworthy stuff, and it would do this by understanding, in its cold mechanical way, what expertise looked like. Links were votes. Authority was earned. The system, at its best, was a machine for finding the people who knew what they were talking about.
That machine broke. Not all at once, but steadily, under two pressures. The first was the SEO industry, which spent two decades reverse-engineering every quality signal Google invented and then manufacturing it at scale, until a top ranking meant "someone optimized this" at least as often as it meant "this is good." The second was AI content, which arrived and made the manufacturing free and infinite. By the early 2020s, Google was drowning. The signals it used to trust had all been gamed. It could no longer reliably tell, from the page itself, whether the author actually knew anything.
So it changed strategy. Instead of trying harder to identify expertise, a problem it was losing, it started outsourcing the judgment to humans, in bulk, for free. It started ranking Reddit.
Upvotes as a Confession
Think about what it means, philosophically, for Google to lean this hard on Reddit. Reddit's entire quality mechanism is the upvote: a crowd of anonymous people clicking arrows. That is not expertise. It is popularity, filtered through whoever happened to be in the thread, subject to every bias and pile-on and inside joke a community has. It can surface genuine hard-won knowledge, and often does, and it can just as easily bury a correct answer under a funnier wrong one.
By promoting this so aggressively, Google is confessing something it would never say in a blog post. It is admitting that a crowd of anonymous strangers voting with their gut is now a more reliable quality signal than its own algorithm's assessment of a web page. Twenty-five years of machine learning, of PageRank, of BERT and its descendants, of the most sophisticated information-retrieval system ever built, and the honest fallback in 2026 is: ask the crowd, they probably know better than we can tell. That is not a triumph. That is a white flag with a logo on it.
Why It Feels Better and Is Worse
The maddening part is that it kind of works, in the short term, which is why Google did it. Reddit results often are more useful than the SEO-optimized sludge they replaced, because at least a human being with no commercial incentive typed them. When you are trying to figure out which robot vacuum to buy and every "top 10" blog is transparently an affiliate farm, a Reddit thread of actual owners complaining about actual problems is a relief. Google noticed you preferred it. Google gives you more of what you click.
But look at what this does over time, because it is a trap with a slow spring. The independent expert who used to write the definitive guide has now been deranked in favor of a forum thread. So they stop writing the guide, because writing it no longer earns them anything. The expertise migrates into the walled platform, or it evaporates. The open web loses another contributor. And Reddit, now that it is the destination Google feeds, becomes the target every spammer, marketer, and AI bot optimizes for, exactly the way they optimized Google before it. The threads fill with astroturf. The upvotes get bought. The signal Google outsourced to degrades for precisely the same reason its own signals degraded: because the moment something becomes the thing that ranks, the entire economy of manipulation turns to point at it.
The Broader Pattern
This is the same story I keep telling from different angles, and I am sorry to be repetitive, but the repetition is the point, because it means it is structural and not accidental. Google is not a neutral window onto the web. It is a company making expedient decisions under pressure, and its decisions increasingly amount to admitting it can no longer do the hard version of its job. Ranking Reddit is the search equivalent of AI Overviews: both are Google conceding that the actual web, the thing it was built to organize, has become too polluted or too gamed to serve directly, so it reaches for a proxy. A crowd. A summary. Anything but the open web it spent twenty years training us all to build for.
What to Do With This
If you make things, take the lesson the deranked experts learned too late: do not build your house on the assumption that Google will reward quality, because Google has publicly, functionally admitted it often can't tell what quality is anymore. Go where the trust actually pools. If Google trusts Reddit more than your domain, then being genuinely present and genuinely helpful inside those communities is not beneath you, it is just where the attention went. Build a name that people search for directly, because a branded search is the one query Reddit can't intercept. And keep publishing the real thing somewhere you own, because the crowd-sourcing era will degrade like every era before it, and when it does, the people who kept their own house standing will be the only ones left with anything to rank.
Google outsourced quality control to a mob because it ran out of better options. Don't mistake the mob for the truth, and don't wait for the algorithm to start rewarding expertise again. It told you, in the only language it speaks, that it doesn't know how.