Lifehacker was interesting when it was mostly the single voice of Gina as their blog: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Trapani She would publish great articles about how she managed her personal information, used technology and tools, etc. As a blog it was great content. As a million and billion dollar business... I have my doubts.
I do think there is still a good future for a Lifehacker that goes back to high quality and interesting content from a small set of passionate voices. Too often on Reddit you get a hive mind where the group forms a consensus and any dissenting or alternate views are suppressed or ignored. It's nice to have something with a strong editorial team that can publish unique content based on the merits of its research, and not mashes of the upvote button.
Just gleaming the front page of /r/lifeprotips I have now learned how to remove superglue from my fingers... that doesn't scream hacker to me.
It's a common trope, but reddit has really taken a nose dive as the average user base grows to reflect the average population better. As George Carlin noted, the average person is kind of dumb, and half of all people are even dumber than that. On top of this race to the mean, you have advertisers who are increasingly aware of how many eyeballs are visiting the site, and the playbook for shilling and influencing sentiment on reddit is pretty textbook and reliable at this point, so a lot of content isn't really "genuine" anymore, especially on the larger subs with more eyeballs to monetize or influence.
Curation is the lifeblood of Reddit and some subs are insane in their quality and dedication. Maybe there are some in those subs who would contribute longer form content to Lifhacker in the future but the differing business models makes this unlikely in the near term IMHO
On the other hand, you can end up in situations where moderators are the only source of truth. The california subreddit is an example of this. 432k subscribers, yet the vast majority of posts come from a single moderator. At least they are posting mainstream news articles and not fringe content, but this seems to depend on one person with no check or balance.
Notably, they both coexisted back in the day, too.
If they seek to be an honest source of information they ought to stand out in modern net sources. We all know the hell of searching for info on google nowadays.
they definitely didn't coexist 15-20 years ago, which was maybe the reason I read LH back in the days, Reddit was founded less than 18 years ago and even in those first few years had hardly any users, started using it maybe 11 years ago and even then it was quite empty
stopped reading LH already before starting with Reddit
I mean that is a pretty low bar. Outside of reddit, "institutional" results like wikipedia or cdc.gov etc, and the occasional living fossil niche forum that has miraculously survived to this day, I can't say I've seen very many relevant results.
Usually I defer to reddit but sometimes even that is junk, and google tends to misdate ancient reddit threads as more recent. The best is when I identify a relevant forum on the first pass. Then I can append the site:forum.com tag and actually search the forum, because its internal search is probably ancient rate limited junk still.
Google makes a great search tool for parsing an individual or handful of websites like this, but its terrible of course when parsing the firehose of the modern web.
also used to read it like 15-20 years ago, but the content just didn't tell me anything new