HACKER Q&A
📣 eatwater123

Where do you go to find reliable, trustworthy information online?


I find myself struggling to find reliably consistent, trustworthy places to find information / answers to questions on the internet anymore.

I absolutely despise Googling a question and getting generic blog spam from sites trying to stuff answers with SEO keywords. I tend to use Reddit a lot to search for posts to hear user opinions, and I begrudgingly accept the info as a source of truth a lot of the time as most of the time it feels like a Reddit user has less intention of spreading misinformation for the sake of getting ad revenue or higher Google results, etc. Obviously this is not always true, but if I see advice about X in a small subreddit dedicated to X, I trust that far more than "top 10 things to do" blog spam articles.

Is there a good way to resource solid information on the internet nowadays? Wikipedia is obviously a great source, what else?

  👤 cpach Accepted Answer ✓
Feel free to clarify what kinds of information you are searching for. The answers might vary a lot depending on what you are looking for.

For current events, The Economist is great, IMHO. Other good publications: The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC. Maybe The Washington Post.

Quora has some good info but the quality probably varies a lot.

BTW, did you know Hacker News has a search function? Really good.

https://hn.algolia.com/

HTH.

👤 throwawaybutwhy
Rule no. 1. Never trust strangers on the Internet. They are out to take your wallet and turn your brains into green mush.

If you're still reading after this, rule no. 2: look for primary sources written in tech manuals, scholarly articles, full-length boring books replete with references. Eff Wikipedia, it's full of it most of the time (except for reference sections which can guide you to some of the primary sources).

Rule no.3: collate, collate, collate. Everybody lies by commission or omission, understand their motivation and make sure you have several independent sources with diverse motives to compare with each other.

👤 rawgabbit
I can give one example when SQL Server was purchased by Microsoft from Sybase. Overnight literally everyone claimed to be an expert. I did some research including asking the Microsoft employees I knew. It turned out there was one lady who did all the training at Sybase and who taught the Microsoft employees about their new database. That lady Kalen Delaney spoke highly of a husband and wife consulting team. The husband was ex Microsoft and designed some of the DBCC code. https://www.sqlskills.com/about/meet-the-team/
👤 jolmg
Classify your sources and use primary ones when available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_source

For example, if you have a question about some software:

SE Q/A is less trustworthy than official documentation is less trustworthy than source code.

> Wikipedia is obviously a great source

Only as good as its citations.

👤 ystad
+1 on citing reasonable references. I think articles, posts and even daily news briefings should explicitly cite referenced articles, sources or briefings. Of course, there are cases where news papers may not want to disclose their source. It should be marked accordingly.
👤 2rsf
Depending on what you are looking for then the various Skeptics groups are a very good starting place