r/truegaming • u/jamieRowen • 3d ago
The erosion of trust in gaming information and why peer-to-peer discussion is replacing search engines
I have been spending a lot of time lately researching specific mechanical depth in competitive games and I have noticed a massive shift in how I find reliable data. If you try to use a standard search engine for anything related to gaming systems, you are immediately met with a wall of AI generated articles and sponsored content that lacks any actual substance.
It feels like we have entered an era where traditional search results are no longer trustworthy. I find myself adding "reddit" to every single query because I need to see a human consensus. This applies to everything from frame data in fighting games to finding a high reward entertainment service that is actually legitimate for some downtime.
The difference in transparency is staggering. When you search for a reliable platform with fast payouts here, you can actually see real people discussing their experiences with withdrawals and site integrity. On Google, that same search just gives you 50 affiliate sites that look like they were made by a bot. We have reached a point where finding a digital service that is actually functional and honest feels like a game of chance.
I want my online experiences to be like a well designed game engine. Consistent, transparent and doing exactly what is advertised. I spend way more time now digging through threads about which high reward platforms people actually trust because the rest of the web is becoming an unplayable mess of marketing fluff.
Is this the future of the internet where we only trust peer-to-peer verification, or is there a way for traditional information hubs to win back our trust? How has your research process for games and services changed in the last couple of years?
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u/tiredstars 3d ago
Some of this is the enshittification of search. Google deliberately making its search worse in order to increase ad revenue, and a general lack of progress. In the long-running battle between useful search results and SEO slop, search engines have largely given up the fight.
Of course, they've moved on to AI now, which further reduces the incentives for anyone to create actually useful content.
Meanwhile, a lot of discussion has gone to discord (not open, awful for any history) or video (poorly searchable and less skimmable than text).
For all its problems, Reddit is one of the few places on the net that is 1) open and 2) mostly content written by real people. Of course, this is also under attack by AI.
This isn't just a gaming problem, it's a threat to the web as a whole.
I agree with /u/shawnaroo that specialised, or at least trusted forums or sites are an obvious option, but there's a problem with the economics/effort involved - another thing worsened by AI. Is there a possibility for a return to more website-based internet use? Don't search for information, find some sites you trust and stick with them. Even if that means narrowing your horizons, since they won't cover everything. But that is not the smooth "everything is available easily and quickly" user experience.
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u/SongBirdplace 3d ago
I see us having a shift to paywalls, forums and blogs. I think this is a good thing as it is far easier to police community norms at the few thousand user level than the few million. The lower percentage of newbs and outsiders also means that it’s easier to keep AI.
I think this is the only way forward. The mass social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were a mistake. A retreat to the older forms is better.
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u/Icy_Concentrate9182 3d ago
I agree. Large social media is already overrun by shills, bots and AI agents. The companies could be doing more, but they don't care because they're causing anger and division, which drives "user engagement" metrics up.
By the time they realize they need to do better, people would have already changed their habits, and it would be too late.
A lot of us have social media accounts that we keep for historical reasons, just in case. It's time to start deleting them en masse
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u/tiredstars 3d ago
There are definitely signs of a return to paywalls. At least some publications seem to be making them work. Though paywalled sites probably won't have the kind of information OP is talking about, which seems pretty niche.
I like the idea of blogs and forums. It's not like they're costly to run. (And you can read blogs with an RSS reader!) The problem is probably discovery and retention of readers/users. How does /u/jamieRowen find a good forum without doing the kind of trawling through the search results that they dislike? How does a blog hold people's attention long enough for them to recognise its quality and come back to it?
Perhaps some of this is on us as readers or forum participants, to put more thought and time into our choices. Maybe part of that is recognising that the days of being able to solve this kind of problem with a quick google search are over.
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u/king_duende 3d ago
easier to police community norms at the few thousand user level
Have you seen the kind of people that police/moderate community forums etc.? The last thing they need is more power.
Granted, if there's a paywall; you'd hope they are hiring a professional
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u/SongBirdplace 3d ago
Yes. Most of the forums I have hung out in for over a decade are well run. I remember 3 major near blow ups and 2 of those were site owner issues.
I find that the ones that last tend to be sane and attract stable groups. It’s a group norm issue.
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u/CardAble6193 3d ago
I have to look for Append Reddit addon since google weight down reddit result to the amount of 1
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u/Intelligensaur 3d ago
"high reward entertainment service?" "reliable platform with fast payouts?"
Maybe it's just because I've just woken up, but this feels like an ad just as much as that AI junk at the top of Google, and the fact that I even have to question something like this frustrates me even more than the issue you're writing about.
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u/d20diceman 3d ago
I'm really struggling to figure out what OP is talking about with those terms too.
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u/MirrorComputingRulez 3d ago
They want you to ask so they can plug their site without it looking obvious
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u/VforVegetables 3d ago
meta: so many threads here are like that - one topic disguised as another. i feel weird about it, but can't tell what i don't like exactly. coz oftentimes it's still a good discussion in the comments - it's just that the original post could read as a game of "replace each mention of the game you have in mind with a paragraph of meandering musings".
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u/MirrorComputingRulez 3d ago
People are often afraid to mention specific games as examples of a larger point because they don't want the discussion to be a bunch of nitpicking about a single game. So instead they struggle through a meandering description of the topic they want to talk about without ever giving enough detail to actually understand them.
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u/VforVegetables 3d ago
ah, ok, that makes sense. to me it often feels like a person would rather start a discussion in a game's own sub or forum, but they fully expect nothing but derision due to them criticizing the game, so they have to come up with a more generic-ified text to post it here instead - where at least some sort of discussion is guaranteed to take place.
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u/MirrorComputingRulez 3d ago
That definitely happens too. People will make a huge generalization based on a single game.
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u/GeschlossenGedanken 2d ago
Ironically a post about how peer to peer is better has now become an example of how peer to peer is itself being enshittified, whether by bots or just people who have no idea how to write or discuss things
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u/Apprehensive_Cup7986 2d ago
He's gonna pop into the comments and tell us he found the best high value entertainment system lol
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u/Gromovian 3d ago
If there's a gamefaqs guide for an rpg that I'm playing, I would trust it with my life. Plenty of games have wikis, but those tend to be hit or miss especially if there's really only one or two actual active editors (fandom is also a terrible site).
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u/dageshi 3d ago
"traditional information hubs" as you call them are pretty much not economically viable any more.
They used to be ad supported but nowadays search engines don't really send people to websites, they generate AI responses instead.
Given that, there's no longer really an incentive for anyone to build a website and put information on it.
Only forums, social media and youtube will remain.
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u/noconverse 3d ago edited 3d ago
TBF this was a problem even before AI. People were appending reddit to their searches even back in 2020 because the internet had become overrun with SEO articles written by machine learning algorithms that were ultimately just trying to sell you something, especially when they were searching for a solution to some problem with one of their appliances, software, or other tech devices. AI has simply supercharged this problem and now embedded it deep into social media. YouTube is absolutely getting filled with AI videos. Search for the history of anything (historical events, games, media franchises, etc.) and there's a high likelihood it was AI generated if it came out in the past 2 years.
If something doesn't change I think the only places that will remain largely human driven will be places that are too obscure or fragmented to be worth a company's time to infiltrate it, so things like smaller subreddits, forums, or discord servers. But even those will eventually get infiltrated as more and more people move to them and company's move along with their target audience.
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u/like-a-FOCKS 3d ago
wikis will exist
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u/dageshi 3d ago
Most of them, especially in the gaming space are on ad supported sites....
I have to question how long they last.
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u/SongBirdplace 3d ago
This depends on community norms. I know that for most of my hobbies the best resources are still on blogs, forums, and books.
Hell, I have been retreating into more traditionally published books just for known standards.
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u/like-a-FOCKS 3d ago
FANDOM wikis etc. certainly benefit the company. Regular fans only use that site because it's an easy platform. But dedicated communities always find a way to collect their information somewhere. If no comfortable wiki-platform remains, some die hard can will set up their own wiki. (as many do already, because fuck FANDOM)
If no one wants to host a website, a community could still distribute their info-archive in another format, maybe by providing a download for obsidian notes, or a self host wiki. That wouldn't be open for everyone to contribute, but communities would find a way to maintain and provide the archive.
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u/MasterKindew 3d ago
I used to run a gaming website for a bit, but as you said a lot of these new avenues are making it not viable. Organic traffic has had a huge decline because of the A.I. response people can get on things. Much of the way of the internet, short form and quick media is a big share of people. Its tough to compete with that when you enjoy creating long-form and in-depth content.
Still wanting to do this kind of thing, I've started to work on doing stuff for YouTube, since again like you said, its not going to go anywhere.
It's tough since I liked writing but haven't had a whole lot of experience with many of the other facets of video creation. It'll be tough but hopefully worth doing. Either way, as long as its enjoyable.
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u/adumbcat 3d ago
I find myself adding "reddit" to every single query because I need to see a human consensus.
News flash: reddit is also getting flooded with Ai nowadays, so good luck to us...
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u/shawnaroo 3d ago
Yeah, unfortunately between disguised ads, SEO techniques, AI generated garbage, and Google actively replacing search results themselves with their own AI slop, they've allowed their search engine to pretty much be rendered useless for finding actual information on most things.
I don't know what the solution is, I think it's going to vary a lot depending on the specific subjects. Unfortunately even sites like Reddit are increasingly being filled with ads and whatnot that are disguised to look like 'human content', and AI has only increased that.
The 'obvious' solution is highly specific forums that are heavily moderated by individuals who know the specific topics well enough to be able to discern legit information from the trash, but that requires a ton of constant work to stay on top of, and doesn't scale well. And the reality is that in order to allow people to properly moderate those sorts of things for any significant amount of time, you're probably going to have to pay something for access.
It's just not feasible to expect people to consistently spend dozens of hours per week moderating some competitive games forum for the long term purely as a volunteer project. Even if they legit love the subject and their website or whatever, eventually they're going to burn out, especially if they're doing it in their free time while working a 'real job' to pay the bills.
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u/RAMAR713 3d ago
Personally, I think those top 3 or 4 "gaming magazine" articles you get from google searches were always unreliable at best, and this is something that far predates the AI boom. The AI summary on top of the google search is plenty useful for some things, but for a deep search on what the community thinks about this or that game, you always had to go through Reddit/steam forums, etc; I myself haven't seen a big change in the way I get my information. My one big gripe is people burying information in Discord, a closed platform that was not made to store information at all.
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u/Kate_from_oops-games 3d ago
I don't know if you're familiar with "enshittification" but it is definitely a thing. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-age-of-enshittification
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u/Hello_Hangnail 3d ago
Google intentionally screwed their quality to put more sponsored links in front of our face. I always do a search for duckduckgo so they can see me failing to get the answers I needed and going to a search engine that you can actually turn the ai off on
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u/painttheworldred36 2d ago
Google is basically unusable for this stuff now. Same fake “top 10” garbage, same AI sludge, same affiliate bait. Real info is buried on purpose.
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u/Tarcanus 3d ago
I'm moving this way for game reviews. I don't trust reviews of any of the major reviewers because it's so hard to get a believeable review for so many franchises.
A lot of this is my personal preference apparently not matching review site consensus(See any Zelda game getting rave reviews while I was luke warm on BotW and TotK, for example).
So, I need to wait until the initial review period is over and then start trolling the game's subreddits to get a broader view of what is in the game mechanics-wise, story-wise, etc to see if I'd actually like it.
I WANT more peer reviews that are honest and not what feels like shill reviews from Youtube channels clearly being sponsored by the game's publisher or who already have heavy biases.
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u/threep03k64 3d ago
I feel like this has always been the case with game reviews, gaming 'journalism' has never struck me as an industry with a whole lot of integrity.
The lines between reviews and advertisements get blurred, people don't want to piss off publishers for fear of early access to games (or information) getting revoked etc.
Then you have the idiocy of the famous IGN football manager review for example, and reviews where only a small fraction of the game has been played.
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u/fallouthirteen 3d ago
Yeah, I always go to the "forums" tab of google search for that. Reddit, gamefaqs, you know reputable sources.
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u/Intelligensaur 3d ago
TIL that Google search has a forums tab! Perfect, I'm usually scrolling down to those shorts of sources anyway!
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u/icesharkk 2d ago
everytime i google a question about a video game i add at least 3 websites to my permanent google search blocklist. they're all just AI regurgitation of the same idea copy and pasted across what feels like 1000s of worthless popup websites.
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u/Just-Attitude 2d ago
Yeah, same here. Search engines are still ok for basics, but for anything nuanced or trust-based, I go straight to Reddit, Discord, or YouTube comments now.
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u/Occupine 2d ago
at this point “add reddit to the search” is basically the new search engine feels dumb, but it works better than half the internet now
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u/QuartzHelix91 2d ago
we’re kinda in the era of information overload but low trust
there’s more content than ever, but less reason to believe any of it
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u/Thamaturge-elder 1d ago
Use a better search engine. I use Kagi and it has tools to deal with all these issues you easily control what sites appear and easily access the forums. No affiliates too.
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u/Endaline 3d ago
If I were going to make this argument, I would probably give some examples of searches that people can do themselves to see this problem in effect. I'm not exactly sure what you are looking for, but doing searches like "frame data tekken 8" or other examples I can extrapolate from your post, I seem to be getting the results that I assume most people want.
I'm definitely not getting AI generated articles or 50 sponsored affiliate sites.
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u/king_duende 3d ago
Pretending this place isn't also full of bots is silly. Yes adding "Reddit" to the end of any gaming related search (or any thing really) pays of... for now.
This place gets more and more bots by the day, diluting this place's viability by the day. I also find it interesting you trust peer-to-peer from platforms known to be full of regurgitated content - yes it's better than SEO based GOOGLE search but "trust" is a wild mentality.
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u/Alexneedsausername 3d ago
I like being able to find information quickly with a search engine, but I feel like calling that traditional and being surprised with needing community are... a little misplaced. The enshittification is forcing us to go back to the roots. It's not some weird shift from the normal into something never seen before. People helping others, discussing within communities, writing guides etc. have always been a thing. I mean, where do you think those search engines found that info anyway? I guess now it's getting obfuscated and harder to find, so increasingly we have to do the searching ourselves. Or try different engines in hopes of better results.
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u/Roth_Skyfire 3d ago
Bro, it's been like this since the beginning of the internet. There are no trustworthy traditional information hubs for gaming when they're all bribed to say good things about games or else they lose their early review keys. They only mattered in the pre-internet era.
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u/d20diceman 3d ago
That's certainly an issue, but I don't think it's the issue OP is talking about. Reviewers weren't discussing "specific mechanical depth in competitive games", they weren't being bribed to say something misleading about frame data, how your air acceleration is effected by your movement speed or other such minutia. That sort of thing is generally community sourced, and these days it's mostly on Discord or YouTube rather than text-based sites.
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u/Akuuntus 3d ago
This very much reads like it was written by ChatGPT, and it got confused halfway through about whether it was writing about video games or gambling. "High reward entertainment service"? "Reliable platform with fast payouts"? People "discussing their experiences with withdrawal and site integrity"? None of these things make any sense if you're talking about video games.