Guide

Can you trust Reddit advice? How to judge who is answering

6 minute read

You searched a problem, landed in a thread, and the top comment sounds completely sure of itself. Before you flash the BIOS, confront your partner, or change your medication, it is worth asking the question Reddit never shows you: who is this?

What upvotes actually measure

An upvote is agreement from a passer-by, cast in about a second, usually without reading past the first line. Votes reward confidence, timing and fit with the room's mood. They do not, and cannot, measure whether the person has ever done the thing they are advising you to do. The top comment in a thread is the most agreeable comment, which is only sometimes the most correct one.

Early momentum compounds this: the first plausible answer collects votes simply for being first, and later corrections from actual experts sit unread at the bottom. Every heavy Reddit user has watched this happen. Few remember it while reading the next thread.

Reading the account behind the comment

• Do they live in the topic? Advice about power supplies from an account with years in the hardware subs is a different object from the same sentence written by an account that has never posted in one. History in the territory is the closest thing Reddit has to credentials.
• One answer for every situation. Some accounts give the same verdict to every story: always leave the relationship, always sue, always buy the thing. If their history shows the same answer pasted across wildly different situations, you are reading a reflex, not a judgement.
• Broadcast or conversation? Accounts other people engage with collect replies, follow-ups and arguments. A column of unanswered one-liners dropped into unrelated threads is the shape of someone performing, and it is expensive to fake at scale.
• Drama-only diets. An account that exists purely in judgement subreddits, voting on strangers' lives all day, brings appetite rather than experience.
• The machine tells. Rigid posting rhythm, near-identical wording across threads, and a young account with industrial output are the classic signatures of bots and paid accounts. Marketing teams astroturf Reddit precisely because comments feel like disinterested strangers.

The two minute check

1. Click the username. Note the age and where the account actually posts.
2. Ask whether this topic appears anywhere in their history besides this comment.
3. Scan for the same advice repeated across unrelated threads.
4. See whether people reply to them, and how those exchanges go.
5. Then, and only then, weigh the comment itself.

Facts versus opinions

For checkable claims, about hardware, money, law, or health, Reddit is a lead generator, never a source: take the claim to a primary source before acting, and treat "trust me" as the absence of one. For genuine matters of opinion, relationship threads above all, there is no fact to check. What you can check is whether the answer you are reading is a considered response to your situation or the same slogan the account leaves everywhere. The pattern is the information.

Doing this at a glance

This whole checklist is what Vetall compresses into the badge it puts next to every username: the account's public history, read in seconds and reduced to a score, the signals behind it, and one line of advice. For the accounts that really matter, a deep dive writes the full picture, including what specifically to verify before acting on that account's claims.