Two weeks ago, I spent too much time on T-Mobile’s site because I didn’t go to Reddit’s first. I was trying to opt out of my wireless carrier’s new targeted-advertising scheme, but I could not find any way to do so when logged into my business account–and like any dummy perplexed by an unintuitive interface, I kept trying the same thing over and over instead of asking for help.

The answer I needed was waiting in a thread on Reddit’s r/tmobile subreddit, in which one T-Mo customer replied to a comment about the unhelpfulness of the carrier’s site for this opt-out by saying “I had to use the app and eventually found it in the privacy section.” As in, the T-Mobile app I’d had on my phone all long but had forgotten about, and which coverage I’d read about this issue had not clarified would be the only way for a business customer to adjust this setting.

(In case you’re still puzzling this through, open the app, sign in, tap the “More” button at the bottom right, and then tap “Advertising & Analytics.”)

This wasn’t the first time I’ve found Reddit’s company- or service-specific forums exceptionally useful for tech support. While smart companies maintain their own forums where people can sort out problems and share tips, Reddit has three things going for it that many other discussion boards lack: scale, a search that works, and crowdsourced measures of the value of a comment and its author.

Reddit upvotes, downvotes and the karma score they feed into can be abused like any other social-media system to protect toxic behavior–it was only last June that Reddit nuked r/The_Donald and some 2,000 other subreddits for repeated hate-speech violations. (Of course, there’s a subreddit on which you can debate those risks of abuse at length.) But in the context of a subreddit set up for users of the same app, service or gadget to solve each other’s problems, these collective accountability features seem to function well enough. I also keep wondering if Twitter could use some version of a karma score–and that, decades ago, Usenet could have had one as well.

Plus, many of these product-specific subreddits also feature wikis maintained by their more-frequent contributors, something you almost never see at the forums a company maintains for its customers.

In addition to T-Mobile tech support, I’ve found Reddit a good resource for help with my HP laptop, and some of my earlier smartphones. Reddit’s also proved useful as a journalistic resource when I’ve needed to find people using a service with limited availability, like Verizon’s 5G Home fixed-wireless service or SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband. I try to pay that assistance back by showing up in threads other people have started about my own stories–yes, “robpegoraro” there is me–and offering to answer whatever questions people have.

Writing this post made me realize I’ve probably neglected Reddit’s potential to help me puzzle through one app I use all the time: this blogging platform. Maybe r/Wordpress can help me feel less grumpy about the Block Editor?