• Plume (She/Her)@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    Reddit actions are tragic for the web. I can’t even tell you how many times I searched something and typed Reddit at the end of the query. Not just because Reddit search SUCKS, but mostly because it’s a gold mine of information. Especially for technical stuff.

    Your game crash? Reddit. Weird bug on your laptop? Reddit. Looking for a cool app? Reddit. Have a weird question? Reddit.

    Reddit saved me countless hours and headache. I felt that yesterday when doing a search about something without even putting Reddit on it, kept bringing up Reddit links. I’d click on it without reading and end up on a locked sub because of the blackout.

    It sucks but I hope it’s going to continue. But at the same time, I don’t see Reddit backing down. And even lf they do? I’m not going back. Because how dare you? Like… screw you for even trying to pull that crap on your users.

    • OrthoStice@feddit.it
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      2 years ago

      Agree, but I think that’s the point: this is the proof we have to switch to a different model. It will take time to replace Reddit as the huge information source it was (and to a certain extent still is), but I’m willing to hope it can happen.

    • nephs@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Reddit is the web we built. And fuck u/spez decided to give it away for money.

      I miss Aaron Swartz and the open web. Let’s rebuilt it again, on better foundations!

    • reric88🧩@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      Try using ChatGPT if you haven’t. Ive used Reddit in the past for a lot of troubleshooting, but ChatGPT is easier to get the answers I’m looking for unless I asked the question myself. But there’s no judgement from ChatGPT lol

      • arcturus@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Though, take care to factcheck what you get from it; all it really is is just a word predictor, and it can be pretty good at confidently telling you absolute nonsense that sounds right

        • reric88🧩@beehaw.org
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          2 years ago

          Definitely true, however my usage of it has been to troubleshoot code. I wouldn’t suggest using it for research purposes

  • Monkeytennis@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    Tacking “Reddit” onto search queries almost became a prerequisite. Never imagined I’d have to replace that with “-Reddit”.

    It’s made researching a media centre setup very difficult this week…

    • MigratingApe@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Give it some time, people will get comfortable here, the revolution dust will settle an we will be adding ‘-Reddit “Lemmy”’ to search queries (fingers crossed!)

      • DarthRedLeader@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        But how would this work with broader federation? Searching other instances like beehaw or kbin? We’ll needan new search optimization to search the fediverse more efficiently.

  • im stuff@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 years ago

    honestly we should have collectively realized way earlier that putting all the useful, readable, un-touched-by-SEO help content for basically every niche hobby fandom and ideology in the hands of one for-profit entity was not very wisdom-pilled of us

    • noodlejetski@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      we should have collectively realized way earlier

      some people have, but whenever you’d mention it, you’d be met with “lol take the tinfoil hat off”, “but we’re already using [for-profit platform] why would we move when everyone’s here” and “but it’s haaaaaaard”.

    • twack@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      I agree, but I also have serious concerns about this being the replacement strategy. It could be because of my ignorance of how this all works though. Like many of you, I am new and here because of the reddexodus.

      These servers are going to cost money, and for many of them the money will run out. Is there a function to preserve the collective content of an entire server once it goes dark? I know that you can migrate your own account to another server, but what happens to everything Google has indexed at Lemmy.world if the worst happens? Is it all just dead links? What if many of the users do not migrate? Is it just gone?

      I am concerned that in the current state we are setting up to burn everything that loses a couple admins or becomes too old to economically host.

      • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 years ago

        Before reddit removed them most of this compiled knowledge was in the subreddit wikis. I honestly believe a return to communities with wikis is the long term replacement.

      • Kotton@beehaw.org
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        2 years ago

        I was on a mastodon server and the owner decided it was not worth his money to keep running. He did not inform anyone on the server or allow any account backups and all was lost.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          2 years ago

          With federated services, I feel like it’s somewhat important to get to know the admins of the server you use. You don’t have to be best friends, but at least know their name, motivation for running the server, and how it’s funded.

      • Word of Mouth@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 years ago

        These are certainly possibilities! It’s happened elsewhere in the Fediverse… but already we can export most of our data and migrate to a different instance. Getting these base features right is important before enhancing their functionality. Planning for the future is important too. So far I’ve been impressed by Lemmy, though it’s not nearly as portable as Mastodon or Calckey or Pleroma etc. Part of that is that in Lemmy/kbin we don’t follow other users… we subscribe to groups (subs/communities/magazines).

        Still, with the nature of ActivityPub, it’s inevitable that migration tools for Reddit-like federated apps will get built quick-like

      • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net
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        2 years ago

        In practice the content is distributed to all the other servers, so people who have been reading it before will still be able to on their own instance, but you’re right the indexed domain is gone and so are the results in Google.

        But there is one difference, one instance of lemmy only stores a very small fraction of the content. And it’s much easier to fuck up one reddit compared to fuck up thousands of lemmy instances simultaneously. So if one instance goes down, the rest of the fediverse is still up and running.

      • Concetta@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 years ago

        I’m sorry, but clearly you have not looked for niche information on Google for a while now. Lots of links end in dead ones, particularly when I am looking for vehicle information on older models.

        • twack@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          I’m not sure what you are trying to say, we shouldn’t be concerned because this problem already happened?

          A lot niche older vehicle information, if it wasn’t hosted on Reddit, was often on forums funded by enthusiasts, which eventually ran out of money and no longer exist. This is exactly the problem that I’m concerned about. Particularly so if a certain community balloons in popularity and an admin nukes it to keep the server costs under control for the other members.

          • Concetta@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            2 years ago

            Completely what I’m saying, but to add on it is not just forums. With the new web, I’ve hit a deadend on many OEM websites as well, and part websites, and others. I’m sure cell phone and computer information is similar, in fact after trying to research a power supply for my old prebuilt I know it’s a fight.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      I’ve said it numerous times over the years, the Internet has been centralizing rapidly and it benefits none of us.

      In 2005 you’d wander around, going from peoples’ personal pages to forums to whatever else people linked. In 2015 half of those websites were dead because everyone got their content on reddit anyway.

    • withersailor@aussie.zone
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      2 years ago

      Yes. When everyone enters info on corporate sites, sooner or later they’ll decide to monetize it.

      Reddit going evil on charges and showing their colours in the AMA has been a wake up.

    • LunarticBot@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      I just can’t agree more with you. Like wow this reddit blackout has truthfully opened my eyes to the massive, giant and incredibly amount of useful information that is currently resting on reddit servers.

    • Lanthanae@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 years ago

      One thing the FOSS world really needs to get on right now is some form of search engine accessible distributed content archival. We need a way to store useful content from the past in a way that no one individual or group of individuals is capable of deleting it.

      • KNova@links.dartboard.social
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        2 years ago

        Yep. I blog infrequently but I’ve said a few times in my posts, I am writing this article because I need to remember the steps to do this weird niche thing in case something breaks in the future. If it happens to help someone else out, great.

  • tymon@lemmy.one
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    2 years ago

    This has been deeply frustrating, but since that’s the whole point, I support this collective inconvenience.

    • Brunacho@feddit.cl
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      2 years ago

      All in all it’s also a testament of how bad internet is now. All the information is concentrated in few sites that, if gone, gets lost.

      • catshit_dogfart@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        Also, I find that basically every search result that isn’t reddit is sponsored content.

        Search something real specific like “Best aftermarket injector coils for a 2009 Toyota Corolla” and you’re going to get 100% advertisements and listicles for search results, likely written by somebody who doesn’t know shit about cars.

        Append “reddit” to that search, and you’ll be led to a post from a car mechanic giving their opinion on the matter. And, well, I do trust a random stranger on the internet more than I do an advertisement.

  • forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    Am I the only one that’s noticed how reddit has been fucking with web crawlers? They insert newer comments into older posts so the crawlers pick up false results.

    A few years back they started injecting a “related posts” box into pages. What that does is multiply the amount of results a crawler will pick up. But all those are false results. There’s only one true search result which is the original comment/post. Some times I find myself sifting though the search engine results to find the actual original post. The rest are completely worthless, off topic, reddit posts littering the search index.

    I know all this blackout stuff hurts now. I see it as necessary for the platform to lose its status as the “front page of the internet”. Reddit turned evil a long time ago. It’s long past time it be deposed of.

    • Griseowulfin@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      That explains why the search page quotes a comment that doesn’t exist on the post. That always confused me. It’s insane how dependent on searching with “reddit” appended on the end of the search term I am. I have qualms as to how this’ll bode for search engines if reddit loses interest or goes under.

    • MigratingApe@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      I couldn’t understand how those changes back then crippling the user experience were “better” in any way, this explains a lot!

  • halictuz@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    For many people google (or whatever engine) was just a gateway to get informations on reddit. With all those sub reddits down at the moment, a lot of searches are really hard to get informations, because like it, or not, reddit is a big part of getting informations or opinions etc.

  • DarraignTheSane@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I think it’s more appropriate to say that internet searches in general had been getting worse over the last several years, but it just so happened to be the case that your answer could likely be found in a reddit thread.

  • Guy_Fieris_Hair@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Makes me want to go back and edit my posts to f*** /u/spez because I don’t want them getting traffic off of my content. But also don’t want that entire collection of human data gone if everyone did the same.

    Too bad we can’t all export and reconstruct our conversations here somehow.

    My posts are 99% shitposts anyway, so it doesn’t really matter, nothing constructive to mankind.

    • lka1988@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Do it. Use “Power Delete Suite”, it has an option to edit comments before deleting everything.

    • Ivyymmy@lemmy.one
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      2 years ago

      Use a tool to edit all your comments to a Lorem ipsum, the more useless data they have filling their database the better, I prefer this to simply deleting them all and freeing up their database storage.

      Btw, I don’t know any tool for that, but I guess there should be some because I saw some users editing all their comments.

  • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    I’ve actively found this as well but honestly, I think it’s for the best because most of the time Reddit posts with actual answers aren’t well-cited. So if anyone asks how you know something, “uhh Reddit told me” is pretty weak. So Google is getting better because Reddit has gotten worse. It means that you have to go to the actual articles and find the actual sources instead of this daisy chain of information. We have a huge issue with misinformation and this actually helps resolve it.

    • nodiet@feddit.de
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      2 years ago

      Wait you use reddit posts to inform yourself on things where misinformation is possible? I also was mildy inconvenienced by the blackouts but it was mostly related to programming stuff, where it is very obvious if an answer is wrong. I don’t think I would even consider using reddit as a source for anything factual

      • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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        2 years ago

        I work as a game developer and a programmer. There are a lot of possibilities for people to be wrong. Especially when it comes to design or usage. A lot of misinformation in programming is like “Yeah this answer is technically correct” with this specific case but when you scale it, it breaks entirely. Like https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/stealth-based-mechanics/6992/6 is a great example where yeah a trace will work, your data will be inaccurate a bit, you won’t be able to scale it and it won’t work with a lot of edge case lighting. The better solution is to use a grey-colored mesh and a scene capture to get information consistently about both the baked and dynamic lighting. You might even have a better way, like getting the data from lumen or shadow maps.

        So even with things you think won’t have misinformation, you get misinformation, and people are guessing while presenting they are right.

    • oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz
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      2 years ago

      All the stuff i would use reddit as an actual source for is things where it’s either obvious that the person is wrong or easy to check or think through. Same for lemmy

      • crisisingot@beehaw.org
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        Yeah I mostly use it for like product reviews/recommendations or like personal help topics. Not stuff where factual information is required

    • Brunacho@feddit.cl
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      2 years ago

      We have a huge issue with misinformation and this actually helps resolve it.

      I’m not really sure about that. Bad SEO is something that still exists, and with huge sites like Reddit gone, the bad SEO sites become more prominent which is not necessarily the site with actual articles and sources.

      Of course the solution to this is not reddit back but stopping SEO and having better curation of sites in search engines somehow.

  • Kresten@feddit.dk
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    2 years ago

    Are lemmy instances indexed properly as well? Would it be enough to put “lemmy” into the search

    • sincle354@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      The federated nature of instances unfortunately might nerf the SEO because they’re from different domains. Google wouldn’t value instance_1. com more because the clicks to related_instance_2. com are higher.

      • Syboxez@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        I’d imagine if/when the fediverse becomes popular, search engines will account for this.

      • DarkGamer@beehaw.org
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        I thought links between domains helped pagerank score? Mind you, it’s been a while since I learned SEO. A lot of the content, especially the federated stuff, seems to be loaded via javascript. I wonder if that affects what is indexed.

        • altz3r0@beehaw.org
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          Theres more to it than that, vut it does help. However, the base issue here I think is that they just don’t crawl the federated space yet.

    • plisken@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      2 years ago

      I was amped for Kagi when I first heard about it. But they bumped the price up after the LMM boom. Still might have to bite the bullet as part of desire to use paid ad-free services.

      • kosmoz@beehaw.org
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        2 years ago

        Depending on how much you use it, it might not be that much worse though… The old price was 10$/mo for unlimited searches. Now they offer different tiers starting at 5$/mo for 300 searches.

        Personally, I use about 300-500 searches per month, so my monthly bill is actually less than it used to be (5-7$).

    • chrisA
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      2 years ago

      I switched and I’m happy. I rarely use the !g shebang to see if google has anything more useful and it rarely has.

    • nhgeek@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      Seems nice based on my trial but they are really pushing the envelope on my price tolerance.

        • yacht_boy@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          I’m not sure what to think about the price. I can’t really imagine life without a search engine, even though I was alive for a couple of decades before search engines existed. I pay $400/month for my car, but my search engine arguably gives me more value (I am lucky not to need to drive a lot). I wouldn’t pay $400/month for a search engine. But $5-10 to have a degree of freedom from the tracking and results that aren’t just trying to get my money? I am intrigued.

          • lenninscjay@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            Idk, maybe it should be usage based. I feel like 60/yr is too much. I’d be fine with 19.99/yr but idk what they’re costs are. Otherwise, I do like the idea. Confession, I haven’t used it yet but I plan to signup and try the first 100 searches free.

  • fennec@feddit.de
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    2 years ago

    That’s why I used shreddit to delete all my posts and comments on Reddit. It’s not much, but if everyone does it Reddit will feel the repercussions. They won’t benefit from my content anymore.

    • monerobull@monero.town
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      I don’t want to take away ressources from people who will look into Monero in the future :/

      In the past I commented many explanations when people asked for help and I don’t want someone to find a thread with a question and deleted comment with a “Thanks!” reply. I guess a script to change all my past comments into something along the lines of “Removed. In case this was a support-related comment, feel free to ask for help on monero.town” could work?

      • fennec@feddit.de
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        2 years ago

        Some people used a script that edited all their comments to forward to a new instance (in this case it could forward to Lemmy). Perhaps that would be a solution?