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The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

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Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#111

Post by s1artibartfast »

EscapeFromNY wrote: post #9

My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.

Google won the spam War, they were just fighting for the opposite side. I know it's trite but it bears repeating: Google only cares about user satisfaction if it positively impacts their bottom line.

As long as they can monetize remaining users more than what they lose from users abandoning search, the trend will continue

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#112

Post by noknownsender »

reaperducer wrote: post #51
diegocg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more than the spam war...a lot of content is just no longer produced and exposed to the open web (think about how much content goes into tiktok, discord, etc and you will never get that into your search results). Google has less useful content to index, algorithms can't fix that. There is more spam only because that's the only open content that gets added massively. The winners of this battle will be the places…

a lot of content is just no longer produced and exposed to the open web (think about how much content goes into tiktok, discord, etc and you will never get that into your search results) I see this all the time when trying to find information about old computers. So many of the good vintage computing resources are locked in social services or mailing lists that the information never shows up in search engines. It fee…

I've experienced this a lot myself.

It's weird.

I used to be considered a Digital Native.

Now I feel like an outsider on the internet.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#113

Post by mrtksn »

hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

> are now reduced to be a Subreddit.

I don't know if anything else was possible, the IT need for communities is about the same and it makes total sense to have those on one place. It solves the infrastructure problem, it solves discoverability problem, it solves the user account management problem and it is all "free".

It comes at the cost of fragility, true, but as always convenience is the king.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#115

Post by dale_glass »

danudey wrote: post #26
dv_dt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stupid part is that profits are really not optimized by the enshittification profit campaigns - there is so much incompetence in isolated C-suites making these decisions.

I've said it before, but why do social media sites try to monetize through methods which provide no tangible benefits? A blue checkmark, some shitty NFT avatars, being able to badge someone's comment or post - I don't care about those things, definitely not enough to pay for them. If Reddit wanted to monetize me, give me something tangible. I'd pay $5/mo for a 'pro' tier or something if it had unlimited third-party a…

Because it's hard to create tangible benefits.

Reddit doesn't want to have any functionality that makes the site hard to use. They don't want to say, limit how much you can post because you're making content for free for them and keeping other people engaged.

Minor quality of life improvements are easily addressed with browser plugins like RES. It has to be something that can't be provided that way.

So what you get is very niche features like the ability to load more than 500 commments and a shiny badge.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#116

Post by jjk166 »

falcolas wrote: post #16
EscapeFromNY wrote: post #9

My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.

Google's recency bias in search results hurts them too. There are many older resources which are still valid out there, but you won't find them (easily) via Google Search. Instead, you get the SEO spam which doesn't match the search as well, but is newer.

You can filter results by time pretty easily. It's not perfect but it eliminates most of the SEO crap or current event stories.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#117

Post by AlbertCory »

hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

+1 to that last point.

In the 80's, the OSI suite of protocols, owned by the telephone monopolies of the world, actually had pretensions of becoming what the Internet did become. OSI lost, but the spirit never died, apparently.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#118

Post by Gordonjcp »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #91
hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

Honestly I’d LOVE to revert to the old phpBB or vBulletin forum days There’s literally no reason why not and it’s never been cheaper to run

Take a look at FlaskBB, it's kind of like those but modern and written in Python.

Also it needs devs.

https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#119

Post by thatguy0900 »

drowsspa wrote: post #28
bombcar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google flourished because it could find forums (and blogs) and mine those, but much of that content has disappeared into Facebook and Discord (and YouTube - we must not discount how many things that would have been easily parseable blogs are now buried in livestreams and videos).

Discord is probably the worst of all. I'm not a gamer and I hate it so much that a lot of tech content is now locked behind private Discord channels. Even Facebook is more discoverable than that

Even when you are already on discord, search and trying to read old conversations is awful on discord, because that's not at all what discord was made to do.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#120

Post by AndrewKemendo »

jeffbee wrote: post #104
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I’d LOVE to revert to the old phpBB or vBulletin forum days There’s literally no reason why not and it’s never been cheaper to run

99% of phpBB installations were pwned and distributing malware. It’s a terrible model. If we want small distributed operation of software like that we need a revolution in software operability and quality.

Suggestions?
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