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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

#181

Post by TheCapn »

eugenekolo wrote: post #17
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…

I can't believe that. There's still so many personal blogs by real people. They just don't show up in the first 3 pages unless you query for them very specifically. Seems most queries result in something like 30% SEO spam sites, 30% quora, 30% reddit, 10% other. Edit: I don't disagree that Discord/Youtube/Other closed gardens have taken open searchable data away, but it's not like there's now no authentic searchable…

Blogs are parallel to research papers in a sense. They're useless without peer review unless you're already intimately familiar with the source material and able to critically evaluate the contents.

So Blogs are more useful when they're aggregated through a site like Reddit, where users have already done the vetting on whether the linked page is valuable. Reddit comments are invaluable to pages by adding additional context. Noting when the content has become dated or inaccurate due to external changes, etc. Sites like Brian Kreb's blog are the exception as the author is well known and respected. But the general blogs? It takes time to earn that community respect.

Then beyond that, how often have you gone on the hunt for something obscure only to run across 3 or more blog pages which look entirely unique, but have the exact same article pasted to them? It isn't that the contents are bad/wrong/inaccurate, but rather who do you trust? How much effort are you going to put in to finding which blog was the original, written by the expert and which ones are bots copying the info?

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

#183

Post by ansible »

michaelchisari wrote: post #145
mrtksn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe the solution isn't decentralization, but a non-profit approach like Wikipedia. Reddit already functions entirely on volunteer labor anyways, adding venture capital requirements makes much less sense than a just-keep-the-lights-on non-profit model.

> ... non-profit approach ...

It may be a better way to go for a public forum like Reddit. Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation won't also be rife with petty politics, hidden agendas, and the usual crap. There will still be issues, and how to handle NSFW content is still going to be a big conflict.

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

#184

Post by beached_whale »

toastercat wrote: post #170
chrisrogers wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a bit like IRC to be honest.

I've seen some IRC channels archive their chat as search-able HTML pages that are also indexed by search engines. Wish Discord servers would do something similar.

being in the irc room and logging it is enough and only requires access to the room.

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

#185

Post by lamontcg »

willio58 wrote: post #106
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…

I think what's happening with Twitter and Reddit is actually a good thing in that it's exposing the failures of centralized networks. The thing is, these failures aren't big enough yet for people to jump ship and I think the main problem is none of the decentralized social networks have provided a solution that's better. Mastodon is theoretically a better version of Twitter, but normal people get lost the moment some…

Maybe the solution isn't federation, but a nonprofit foundation with an open source and relatively simpler codebase like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the 800# gorilla in that space, but there's no ads and no perverse incentives and they aren't trying to lock down to prevent "theft" from AI companies, and the decentralization is through people being able to relatively easily setup specialized wikis.

I'm not sure the problems of federation are ever going to be solved at massive scale. Usenet and IRC were always problematic back in the 90s. Not even e-mail works well due to spam.

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

#186

Post by SoftTalker »

TrackerFF wrote: post #126
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…

I still use a couple "old school" forums, but I have to say - the reddit tree format is just so, so much easier. It is impossible to de-rail a thread, and there's a certain level of anti-spam and self-moderation mechanism to the reddit format. The older forums still need some hardcore moderation, or else many threads become unreadable. Nothing worse than when two users start arguing, and the thread turns into shit. B…

"It is impossible to de-rail a thread"

citation needed, I've seen many reddit threads degenerate into name-calling, logical fallacies, political posturing, and what have you. If they don't, my guess is it's a very focused subreddit that doesn't attract much general interest, or the mods are very on top of things.

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

#188

Post by marginalia_nu »

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.

It's not hard to to write significantly more robust software than what you get on a late '90s LAMP stack. What killed those forums was the constant upkeep needed to keep them secure. Most of that is historical baggage though. The software emerged in a time when the threat landscape was completely different, and things like data portability wasn't even a thing.

The problem that remains is spam mitigation. Bots are very hard to detect, and there really aren't any good distributed approaches afaik.

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

#189

Post by frickinLasers »

unshavedyak wrote: post #133
whimsicalism wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, do search engines even index mastodon? i've never seen a mastodon result in my life, compared to reddit.

It's a good question. Regardless of Twitter, Kbin and Lemmy (and maybe others?) will be even more important for ensuring they get indexed properly. The organic/real nature of Reddit comments (at least those not astroturfed .. heh) were valuable to search. We (devs) need to make sure Fediverse stuff provides that value. At least in my view. Is there something Mastodon/Kbin/Lemmy might be doing that could cause poor in…

I only know Mastodon: There's a large LGBTQ+ community who don't want to be indexed out of concern for their safety (because, for example, there are small far-right communities on other instances looking to cause mayhem). The ability to be oneself online without worrying about getting brigaded, doxxed, or whatever, is a selling point. Indexing runs counter to that.

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

#190

Post by rightbyte »

shswkna wrote: post #164

Humans built this wonderful common structure, where we can all communicate boundlessly. The huge benefits only last briefly for humanity, until our inherent nature causes it to degenerate into a mess. Everybody goes back to doing their own thing. Sounds like the Tower of Babylon from the bible.

Google, Facebook, Reddit etc are the tower though. Not the WWW.
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