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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

#191

Post by SoftTalker »

lisper wrote: post #102
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…

Email is dying too. I have run my own email server for 20 years. A few years ago my original ISP was acquired, forcing me to switch providers and hence get a new IP address. Ever since then my server has been blacklisted by one major player or another as a source of spam. I even tried changing to a new IP address, but the result of that was just a different set of providers blacklisting me. I'm about ready to throw i…

Email is shrinking, for sure, but there are still a lot of options and providers and if you're hard core you can run your own if you're willing to pay for a clean IP address.

There's only one reddit.

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

#192

Post by lamontcg »

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…

Pretty sure Mastodon doesn't allow indexing because that can be used to brigade users and they're trying very hard to actively avoid creating the dogpiles that twitter almost actively incentivizes.

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

#193

Post by hef19898 »

bombcar wrote: post #20
falcolas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a huge, huge, huge problem and Google I feel could work to solve this. NEWS (heh it contains new) is important to be up-to-date and recent. But so many things are olds and you should give more weight to older pagerank-verified pages.

News, the search showing articles from 3 weeks ago it didn't find 2 weeks ago...

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

#194

Post by ocdtrekkie »

ajayyy wrote: post #150
DirkH wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is stunning to me that Mastadon still hasn't come up with a simple onboarding solution to sidestep the issue of "instances" I completely agree with you. Mastadon even loses techies like me due to the decision fatigue of having to pick instances before I can even start exploring.

They did. The mobile app by default signs you up on mastodon.social now

It's one of those battles you can't win: Ask people to choose up front, new users balk. Assign a default, the existing crowd absolutely riots about centralization, and half of everyone doesn't even notice the change anyways.

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

#195

Post by ocdtrekkie »

whimsicalism wrote: post #110
willio58 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Google absolutely does crawl quite a bit of Mastodon, but the community is largely against crawling and indexing so in many cases Google may be blocked.

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

#196

Post by ansible »

nyadesu wrote: post #140
jeffbee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's one of the reasons centralized model works so well nowadays, nobody wants to take care of things anymore, self hosting your own apps is becoming a small niche

> ... nobody wants to take care of things anymore ...

I mean, why would you? It is quite a bit of technical hassle, even for an experienced admin. There's quite a bit of cognitive load just deciding what software stack to use, even before you run an installer. And then you have to maintain it too!

Compare that to less than 3 minutes of sign-up and creation of a new subreddit. It is an orders of magnitude difference in effort and knowledge required.

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

#197

Post by bena »

SoftTalker wrote: post #186
TrackerFF wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It usually gets contained to a branch however.

You can choose not to engage with that branch and instead start your own.

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

#198

Post by pessimizer »

nocsi wrote: post #47
falcolas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Google biased, or are it’s users biased? If someone is looking up something technical or diagnosing a problem, the most recent post on StackOverflow would be more relevant. Old stuff can be important, but if users searches mostly comprise recent stuff - what’s the point?

Most people aren't looking up techniques on how to work with cutting edge software. Sometimes, even usually, they're more likely to be looking for almost anything else.

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

#199

Post by capitainenemo »

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

How about Hubzilla?

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

#200

Post by MrOwen »

lisper wrote: post #154
MrOwen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're planning to offload to a third party anyway, why don't you instead first try routing mail though AWS SES? You'll definitely get better delivery and at least you'll be able to control the rest of the stack.

How is Amazon better than Fastmail? (I actually already have a Fastmail account, and I use it to deliver mail to domains where my server is blacklisted. But even that little concession feels like defeat.)

Not sure about better, just different since it's strictly an MTA. But perhaps you can also use Fastmail as an MTA only? Biggest benefit I can think of is with SES, Amazon would never see any of your incoming mail. Well, unless you replied to something. Then I suppose they would have access to it indirectly.
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