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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

#231

Post by TimPC »

toastal wrote: post #216
supernikio2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient…

> which is in my opinion even worse It’s not just your opinion. Discord is a black hole for content. There won’t crawlers for the content in these spaces. I’d like to see more activity in the ActivityPub & modern, self-hosted forum/blog spaces (where Atom feeds can aggregate), but history likes to repeat itself as we move from one closed, proprietary communications service to the next because there’s ‘no cost’ to joi…

It's even worse for only the metric by which the efforts of a group should be indexed for the masses. But people use discord for group conversation and the goal is not the create content for consumption but to do the things the group does as a semi-private organization. Discord seems like a massive win on some dimensions of privacy even with the drawback of not being able to index all the things. I agree discord is bad if you want to create content for universal consumption but no one I know is truly using discord for that.

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

#232

Post by pessimizer »

rightbyte wrote: post #190
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.

No, Google, Facebook, and Reddit are the languages spoken on the WWW that annihilated all the others. Then God comes down and breaks them up. The Tower of Babel was the original silo.

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

#233

Post by Gloomily3819 »

jwestbury wrote: post #34
bioemerl wrote: post #2

I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google to try to start to prioritize non reddit user content on the internet again. Web forums have been suppressed by their results for ages now and Google's choice to do that has been a big part of what killed the internet.

Many years ago, one of the search options on Google, alongside Images, News, etc., was "Discussions." It would explicitly show results from web forums. I defaulted to this when I was looking for, e.g., product reviews -- because it would bypass the endless SEO spam where someone found some highly-rated products on Amazon and published an article "reviewing" them. Unfortunately, Google killed that search type. There a…

The Discussions page on google was fantastic. I was able to find information so easily. When they shut it down, there was a firefox extension to bring it back. Until Google shut it down completly. I've always wondered why they did that. Perhaps they wanted to bring attention to bigger websites with adsense? I have no idea.

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

#234

Post by redundantly »

supernikio2 wrote: post #83
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…

It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient…

This isn't unique to discord, it isn't any different than IRC which has been around for decades.

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

#235

Post by BashiBazouk »

biziclop wrote: post #187
BashiBazouk wrote: post #50

If it's this important to google, couldn't they just buy Reddit with what amounts to pocket change? That would be an interesting plot twist...

I really wouldn't see Reddit on killedbygoogle.com.

I would think they would treat it like youtube and allow it to lose money, at least at first, in order to support their core business.

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

#236

Post by Guest9081239812 »

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.

I think this causes further problems as well. These big companies know they can easily be listed at the top of Google, and therefore they pump out low quality articles for every popular key phrase. They can write a "Top 10 X of 2023" list and bring in lots of traffic and referral sales, while a smaller site has no chance of doing the same. Then, the big site takes all that income, and pumps out more low quality articles. It's a rich get richer scenario.

If I search, "The top 10 movies on Netflix", I get sent to this page...

https://decider.com/list/top-10-movies-on-netflix-most-popul...

The top 5 movies above are...

1. The Boss Baby (2017)

2. The Angry Birds Movie (2016)

3. We're the Millers (2013)

4. Zookeeper (2011)

5. Mean Girls (2004)

Is this really the best the world has to offer for my search query? I could spend a week putting together a far better page for that query, but what's the point? It's not going to rank anywhere notable in the Google results. There's no incentive for me to produce that quality content.

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

#237

Post by Gloomily3819 »

owlninja wrote: post #147
the_pwner224 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply adding "forum" onto the search query has worked pretty well for me. Of course, when I am aware of a specific forum which exists for that topic, site:... works well too.

Same, if I am done reading reddit discussions I will just switch to 'forum' and occasionally stumble into some forum threads. Most are dead now though!

I wonder how much more active would forum websites be today if Google hadn't shut down the discussion search mode.

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

#238

Post by pessimizer »

willis936 wrote: post #71
masklinn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But usually destruction is just destruction.

It's the right of each user to redact their contributions. If that's the only bargaining tool then it seems entirely reasonable to use it when the other party refuses to negotiate or even be remotely transparent about their motives. If this was really about money then why do we have such little insight into their financials? Could it be that they fleeced the investors and will lie as hard as they can to not be outed…

People didn't post on Reddit for Reddit, people posted on Reddit in the hope that other people might read the post and get something out of it. Burning all of the books that I wrote for others to read is attacking myself to hurt Reddit. I don't care about Reddit enough to hurt myself to hurt it.

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

#239

Post by nemothekid »

pradn wrote: post #108

Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist. The open web is truly dying. I believe in the open web, but it seems like an ideological position, not something most people want to participate in. (Just like decentralization!) There's a few reasons: 1. Putting things on the web means your words are public, so they can be archived forever, and anyone can look at them. Do I want employers looking at my high school b…

I think this largely hits nail on the head. Imagine I was particularly knowledgable about ballpoint pens, and I spent most of my time manufacturing ball point pens.

What motivation do I have to spend money to, build, design and host a website, deal with content moderation, work on distribution and SEO optimization and potentially buy ads. If I do this, I might as well expect a return and start selling something, which leads to spam. But if I just want to talk about the finer details of blue ink vs blank ink, and theres a community of ballpoint pen enthusiasts already, it's far easier for me to reply to a couple hundred comments over the course of the year.

I don't know where the "open" web goes from here. With moderation getting more and more time consuming I don't blame people for just running to discord where they can properly gatekeep information.

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

#240

Post by never_inline »

diegocg wrote: post #14
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.

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…

There certainly is content. Often the ones I could find two years ago but now cannot.

That's because the web is full of juvenile sub-normie content such as geeksforgeeks (if you consider programming topics for example). It shadows the very specific queries with highly SEO'd Juvenile stuff.

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