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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

#241

Post by pradn »

pessimizer wrote: post #222
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…

> Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist. Then it should index the internet that does, and stop trying to convince me that there are only 10 pages of results for any possible query. > The open web is truly dying. Of starvation, because the search indexes don't index it, preferring to index the part of the web that is aggressively marketing itself (and buying and showing ads.)

We have a sort of meta-stable failure here.

Even if it's possible to win the battle against SEO and junk sites (and I don't think it is), this is the best that commercial search engines will do, given their resources and incentives. No one else has been able to break in, for lack of quality, for lack of resources (it's expensive to index the web!), and b/c search engine brands are so sticky (that's why Google pays Apple ~$10 billion to be the default on Apple devices.)

If the junk web problem was so easy to solve, wouldn't another search engine be able to do so - like Bing with Microsoft's resources, or DDG with their unique outlook/guarantees?

So given the current economic system, the current governance regime, and the current culture, this is the best our civilization can do. Unless there's some sharp rift, the internet will stay the course.

I feel like this line of criticism feels a bit like screaming at the clouds.

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

#242

Post by monero-xmr »

TimPC wrote: post #231
toastal wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

Exactly! There is a market for something that more closely replicates conversations in a bar. Sometimes you want to be a blow-hard and say some crazy shit without it being indexed for all eternity.

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

#243

Post by alok99 »

mattlondon wrote: post #218

Do people really find Reddit useful? I usually find lots of "hey guys has anyone got " from 2018 with no solution but a few token "Me too!" Responses, or worse a response but "Never mind - I solved it. " I skip over most Reddit links in the search because of that sort of thing being 95% of results. I genuinely have not ever found that much useful on it - I can probably count on one hand a time where it has been usefu…

Maybe you're just unlucky. I usually find an answer, or at least something that points me in the right direction.

The "me too" problem was prevalent with forums too.

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

#244

Post by musha68k »

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 also a clash between the profit motive of these platform runners / investors and the increasing value of data itself (in the “age of AI”).

Enthusiasts need our help as Usenet as is, phpBB, etc just don’t cut it anymore in terms of ease of use for admins and exploration and fun for users.

Todos then:

1. Centralized solution it ain’t

2. Remove (boundless, blunt) profit motive out of equation (don’t depend on this at least)

3. Actually care and be professional about UX. UX quality for centralized services has been decreasing over the last ~10 years (I blame Apple for continuously dropping their own ball there; role models are important) so it’s actually not as high a barrier as it used to be (relatively speaking).

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

#245

Post by balder1991 »

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 just had this thought. Seems like user generated content is gonna be very valuable from now on, so wouldn’t it be good for companies like Microsoft to foster new websites like Reddit?

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

#246

Post by toastal »

TimPC wrote: post #231
toastal wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

Pithy retort: that must be a parallel dimension to suggest Discord is good for privacy.

Letting ideas float around a chatroom is good but communities hopefully have motivated members to consolidate and publish some of the good ideas for posterity because we will lose them over time. Some places do a better job, but a lot of content is straight up locked out from the wider internet where users are required to give away credentials to a private American company just to get access to it; at least private American Reddit I could read without an account with answers to folks web searching for a quick solution. But we’re tech-savvy folk and know better, but it seems from even the Stack Overflow survey results yesterday that our industry is also trending in the wrong direction.

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

#247

Post by ansible »

clnq wrote: post #60
nocsi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have some old articles on my blog that always decrease in readership. I do a pass every year, change a paragraph here and there, change the alias/url, and then get 5x the readership for a few months. Rinse and repeat. Most of my traffic comes from Google. Also, most of my content is in such a specific niche that it doesn’t really age much in 5 years. So recency bias kinda works against people discovering useful con…

Heh.

I just ran a Google search on some code I was working on 15 years ago, posted to blogspot.com. It was about card game X, using programming language Y. The relevant keywords appear in the blog post. However, it completely failed to show up in a Google search. Just... nothing, even when I scrolled through the "more results" stuff. There were relevant and more recent links to the same topic (and likely better implemented, but let's leave that aside).

I did find my page on a Bing search after getting it to not ignore an important keyword, so that's something.

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

#248

Post by calny »

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.

Very interesting point. It'd be a challenge to execute, but I'd be glad to see a non-profit that lets online communities discuss topics of interest, solve problems, and expand knowledge. Maybe something like that exists and I just don't realize it.

Sorry to make this about AI, but it'd also be interesting whether such a non-profit makes its data fully open--i.e., for AI companies to scoop up--or has more restrictive terms that forbid AI "scooping" without a separate agreement. Lots of tricky issues, trade-offs, and interesting incentives involved. There could be alliances with orgs creating open source models, for example. If anyone is working on a nonprofit like this or just wants to chat about it, please reach out.

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

#249

Post by sleepytimetea »

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #33

I noticed this too when I was trying to search for local opinions like affordable clothing in netherlands and for general recommendations like cloud storage with execellent file management. Without reddit, outdated generic blogs with affliate links show up. They are just advertisement in disguise and not the genuine opinions which I'm looking for. In a way this shows the value of Reddit. Even with their awful UI and…

I search for reviews of DIY tools and all Google shows me are review sites that are just thinly veiled affiliate link farms. I even read a post somewhere about a guy boasting he has SEO optimized his review sites to show up at the top of google searches and he makes a bundle on all the Amazon affiliate links people follow.

For me, the solution is not Reddit but Youtube - luckily, Google can now link you directly to the point in the video that matters otherwise videos are not random searchable, and I haven't seen all videos have text transcripts you can search through.

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

#250

Post by forbiddenlake »

mattlondon wrote: post #218

Do people really find Reddit useful? I usually find lots of "hey guys has anyone got " from 2018 with no solution but a few token "Me too!" Responses, or worse a response but "Never mind - I solved it. " I skip over most Reddit links in the search because of that sort of thing being 95% of results. I genuinely have not ever found that much useful on it - I can probably count on one hand a time where it has been usefu…

Yes, all the time, but quality varies heavily based on subreddit, and in my experience the more popular and/or less strictly moderated subreddits have lower quality.

The part isn't unique to reddit. See: XKCD 979

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