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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

#281

Post by nosecreek »

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…

Is there an equivalent to say phpBB or vBulletin, but using the reddit tree format?

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

#282

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

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.

Codicat is doing that for Stack Exchange. I don't know anyone doing anything similar for Reddit. There are apparently some Reddit clones on the Fediverse, but I have my own dislike of the Fediverse model.

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

#283

Post by tectec »

dabluecaboose wrote: post #81
bufio wrote: post #3

The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.

Enshittification was already causing reddit to ruin google results. Reddit's new garbage redesign contains other posts from a subreddit in the page. So often times you'll google a term and get a link that looks like exactly the post you want, but it ends up being a different post in the same subreddit, and the one you were looking for was just in the suggested posts for that one. Also, reddit has ruined filtering by…

You'd think that reddit would be smart enough to show web crawlers a cleaner version than real users, or is that not allowed? Maybe google needs whitelist some of the biggest sites on the web so they can feed searchable data into google in a more efficient way.

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

#284

Post by a_humean »

throw7 wrote: post #252
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…

What is the appeal of discord? I've tried to multiple times and to me it's just ephemeral... something closer to irc then a web forum. The onboarding and UX is horrid (or I'm just an old dude... which is true :)

I agree the intial onboarding is a bit confusing.

The appeal is for small private and semi-public communities. You are right that it is more like IRC than a web forum, but it serves much the same purpose for many people with its server channels and channel threads.

I'm a member of a small community about 25-30 people that know it each from either university or work. We chat about games, politics, software development, organising IRL events, and lots of other interests. The advantage of discord over IRC is we get better message persistence, video streaming and voice calls, sharing media (pictures and video). It lets us organise this content in a way that say a group whatsapp could not. Right now three people are in a voice and video chat room talking about and playing Street Fighter 6. I could just jump right into that conversation with a single click and might do so in a moment. They are also sharing videos and twitter links in a channel dedicated to fighting games.

I'm also a member of a larger programming community with a few thousand members and we have automated help systems allocating space to get help, evaluating programming expressions to aide conversations, moderation tools, url shorteners for programming playground - much of which is powered by custom bots using discord apis.

The thing it is closest to is MS Teams or Slack, but the difference being that its more focused on soical interactions and gaming intergrations than it intergrations for work tools. Its also just frankly a better product than Slack or Teams - it just doesn't have the business intergrations that make it viable for business and doesn't offer business plans.

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

#285

Post by acomjean »

toastal wrote: post #246
TimPC wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 awa…

>motivated members to consolidate and publish some of the good ideas for posterity

I think there were some sensitive documents dumped from Discord (where noone noticed them for a good while) to the public internet. So I'd say there is some truth to it being semi-private. The "Discord Leaks".

https://wapo.st/3NvrkFk

Discord has its place, but its not generally great as a information sharing place.

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

#286

Post by rfgmendoza »

trollied wrote: post #32
bufio wrote: post #3

The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.

I think curated indexes, with associated search, will come back. Yahoo! was before its time. Now we need a human-curated search engine/index that only has verified human generated content. I guess everything goes in cycles.

[flagged]

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

#287

Post by mcast »

pessimizer wrote: post #238
willis936 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In that case, the script could be modified to archive all the comments into a local file -- you could restore all your books back to the library (Reddit) if you chose, once they stopped threatening customers with higher fees.

If people were really committed, they could "unionize" and have a centralized party which held access to their comments, but that would probably violate their ToS and would not set a good precedent for an open and free internet. Not to mention, Reddit could easily just block users from modifying/deleting old comments.

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

#288

Post by thanosapollo »

SoftTalker wrote: post #223
lost_tourist wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does it cost for a low to moderate traffic (annually) "your own domain" server?

$50/year for fastmail. One of the very few things I pay for online other than my ISP service. A VPS is cheaper if you actually want to run your own, but the cheap VPSs typically have very bad IP reputations.

[dead]

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

#289

Post by Guest9081239812 »

Reddit should have leveraged their content to compete with Google.

1. Improve old.reddit.com instead of creating this terrible Reddit v2 that encourages replacing real content with memes.

2. Build a dedicated Reddit search engine on a short trendy domain.

3. Remove all Reddit content from Google.

4. Carefully curate other quality sites into the search engine.

5. Leave Google to rot with SEO and Amazon referral spam.

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

#290

Post by throw9away6 »

dcow wrote: post #21
MAGZine wrote: post #5

it's not just google. it's the web. all of the web's useful information--decades of discussion--is stored in reddit's garage. and they've decided to close the door.

idk.. kagi still works great. I've experienced no impact to search quality over the last few days.

It’s not the search quality is that the contents is not there as all of it is on Reddit
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