321–330 of 436 posts
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.
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> just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto-banned from somewhere if you post in a subreddit they dislike. That feels like a very incomplete implementation of federation, to say the least. Being able to defederate is one part of that, but "just make alts for the various mutually defederated subsets of subreddits" seems like a pretty unpractic…
That's Reddit for you, the actual site doesn't really serve the needs of many of its users, so they had to invent workarounds like "run a bot that auto-bans people that post in r/placewehate". But the actual dynamic of that to me seems to resemble what you get under federation. It's just that Reddit doesn't let people do it easily, so weird workarounds are needed.
Not the bright future we had hoped for, but the one we built...
I've been bumping into this a bunch trying to research different neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., for an upcoming three-month stay. A lot of useful info is locked up in r/washingtondc right now, with much of it missing from Google's cache and the Wayback Machine. I still support the blackouts—I used to mod a default subreddit—but I wasn't expecting this particular effect! (Tangentially, anyone know how the Mount Ve…
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…
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> One service goes down and everybody suffers "everybody"'s boycott brought this service down, the suffering is completely self inflicted, and people can end it whenever they want.
"everybody" in GP's context is "everyone using google" while "everybody" in your comment seems to mean "everyone using reddit" There's significant overlap here (to the point of it nearly being a subset relationship, I'd guess) but these are not the same thing.
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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.
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That's too bad, because a lot of open-source projects have moved to Discord, and it's an absolute pain that every time I want to search, I have to 1. login and 2. join yet another Discord server.
I find it easy to mute and put the ones I don't frequent often in a folder and only go there when I need to. I only actively visit and contribute to 2 Discord servers but that number might grow if the reddit communities stay dark (and I don't blame them for doing so). I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. Slack only retains 90ish days of text chat which makes it an awful platform for open-sou…
Gitter had terrible search, but one advantage Gitter had over Slack and Discord is that it required no login to lurk, and chatrooms were indexable by search engines. You can still do so with Gitter's switch to Element, although Element leaves a lot to be desired on the UX front.
> I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. Slack only retains 90ish days of text chat which makes it an awful platform for open-source projects to use.
But who is to say that one day Discord won't start enacting limits on search history? The enshittification seems inevitable, in my opinion.
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"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.
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"everybody" in GP's context is "everyone using google" while "everybody" in your comment seems to mean "everyone using reddit" There's significant overlap here (to the point of it nearly being a subset relationship, I'd guess) but these are not the same thing.
but everybody who googles and finds reddit results either ignores them or clicks to join everybody who uses reddit...
so, "use" in my reply means "actively using, creating posts & comments" while "use" in your post means "view content". Is that a fair summary? I think I'll end the definition game here. :D
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…