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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

#341

Post by Solvency »

Nakroma wrote: post #153
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…

This, at least subreddits are relatively stable, public and searchable. There is so much knowledge hidden inside huge chat logs of semi-public Discord servers which might disappear at any minute and is hard to retrieve, unless that server maintains a wiki or something similiar.

So then someone should make a basic product/feature that let's you "save" (encapsulate, and then push) a conversation to a public page.

Let's say I run a Discord community around some product/service, like a rendering engine like Octane. Two users have a meaningful conversation explaining how to increase light samples. Let's say that information is not documented online. There should be a nice way to summarize + post that onto a website that can be crawled.

You could even automate this with GPT. It could constantly scan Discord for back-and-forth context-specific conversations and push summaries from them to a website. Then users could upvote or downvote them into oblivion asynchronously.

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

#342

Post by winkwinkwink »

Guest9081239812 wrote: post #289

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.

This would have been a crazy idea that I (would have) like to see happen. The fact that we're talking about Reddit content in Google searches is an indicator that Reddit should have improved search on their own site.

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

#343

Post by lisper »

zbuf wrote: post #330
lisper wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who are you hosting on?

Linode.

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

#344

Post by heywhatupboys »

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…

> 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.

try rdrama dot net, one last bastion of the old "bb board". style forum. and good OC discussions.

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

#345

Post by mostlysimilar »

nemothekid wrote: post #239
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, whic…

> 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

Betterment of the shared social world of the web? Not everything has to make a profit.

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

#346

Post by Guest9081239812 »

winkwinkwink wrote: post #342
Guest9081239812 wrote: post #289

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.

This would have been a crazy idea that I (would have) like to see happen. The fact that we're talking about Reddit content in Google searches is an indicator that Reddit should have improved search on their own site.

In a different universe, I think the idea could be a valid attempt at dethroning Google. However, after seeing the changes to Reddit the past decade in our current universe, I wouldn't trust those same people to handle search for the world.

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

#347

Post by frickinLasers »

unshavedyak wrote: post #219
frickinLasers wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only know Mastodon: There's a large LGBTQ+ community who don't want to be indexed out of concern for their safety (because, for example, there are small far-right communities on other instances looking to cause mayhem). The ability to be oneself online without worrying about getting brigaded, doxxed, or whatever, is a selling point. Indexing runs counter to that.

Agreed, but is it a choice or a requirement from the software? I love choice, that instances (and users!) can and should get to choose the level of indexing. If it's software wide, not sure i can get behind that. Especially since .. doesn't ActivityPub sort of ruin that? Ie any instance you federate with could expose your data, regardless of Mastodon's rules. Federated instance data visibility and agreed visibility r…

I don't know enough/anything about ActivityPub, but maybe different...apps? (Mastodon et al vs kbin/lemmy) could have different agreed-on rules. The forum-style ones would be appropriate in search results, so they could be indexed. People linking to Mastodon posts on lemmy might be unavoidable I guess, but there's at least a bit more separation.

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

#348

Post by TeMPOraL »

Euphorbium wrote: post #331
TeMPOraL wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory. In practice, like Slack, Discord is unsearchable. As someone rightly said on another thread: Discord is where knowledge goes to die.

Until you train llm on it. Which WILL happen.

LLMs perform lossy compression on knowledge, so they're not a good replacement for indexing and search. If anything, you want to have the latter, and expose it to LLM as a tool it can use, regardless of whether the LLM was trained/fine-tuned on that same content or not.

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

#349

Post by lisper »

SoftTalker wrote: post #191
lisper wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> if you're willing to pay for a clean IP address

I would be more than happy to do that. Where would I find one?

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

#350

Post by TeMPOraL »

Barrin92 wrote: post #320
toastal wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's different notions of privacy. Discord isn't going to protect you from someone deliberately stalking your posting history, but it is more private in the sense that it is, first and foremost, comprised of communities who want to manage who participates. A Discord server is the equivalent of a local pub with a specific audience. And in that context not being crawlable is very much a good thing because communitie…

Sure. It's not a problem that people who want a casual chat with friends or interest groups use a platform for casual chatting. I say that even though I prefer the earlier world where everything was indexed and people liked to overshare on Facebook.

The problem is when you use Discord (or Slack, or IRC - yes, IRC is just as bad in this context) to run a community that's outward-facing. For example, when a large OSS project, or a foundation, decides to use Discord as its main support/hanging out channel. Participating in such group requires so big an investment of time and attention that it instantly shuts off anyone who has a day job or other interests and responsibilities. Again, this is not about causal chats - your "offtopic" forum thread probably is better off being a Discord channel. The problem is when contributing to, or receiving support from, such community requires being active on a chat group.

Remember "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"[0]? That seminal article from 1970s that, for some reason, just doesn't want to die? It was posted here just three days ago[1]. It actually talks about this. What it calls "elites" that naturally grow as an informal hierarchy in a group without a strong formal hierarchy - Discord, et al. are pretty much designed to create those. The people who are able and willing to keep up with the chat flow, following it all day every day, are the ones that become those "elite", and end up running the community.

--

[0] - https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285097

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