The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by dynamorando » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 8:46 PM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #185

willio58 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what's happening with Twitter and Reddit is actually a good thing in that it's exposing the failures of centralized networks. The thing is, these failures aren't big enough yet for people to jump ship and I think the main problem is none of the decentralized social networks have provided a solution that's better. Mastodon is theoretically a better version of Twitter, but normal people get lost the moment some…

Maybe the solution isn't federation, but a nonprofit foundation with an open source and relatively simpler codebase like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the 800# gorilla in that space, but there's no ads and no perverse incentives and they aren't trying to lock down to prevent "theft" from AI companies, and the decentralization is through people being able to relatively easily setup specialized wikis. I'm not sure the proble…

I have often wondered (I realize this is American centric) why NPR or PBS doesn’t have their own social network.

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

#352

Post by lisper » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 8:47 PM UTC

MrOwen wrote: post #200

lisper wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Amazon better than Fastmail? (I actually already have a Fastmail account, and I use it to deliver mail to domains where my server is blacklisted. But even that little concession feels like defeat.)

Not sure about better, just different since it's strictly an MTA. But perhaps you can also use Fastmail as an MTA only? Biggest benefit I can think of is with SES, Amazon would never see any of your incoming mail. Well, unless you replied to something. Then I suppose they would have access to it indirectly.

> perhaps you can also use Fastmail as an MTA only

Yes, and that's what I actually do to solve my current problem. But one of the reasons I run my own email server is to maintain my claim to fourth-amendment protections in light of Smith v. Maryland so I really don't want my mail being routed through a third party.

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

#353

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 8:51 PM UTC

xctr94 wrote: post #334

JohnBooty wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. How "open" were those blogs and forums, though in a functional sense? Instead of an untrustworthy/unreliable corporation like Twitter or Reddit owning a data and community.... we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs and forums. "Your" "community" might be gone in the blink of an eye becaus…

Valid point, but only partially true. It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump and clone the server. Or pay the bill again. Or have multiple billing admins. There’s a very good number of forums still alive, proving they have some resilience to show for themselves. It’s also a form of distributed resilience, i.e. one forum going down isn’t as bad as all of Reddit. Eh…

    It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump   
    and clone the server

Huh? I'm not following. That helps the admin(s) and nobody else.

The other 99.99% of users are in functionally the same predicament as Reddit users: they have zero control over the data.

Theoretically a forum admin could make those dumps publicly available, I guess? I'm sure that has happened once or twice, but I've never heard of anybody doing that.

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

#354

Post by notacoward » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 8:53 PM UTC

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…

> What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit.

One might quibble about blogs being Reddit when Tumblr and Medium and Substack exist, or forums being Reddit when Facebook groups exist, but that would be missing the point. Whether the number is one or a dozen, or even several dozen, it's not like the thousands upon thousands of independent sites that used to exist. While openness and distributed ownership/control are not the same thing, it seems like it's hard for the former to survive without the latter.

That's why so many people are looking to the fediverse and its imitators to replace the falling monoliths. There are problems there as well, both technical and social, but at least there's hope that they can grow into solutions without being assassinated by a single rich psycho. All it takes is for people to stop thought-experimenting on yet another rich-guy-owned monolith and start actually hacking toward a permanent and public solution.

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

#355

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

toastal wrote: post #297

monero-xmr wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except it’s often used in a way that goes beyond chitchat and bouncing ideas. I was pretty active in a programming community a few years ago, and then they decided to move official chat exclusively Discord which I disagree with on principle & was not going to create an account. Some (not all) decisions I would have previously expected to see on the forum got discussed and decided within Discord’s proprietary walls wh…

It often happens unintentionally, and it poisons communities. Back when I was actively participating, and for a time even running our local Hackerspace, I insisted on a hard rule: our IRC channel is non-binding, anything of any relevance must be also discussed on the mailing group, and only decisions made on the mailing group are binding. This rule was keeping the community from going nova - shedding outer layers of occasional participants, and collapsing into a core group of friends that's in constant contact.

Even with that rule in place, when I graduated and had to focus more on my work, I realized I'm slowly becoming an outsider to my own community, simply because I'm not able to keep up with the torrent of random conversations on IRC. Back then, there were no LLMs available to summarize the 1000+ messages people sent between 09:00 and 17:00. And even if they were, it wouldn't have helped, because the problem was, people who wrote those messages were bonding together, becoming closer-knit every day, while I was becoming more distant just by missing out on this.

It's what eventually made me stop participating - and from what I talked to other people in and around our Hackerspace at the time, I'm not the only one. Which is why I say, chat groups are, by very nature, poisonous to communities - including off-line ones. They need careful managing.

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

#356

Post by TX81Z » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

Gordonjcp wrote: post #315

TX81Z wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flask is generally a joy to use.

I flip between Flask and Django depending on what I'm doing. If I want to make something "from scratch" I do it with Flask, if I've got an existing database (or something that can be wrangled into a database) I do it in Django.

I’m mostly hacking together APIs, but may do a Django project sooner or later. Though I personally deplore ORMs.

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

#357

Post by costco » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

bioemerl wrote: post #8

delfinom wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't suppress web forums, they instead went to prioritize SEO factors that of course SEO spammers maximized to abuse. Of course the Google solution was to prioritize reddit because people were searching for " reddit" due to said SEO spam.

They definitely suppress web forums. There are a few I frequent that are prevalent on bing but nowhere to be seen on Google. Maybe it's just a difference in phrasing. Promoting clean SEO companies is suppressing web forums.

Maybe another factor is that (almost) no one is optimizing to be at the top of the Bing results.

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

#358

Post by xdennis » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

guy98238710 wrote: post #304

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…

> 1. Putting things on the web means your words are public, so they can be archived forever, and anyone can look at them. > 4. Most people don't want to put the effort into writing/posting anything beyond basic food/vacation photos or whatnot. Nobody cares about opinions of some dipshit. There are literally millions of experts in the world. We want to hear from them. > 3. If you don't want to bother with hosting your…

> Nobody cares about opinions of some dipshit.

One individual, sure, but the opinions of millions of non-experts are valuable.

They form the majority of buyers so their aggregate opinions matter to marketers.

And they often trust the opinions of non-experts more.

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

#359

Post by juve1996 » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

uLogMicheal wrote: post #160

moi2388 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think affiliate deals should be banned. I hate it that much. Whilst you’re at it, van advertisement without consent. You can use the kids argument if necessary.

So you want to live in a world where only companies with massive ad budgets breakthrough to end users? The ad empire only strengthens media/big app lock in.

Let's be honest, that's already happening anyway.

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

#360

Post by unshavedyak » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

frickinLasers wrote: post #347

unshavedyak wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing i do hope though is that if instances that want to hide content, or users hide content, that the instance also publishes that data during syncing. Which is to say, i want to write a custom instance but i don't want to mistakenly leak something someone wanted to be private.

In theory it's a well understood problem-space in the Mastodon stack, so hopefully they only federate/publish what they are okay with being public. But it's concerning regardless.