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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

#371

Post by kirso »

supernikio2 wrote: post #83
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 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…

Pretty much this. You can't search discord but its a byproduct of a self-serving goal of the platform.

Perhaps we need more projects like Reddit but without the VC money.

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

#372

Post by leadingthenet »

sb52191 wrote: post #142
danudey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said it before, but why do social media sites try to monetize through methods which provide no tangible benefits? A blue checkmark, some shitty NFT avatars, being able to badge someone's comment or post - I don't care about those things, definitely not enough to pay for them. If Reddit wanted to monetize me, give me something tangible. I'd pay $5/mo for a 'pro' tier or something if it had unlimited third-party a…

I think the question is what are the tangible benefits people would actually pay for? Social media companies have the incentive to figure out how to make more money from their product. I think the fact that none of them have really proposed any pro-tier that is adopted by a majority of users shows that most people aren't really willing to pay for anything they provide.

They’ve never even tried, so how could they know for sure?

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

#373

Post by notacoward »

JohnBooty wrote: post #230
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 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…

> we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs

True enough, but the chance of many blog/forum owners all having a hissy fit at the same time - the equivalent of what has happened to Twitter with Musk or Reddit with Huffman - was infinitesimal. Also, because there were many, competition worked. Don't like one forum? Go to another, often on the same topic, and losing all the friends you knew on other forums was never even a possibility. Thanks to network effects, that hasn't been the case with the every-topic megasites. Returning to a more decentralized model won't solve everything, and will even (re)introduce a few other problems, but it's still more resilient especially with regard to crazy CEOs.

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

#374

Post by berniedurfee »

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…

Content created for universal consumption was the dream of the early internet. It powered several generations intellectually forward at light speed (or backward in some circles).

Segmentation, paywalls clickbait and SEO are, unfortunately, the Monday morning reality we’re waking up to.

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

#375

Post by aniforprez »

Andrex wrote: post #311
aniforprez wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. The consolidation has affected email equally to the point where "email" is synonymous to "gmail". No one is signing up for email by searching for other email clients, setting up SMTP and whatnot. They go to Google, search for "email" click on the sign up link to "gmail" and carry on. I hardly believe even more than 1% of email users even know about its federated nature Unless Mastodon has similarly sensibl…

> I hardly believe even more than 1% of email users even know about its federated nature You're completely ignoring the corporate world, which may outweigh consumer email use (dunno, but it wouldn't surprise me.) G Suite isn't even close to a monopoly, and I imagine there's large IT departments at anti-cloud corpos specifically for managing all their emails. It's like, consumers don't know or care if they're using Li…

I didn't say 1% of all email users are not gmail users. I said 1% know about its federated nature. Even if email allows for different email domains and there are entire departments are dedicated to manage domain emails, I thoroughly doubt even these people would even understand that this is what makes email "federated" or even call it that

gmail isn't a monopoly because of how they handle email. gmail is a monopoly because the common user doesn't know the difference most of the time

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

#376

Post by aniforprez »

vxNsr wrote: post #370
aniforprez wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. The consolidation has affected email equally to the point where "email" is synonymous to "gmail". No one is signing up for email by searching for other email clients, setting up SMTP and whatnot. They go to Google, search for "email" click on the sign up link to "gmail" and carry on. I hardly believe even more than 1% of email users even know about its federated nature Unless Mastodon has similarly sensibl…

You’re missing the point. Just like most people have no idea how their post office functions, really. And most people have no idea how their email service functions except at the most basic level, they understand enough to use it. For most nontechnical people I know, they’re more likely to be using yahoo or aol vs gmail.

You are missing MY point. If you put front and center how your social media is "federated" and then add friction in the signup process by asking them to "pick a server" then it's DOA for anyone except most tech users

From what I've seen, they've significantly changed their signup process to push unauthenticated users to a default feed and to create an account by default on their largest instance which is a massive win for getting new accounts. This is a good change

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

#377

Post by johnnyanmac »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #350
Barrin92 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

>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.

depending on the kind of OS project, that may be more of a boon than a hinderance. There is always good talent put off by some factors in life, but there are always a lot more actors (some bad, some simply ignorant) that may make the project more of a strain than a collaborative effort.

----

I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush. Its much more annoying to log on and read the day's messages, but the number of relevant messages may be in the dozens that take 10 minutes to skim, not thousands that takes a part time job to parse. But even then it makes sense; for those super large OS repos, there are in fact people doing it as part or full time jobs

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

#378

Post by johnnyanmac »

Sophira wrote: post #314
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.

It already is indexed, though. Any member of a server can run a search over the messages. Granted, it's not a particularly great search, but it's there.

Indexed to the public, I imagine they meant. And you can't enter a server (and therefore search a server) without creating an account first.

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

#379

Post by johnnyanmac »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #336
CrimsonCape wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is a proprietor-centric subject-specific usually-public chat room with a medium-length lifespan. Longer life than a chat window, shorter lifespan than a 2008 web forum. Where else do you get that? Thinking Discord is "appealing" is not the right way to look at it's popularity. The reality is more organic, the younger generation was exposed to discord through gaming and Twitch streaming and learned a natural w…

> Discord is much more "you must be here participating to have a voice" and if you leave, someone else becomes the authoritative voice. More democratic, more humble, less belligerent. And shutting out everyone who has a job or other responsibilities that prevent them from keeping up with the discussion flow 12+ hours a day. I've never heard of "perpetual forum dwellers", but Discord (and Slack, and yes, IRC too) is a…

>I've never heard of "perpetual forum dwellers"

oh I certainly have. We call them moderators often, but there are definitely power users who you will see comment on almost every post in a particular group.

And since we're on the topic of Reddit here: well, you will definitely see the abyss stare back if you look into how many subs the largest moderators run.

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

#380

Post by kafkaesque »

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…

Here is an idea: forums are easy to build. What if people got back into them and just hosted them on their domain and then there was a webring attached to all forums like sites were back in the 90s, except there would now be a main site that would serve as a directory of forums divided by interest. so everything would be owned separately: the directory and each forum, but all connected through a webring like it was before. It would "decentralize" the Web in some ways (except for there being a directory).
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