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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

#381

Post by johnnyanmac »

Solvency wrote: post #341
Nakroma wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

it's not impossible. And ultimately many discord groups will try to have channels dedicated to keeping a list of guides (usually some google sheets maintained stuff) that are slightly more publicly visible. But it still comes down to the will of the people to maintain that and make is accessible.

Main barrier with your approach is that I'm not sure how scrapable discord is. It (to my knowledge) never had an API that did more than let you automate posting and maybe scan recent comments to reply to.

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

#382

Post by johnnyanmac »

toastercat wrote: post #327
onedr0p wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. 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…

>But who is to say that one day Discord won't start enacting limits on search history? The enshittification seems inevitable, in my opinion.

If it's inevitable, the service doesn't matter. YCombinator can one day do to HN what Reddit did to itself, but I'll still enjoy the community while it lasts.

It's better to work more on a "good enough for now but keep backups in mind" state rather than "there is nothing perfect so I won't go anywhere" state. If your mindset is the latter, why value online communitie at all to begin with?

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

#383

Post by johnnyanmac »

kirso wrote: post #371
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…

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.

Still open to any alternatives. But as we saw from the thread earlier in the week, none of the answers seemed to have achieved that network effect yet.

No real point in an indexable community if the community has no knowledge.

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

#384

Post by johnnyanmac »

Ralfp wrote: post #271
bena wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It usually gets contained to a branch however. You can choose not to engage with that branch and instead start your own.

But 95%% of attention will go to the "top" branches which are usually memes and "dumbass marathons" were people are trying to keep the original joke going.

Compared to how most of the attention in a traditional forum will go to people trying to respond to the TC/OP? Even in cases where 4-5 pages in the TC already resolved the issue?

The only benefit for a forum is that it "bumps" a topic when you participate in it, so you can keep a topic alive. But that isn't too difficult for a threaded style forum to replicate. That just wasn't how Reddit wanted topics to work (nor HN, in our case). Reddit never even implemented a way to subscribe to a topic despite a 3rd party extension having a feature for over a decade.

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

#385

Post by johnnyanmac »

George83728 wrote: post #328
bena wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It usually gets contained to a branch however. You can choose not to engage with that branch and instead start your own.

When you have to collapse a dozen worthless discussion trees to find one that is actually discussing the topic instead of spamming lame reddit narwhal memes, I think it's fair to call the discussion derailed.

Compared to scrolling through a dozen pages of users arguing over the same first comment topic?

Maybe it's better to say "it's easier to mute de-railings" then say it is prevented. one or two clicks compared to a dozen page loads and scrollings.

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

#386

Post by johnnyanmac »

moffkalast wrote: post #256
TrackerFF wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also most old forums I know were ran by some guy on their spare hardware that could break at any moment or be shut down on their whim, as most eventually got. Reddit is at least bulletproof in that sense, even if the mods go full regard they still can't destroy any actual data and it can all be reverted by admins. Nobody wants to host anything, because it costs money. Even reddit no longer wants to be the internet's…

So what's your solution? forums just die as a concept because no one wants to host text?

TBH I think reddit's hugest shot in the foot was that they DID want to host everything. For a decade the site was fine pointing to youtube videos and Imgur albums, but at some point they decided to bring all of that into the site.

> even if the mods go full regard they still can't destroy any actual data and it can all be reverted by admins.

it can, yes. But will they bother? What kind of sacred knowledge is really kept from some random post on r/pics that was made 5 years ago that got 100k points, especially when it is reposted every few months anyway?

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

#387

Post by johnnyanmac »

dynamorando wrote: post #351
lamontcg wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

social networks are a disaster. Many news websites used to have their own dedicated forum space, but they all died down over the decade, or moved to Discord/Reddit. It's just that big a headache.

Hosting user generated content is very costly. If not in server hosting, then in the emotional toll of moderating that forum and making sure it's not spammed to all hell, or worse. Bad apples ruin the barrel, as usual.

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

#388

Post by johnnyanmac »

smallerfish wrote: post #291
jtode wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[false quote narrative removed, I had names mixed up] Not in the slightest. You see, you can use mastodon.social for exactly as long as it suits you to do so. If you're the type who will simply never wrap your head around federation, stay there. Sorted. If you figure it out eventually, you can take all of your content and migrate it to whatever new instance you like. No hassle, no corporation making it difficult beca…

> If you're the type who will simply never wrap your head around federation, stay there. Sorted. So, 99% of users will stay there, and another 0.9% for the network effect of interacting with the 99%. Right?

Sounds that way. If nothing else, if the main network does collapse, you can make instructions for how to get people to jump off that instance.

Much smoother migration than this Reddit issue here.

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

#389

Post by aurareturn »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #301
aurareturn wrote: post #76

We're going to get more Quora results, huh? Please come back Reddit and save us. Quora results are the worst. I can't believe how much management ruined Quora.

Was there a time when Quora was good? I've been thinking of it as "Stack Exchange for arrogant, tedious bores" for as long as I've been aware of it.

I think 5-6 years ago, it was good. I enjoyed using it and experts wrote some amazing, no filter, content you can't get anywhere else.

From my experience, Quora failed because:

1. Quora decided to automatically mass generate fake questions. Someone genius at Quora saw that the number of questions correlated with engagement/traffic so he/she thought let's just mass generate questions for people to answer. Inevitably, this led to just pure spam. It's like Quora decided to spam itself.

2. Overtime, users figured out cookie cutter, feel-good, often fake news answers received many upvotes and Quora boosted those answers up. This led to an insane amount of garbage from users in India.

3. Quora decided to use every dirty tactic to get people to login/register and download their apps such as hiding content behind prompts, using unkillable popups, etc. Just like Reddit now.

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

#390

Post by johnnyanmac »

capybara_2020 wrote: post #214
willio58 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this not a centralizing measure? This is where things fundamentally break down for me.

I am curious, why don't you like centralization? It seems like no matter the crowd, people need centralization. Atleast to begin with, then they are ok breaking off into subgroups. Like what happened with reddit. You start on the popular frontpage. Then the longer you stay, the more subreddits you start using.

historically speaking, I don't like putting all my eggs in one basket. We've seen sites rise and fall, some fall from grace and others outright shut down. And often times, no one is prepared enough to move. In many cases they may not even care about the lost knowledge and move on in life. Sometimes I do care tho and I spend way too much of my time trying to find any data hoarders who may have also cared. This is a huge hassle.

So in theory, a decentralized network should solve this. If one part goes down, you host another instance, migrate, and have that new instance rise, with minimal impact to your community since all of this is happening under the surface. They may change their URL, but they will still feel like they are on their favorite site, hopefully with most of the people intact.

>Like what happened with reddit

Yes, a great example of why I don't like centralization, given current times. While I support the blackout, if there was some important bookmark to a piece of content that I needed, I may not be able to access it. If reddit was federated, I coudl simply clone those important posts to a new instance ahead of the blackout and keep on keeping on. Maybe have some way to redirect the URLs as well (I'm not too versed in how configurable these instances are).

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