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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

#391

Post by johnnyanmac »

aniforprez wrote: post #375
Andrex wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

>I said 1% know about its federated nature.

I mean, they may not know, but they'd understand a high level overview.

I on gmail can email someone at hotmail, outlook, yahoo, or any custom business email. I can do this because email is a common protocol that is shared amongst dozens of servers. That isn't deep technical knowledge, but they would get the gist of federation there if I segway'd to it.

>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

Even my Grandma has a Yahoo account. She knows my Gmail address and can send me messages. I don't think Gmail is as synonymous with email as you think.

also as mentioned above: some 80% of people with a business email address probably knowws that there are more addresses than "@gmail.com".

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

#392

Post by johnnyanmac »

michaelchisari wrote: post #369
ansible wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... non-profit approach ... It may be a better way to go for a public forum like Reddit. Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation won't also be rife with petty politics, hidden agendas, and the usual crap. There will still be issues, and how to handle NSFW content is still going to be a big conflict.

| Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation Those aren't the problems I was expecting to solve. Those are other problems that exist regardless of funding model, because they're fundamentally social problems. A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits.

>A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits.

It also introduces a larger problem of shutting down entirely if they can't pay for server costs. That's always going to be a bigger problem than VC's.

Wikipedia only does so because it is bankrolled by universities and other institutions. And we should note that Wikipedia doesn't have to host videos, and has strict requirements on how to host images. I can't think of those places doing the same for Reddit.

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

#393

Post by rootkea »

toastercat wrote: post #295
edrxty wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord knows better, this is by design. Their investors would run screaming if they knew what was in those chat logs. The lack of searchability is their biggest defense against being hauled in front of Congress because the public just isn't aware of how much of the platform is extremism.

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.

This might sound rude but as a matter of fact, being FOSS developer I don't consider FOSS projects using Discord/Slack etc. to be worthy of my time.

I despise locking down knowledge to a walled garden.

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

#394

Post by johnnyanmac »

TheCapn wrote: post #181
eugenekolo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe that. There's still so many personal blogs by real people. They just don't show up in the first 3 pages unless you query for them very specifically. Seems most queries result in something like 30% SEO spam sites, 30% quora, 30% reddit, 10% other. Edit: I don't disagree that Discord/Youtube/Other closed gardens have taken open searchable data away, but it's not like there's now no authentic searchable…

Blogs are parallel to research papers in a sense. They're useless without peer review unless you're already intimately familiar with the source material and able to critically evaluate the contents. So Blogs are more useful when they're aggregated through a site like Reddit, where users have already done the vetting on whether the linked page is valuable. Reddit comments are invaluable to pages by adding additional c…

>where users have already done the vetting on whether the linked page is valuable.

and ironically enough, if you post your own blog on reddit to be critiqued, there's a good chance it is removed for "self promotion". Funny how that "vetting" works, huh? So you get back to "how do I make my blog discoverable so it can be peer reviewed" and we're at square 1 again.

>How much effort are you going to put in to finding which blog was the original, written by the expert and which ones are bots copying the info?

A lot if it's important. Because as is I already have to do that muckracking on reddit to see who is trying to understand or even read the article and who just wants to soapbox their tangential pet rant. tracing a source back is child's play in comparison.

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

#395

Post by johnnyanmac »

bombcar wrote: post #24
eugenekolo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe that. There's still so many personal blogs by real people. They just don't show up in the first 3 pages unless you query for them very specifically. Seems most queries result in something like 30% SEO spam sites, 30% quora, 30% reddit, 10% other. Edit: I don't disagree that Discord/Youtube/Other closed gardens have taken open searchable data away, but it's not like there's now no authentic searchable…

Google flourished because it could find forums (and blogs) and mine those, but much of that content has disappeared into Facebook and Discord (and YouTube - we must not discount how many things that would have been easily parseable blogs are now buried in livestreams and videos).

>we must not discount how many things that would have been easily parseable blogs are now buried in livestreams and videos

on the flip side, would those blogs have been created at all if they weren't financially motivated by streaming/video to provide the content?

there's a lot of discussion here about internet commuities, but this comment brings to question why blogs started to die down to begin with. At least with reddit you get clout if you share stuff (useless clout, but sometimes you just want a pat on the back).

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

#396

Post by johnnyanmac »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #345
nemothekid wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Betterment of the shared social world of the web?

are you willing to pay your own money and time for that ideal? I simply lack all the energies and budgets for that level of altruism.

Maybe in 40 years when I retire, if I still have that passion left.

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

#397

Post by toastercat »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #382
toastercat wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What I mean is that it's inevitable for a closed-source, proprietary solution like Discord. The service does matter, and there are better alternatives to Discord for online OSS communities.

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

#398

Post by thefz »

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.

As much as I try to explain this to newer generations, I am hit by the Cassandra syndrome. Nobody understands that siloing everything is bad.

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

#399

Post by thefz »

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…

> 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.

To be honest, for the good. Discord search in "discord forums" sucks so bad it's almost unusable. Let's keep using Discord for instant messaging and voice.

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

#400

Post by dmonitor »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #377
TeMPOraL wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

Take a look at Zephyr RTOS, for instance. It's all behind a fucking discord. It's a pain in the ass compared to something like Nordic Semiconductor's Devzone. The fact that I have to join a tech support channel for my job with the same profile I use to join 18+ furry roleplay servers (discord requires a phone number that can receive texts and I don't have a work phone) is a sign that something here is a problem.
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