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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

#401

Post by elpocko »

dabluecaboose wrote: post #81
bufio wrote: post #3

The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.

Enshittification was already causing reddit to ruin google results. Reddit's new garbage redesign contains other posts from a subreddit in the page. So often times you'll google a term and get a link that looks like exactly the post you want, but it ends up being a different post in the same subreddit, and the one you were looking for was just in the suggested posts for that one. Also, reddit has ruined filtering by…

> Reddit's new garbage redesign

Five(?) years in, it's still "new garbage redesign". I love it.

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

#402

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

> 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.

For values of "enormous" starting at "a dozen people".

Elsewhere in the thread I wrote about my Hackerspace experience. At the point I started drifting away from the community, we had ~100 people active at least every now and then, some ~30 present and at least occasionally active on IRC (later Telegram), and 5 people generating 1000+ messages between 09:00 and 17:00 on every regular working day. By volume, 50% could be casual shitposting, 30% interesting technical conversations, and 20% something relevant to the community - but 100% of it was a bonding experience.

No surprise that the people generating most of the chat backlog volume were also seen as the "core" / most involved participants.

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

#403

Post by plewd »

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…

> Wikipedia & sister sites. StackOverflow. I am pretty sure there is space for more open-content sites, especially ones run by non-profits.

How does this contradict the point that you're at the mercy of platforms?StackOverflow could very well go down the same route as Reddit, for example.

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

#404

Post by rightbyte »

pessimizer wrote: post #232
rightbyte wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, Facebook, Reddit etc are the tower though. Not the WWW.

No, Google, Facebook, and Reddit are the languages spoken on the WWW that annihilated all the others. Then God comes down and breaks them up. The Tower of Babel was the original silo.

Google et al. are God's punishment of our hubris? I would rather say Google is the hubris.

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

#405

Post by fennecfoxy »

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…

Ah yes, signing up to a dozen different forums. Don't want to go back to that, either.

Tbh we've kind of failed to unify software properly.

Hardware is semi unified, Apple's efforts besides, but things like Wifi/Ethernet TCP/IP, HDMI, USB C etc all tie things together decently well now (but it could still be better).

But when it comes to software...why don't we have a universal identity/login system that everyone & everything supports?

Why don't governments enforce/mandate hardware/software compatibility for (larger?) companies. It should be like "if you want to support your own custom login/identity you can but you must also support minimal x"

Wifi for example, as a standard isn't legally enforced, it's purely supported for business reasons. If Apple could get away with rolling their own that only works with iDevices I'm sure they would. But if the usage purely for economical reasons disappears, we need law to force companies to use a minimal standard for interoperability.

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

#406

Post by afroboy »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #405
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…

Ah yes, signing up to a dozen different forums. Don't want to go back to that, either. Tbh we've kind of failed to unify software properly. Hardware is semi unified, Apple's efforts besides, but things like Wifi/Ethernet TCP/IP, HDMI, USB C etc all tie things together decently well now (but it could still be better). But when it comes to software...why don't we have a universal identity/login system that everyone & e…

> signing up to a dozen different forums.Don't want to go back to that, either.

That will cost you 3 minutes if you want to ask a question, if not you don't have to sign up. in exchange we will preserve data and make it easy to search. and not make single entity to rule every community.

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

#407

Post by sacado2 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #392
michaelchisari wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| 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 v…

Reddit worked for years without hosting its own videos and even images. For many years, it was hosting nothing but structured text and links to external resources (which was its original raison d'être, in fact; discussion about external resources).

HN chose to be pure text and not embed external resources, but this is just an editorial choice, it wouldn't cost more resources to add them.

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

#408

Post by sacado2 »

calny wrote: post #248
michaelchisari wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the solution isn't decentralization, but a non-profit approach like Wikipedia. Reddit already functions entirely on volunteer labor anyways, adding venture capital requirements makes much less sense than a just-keep-the-lights-on non-profit model.

Very interesting point. It'd be a challenge to execute, but I'd be glad to see a non-profit that lets online communities discuss topics of interest, solve problems, and expand knowledge. Maybe something like that exists and I just don't realize it. Sorry to make this about AI, but it'd also be interesting whether such a non-profit makes its data fully open--i.e., for AI companies to scoop up--or has more restrictive…

The AI aspect is interesting, it could solve the funding issue. AI scooping requires a (paying) licence. Or, the paying licence would be restricted to closed-source AI models, and it would be free for open-sourcec models, thus making them much more competitive.

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

#409

Post by sacado2 »

ansible wrote: post #196
nyadesu wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the reasons centralized model works so well nowadays, nobody wants to take care of things anymore, self hosting your own apps is becoming a small niche

> ... nobody wants to take care of things anymore ... I mean, why would you? It is quite a bit of technical hassle, even for an experienced admin. There's quite a bit of cognitive load just deciding what software stack to use, even before you run an installer. And then you have to maintain it too! Compare that to less than 3 minutes of sign-up and creation of a new subreddit. It is an orders of magnitude difference i…

You're talking about late 90's-early 00's tech there (basically, LAMP architecture). It wouldn't be that hard to develop an open source, generic hierarchical forum engine that would be easier to deploy than an Apache+PHP+MySQL suite from scratch (on a dedicated Linux server that you have to completely configure all by yourself), and that would work both on a web browser and through a smartphone app.

Security would be less an issue than back then, too. We learned a lot since early PHP and early Javascript's bad practices.

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

#410

Post by sacado2 »

low_tech_love wrote: post #135
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…

And what’s worse, the contents of subreddits are incredibly homogeneous; there is no place for dissent. A subreddit named ”music” or ”films” or ”games” (just conceptually, ok?) fancies itself as the reference for that specific thing, when it’s actually just a reflection of whatever political stance the mods have (usually simply reduction to average). Outside people will see that and think ”oh nice a centralized discu…

And the public upvote / downvote system make it even worse. Soon, you're reduced to a small subset of opinion because any slightly dissenting opinion will be downvoted to hell and hidden at the very bottom of the page.

Not necessarily an issue for small communities focused on a non-controversial topic (mostly anything about jokes/memes, or very niche technical stuff), but bigger communities focusing on slightly political topics become hell. The "europe" subreddit is incredibly toxic for this reason. Not because of individual redditors, but because of the group effect.

HN doesn't suffer from this problem both because of the niche aspect and because downvotes are restricted.

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