Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit is taking over Google

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 349 posts

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#51

Post by commandlinefan »

JohnBooty wrote: post #41
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #31

reddit front page used to be all memes and humour ...now it's all US bizarro world politics and weird interpersonal sexual TMI stuff.

That's got to be Reddit's biggest challenge. The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise. Quality of discussion is on par with YouTube comments (ie abyssmal) A lot of the individual, smaller, focused subreddits are extremely valuable. But, nobody would know it at first glance.

> The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise

I have a really, really, really hard time believing that the ultra-uselessness of the default subreddits is anything other than a _deliberate_ attempt on the part of the reddit admins to make them that way.

Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ that the political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#52

Post by antisthenes »

khalladay wrote: post #46
antisthenes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "fend off" ? Reddit is the one generating fake content to prop up their engagement numbers and make it look like they didn't take a giant hit from last year.

got a source for that?

Look for usernames that look like 2 words from a dictionary, then hyphen, then 4 digits.

Almost always, it's a ragebait post that looks like it could be written by a specialized AI. Or some low-brow high-upvote take.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#53

Post by jedberg »

gary_0 wrote: post #50
jedberg wrote: post #29

To this day, my most public contribution to reddit is that I wrote the code to put the title of the post in the URL. That was done specifically for SEO purposes. It was pretty much the only SEO optimization we ever did (along with a few DOM changes), because shortly after that, Google basically dedicated engineering effort specifically to crawling reddit. So much so that we lost the "crawl rate" button in our SEO adm…

> That was done specifically for SEO purposes. As a human I also like it when I can see what topic a URL points to (eg. when it's being shared on HN, or pasted into source code, etc). URLs that just have an opaque ID or terse filename are not very user-friendly.

Oh yeah, it turned out to be great for humans. It just happened to be the one thing that we specifically did for SEO first. Funny enough, it turns out that most "SEO optimizations" are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans".

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#56

Post by Solvency »

haunter wrote: post #16

I still prefer reddit most of the time. Front page (default) subs are highly manipulated (especially anything news, politics, current things etc.) but for hobbies, video games, and sports it's still the best site. Video game discusssions especially because unlike Discord every tip, guide, and walkthrough is archived and searchable. And for sports mostly because it's _insane_ how quickly you get highlights and videos.…

every single sub no matter how niche is infested with bots or spam/schill accounts.

every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula companies.

every fan niche like comicbooks is full of bot accounts in training (building up karma with low effort posts and repeat copy posts from previous days from other posters).

everything, everywhere.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#57

Post by deltarholamda »

jedberg wrote: post #53
gary_0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That was done specifically for SEO purposes. As a human I also like it when I can see what topic a URL points to (eg. when it's being shared on HN, or pasted into source code, etc). URLs that just have an opaque ID or terse filename are not very user-friendly.

Oh yeah, it turned out to be great for humans. It just happened to be the one thing that we specifically did for SEO first. Funny enough, it turns out that most "SEO optimizations" are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans".

>SEO optimizations are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans"

I'm gonna embroider that on a throw pillow and use it to hit webdevs.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#58

Post by gary_0 »

jedberg wrote: post #53
gary_0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That was done specifically for SEO purposes. As a human I also like it when I can see what topic a URL points to (eg. when it's being shared on HN, or pasted into source code, etc). URLs that just have an opaque ID or terse filename are not very user-friendly.

Oh yeah, it turned out to be great for humans. It just happened to be the one thing that we specifically did for SEO first. Funny enough, it turns out that most "SEO optimizations" are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans".

I see. I suppose in a perfect world, devs would just follow general best practices and search engines would reward that, and nobody would be looking for evil voodoo to boost traffic. And I would have a pet unicorn!

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#59

Post by bun_terminator »

haunter wrote: post #16

I still prefer reddit most of the time. Front page (default) subs are highly manipulated (especially anything news, politics, current things etc.) but for hobbies, video games, and sports it's still the best site. Video game discusssions especially because unlike Discord every tip, guide, and walkthrough is archived and searchable. And for sports mostly because it's _insane_ how quickly you get highlights and videos.…

I don't understand how they still have mods. Reddits boss hates them. Everyone else, too. They have 100% a negative impact. The site would be wonderful without moderation as that's already covered by the voting mechanism.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#60

Post by [deleted] »

dageshi wrote: post #42
chomp wrote: post #8

> Responding to a post on X, Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said users not only like seeing "forum content" but that they "proactively seek it out." Nothing cures my imposter syndrome more than seeing so many Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening here. People aren’t tacking Reddit to queries because they particularly like Reddit or because they want to see user generated content, it’s…

That's presumably because very few people will make new websites on subjects when they can make a youtube channel instead. The web has been hollowing out for a while, AI has just massively increased the speed of that process recently.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN