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Reddit is taking over Google

businessinsider.com

71–80 of 349 posts

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#71
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.…

It's the last bastion of original content before the AI storm overruns search entirely.

And likely puts reddit firmly in the the AI farm crosshairs as well, so reddit will be overrun.

I think the only good content will be in archived discord channels, or obscure boards that aren't worth aiming AI farms at, but even then, it will probably get scanned and targeted.

The only thing that might work is identifying AI information vacuums by their distinct behavior and serving them counter-fake AI content, while user access patterns (as referenced in the above comments about Google-specific reddit robots infrastruction) get the "real stuff".

I almost wonder if intentional misspelling and curse words will start to be used to "scare off" AIs and bots from content, and that will become the new codewords for actual information. Like people online in China these days.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#72
post #50
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.

Nowadays reddit hides it, I use this to revert back to full url

    for (let value of document.querySelectorAll('.first a.bylink.comments')) {
     let href = value.closest('.top-matter').querySelector('.title a.title.may-blank').href;
     if (href != value.href && (
      href.startsWith('https://www.reddit.com/') ||
      href.startsWith('https://v.redd.it'))
        ) {
      console.log (href, value.href);
      value.closest('.top-matter').querySelector('.title a.title.may-blank').href = value.href;
     }
    }

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s what Reddit autogenerated usernames look like

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#74
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.

> I don't understand how they still have mods.

This makes me think that you’ve never been a mod of an active forum or subreddit.

Without mods, popular forums will be spammed and/or gamed into oblivion. Most voting mechanisms are trivially easy to manipulate when potential earnings are involved.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#76
post #42
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.

I don't get how people have so much time to watch amateur YouTube.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#77
Glad to see this. This has helped make finding organic writing easier. I don't care if the data isn't accurate but I want to read about other people's feedback on stuff and not the aggregated fluff crap that flows up on search engines now.

Even then, I loathe quora and ignore it entirely.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People always say this but no one ever proves it.

At this point especially considering the article we’re commenting on, it would be amazing if there weren’t spam shills and bots - they go where eyeballs go

There is an enormous vested interest to not let this become public and should make you question the concept that conspiracy can’t exist somehow

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#79
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.

As a mod of a larger subreddit this comment makes me laugh. Good mods are invisible. In fact I do everything in my power to not use my power for bad, and only to help people out.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#80
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.

> The site would be wonderful without moderation as that's already covered by the voting mechanism.

Tell me you've never moderated anything popular without telling me you've never moderated anything popular.

Even 4chan has some moderation these days.

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