The SV buddy economy in a nutshell. More traffic from Google to Reddit and Quora.
Reddit is taking over Google
111–120 of 349 posts
Re: Reddit is taking over Google
#112The relationship between Google and Reddit goes beyond just improving normal web search for Google - it's actually symbiotic. Because Reddit has horrible search, the best way to search Reddit content is actually using Google's indexing instead. Every time the Google algorithm feeds Reddit, it's feeding itself with more '...reddit' queries.
Further, I feel the role subreddits are playing is not too different to the role curated directories used to play in sorting and filtering the web ecosystem for Google when it’s algorithm was considered good. So while there is a lot of user generated content, i feel the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content.
So my theory follows: the Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation. The Google algorithm only works well when Reddit is applied to it, because Google supplanted, or ignores the other places it happens on the web. Or worse, they've promoted and paid attention to unauthentic content curation through their SEO and 'trusted' sources initiatives.
Re: Reddit is taking over Google
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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('.…
What do you mean the hide it now? I still see it in the URL?
This is what I see https://v.redd.it/pzma14ni23vc1 for post titles, while comment link https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1c6h...
First one is also dynamic, so next ~day its different breaking one of the fundamental features of HTML - :visited link color.
Re: Reddit is taking over Google
#114> 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…
And of course, this is only because the spammers filling the web with shit were focused on the greater web. If Google makes Reddit a major search result for regular searches, that shit hose will naturally begin to focus on Reddit as well, until eventually Reddit's quality content is equally hard to find, and then presumably the cycle will repeat with a new platform.
Yes, that is why I would much rather Google promote Reddit than forums in general. If they did the latter, it would just encourage SEO spam to move from generating fake blogs to generating fake forums full of AI discussions, and cause product spam to focus even more on posting in forums (which is already a problem).
The current arrangement requires a two-step search to find good forums on a subject, then search those forums for my question rather than have Google directly surface content from the forums when I search for my question. But the extra effort is worth it to keep forums from becoming SEO targets.
Re: Reddit is taking over Google
#115Earlier 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 say things like this, but the subs I frequent largely seem fine. I'm sure there are bad actors somewhere in there, but they don't seem prominent to me. > every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula companies. Okay, if it's every single one, show me all the formula company inundation in r/daddit. Should be easy if they're absolutely everywhere, like you say, right?
I felt that way until the other day. There was a post that got upvoted, seemed wholesome and innocuous, and then eventually someone pointed out it was borrowing material from an earlier post. So I go to check, and sure enough, the pattern of posts by the parent poster is very inhuman, to put it one way. Strings of reposts of the same thing to many many subs in a short period of time, over and over and over again.
I wouldn't go so far as to say reddit has been taken over by bots but I've started to wonder more and more about it.
I generally feel like things have subtly but noticably changed for the worse since the exodus but I can't name a replacement in general except for some topic specific forums here and there.
On the bright side I do think the new UI has improved noticably. I still revert to the old site often but the new site is better than it used to be.
Re: Reddit is taking over Google
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ that the political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.
The day after election day 2016 in the US, it was actually possible to post non-leftist comments/articles in /r/politics. Basically, the mods and bot owners hadn't been given their new marching orders, and didn't know what to do.
Re: Reddit is taking over Google
#117I will never understand why anybody still uses Google as their search engine.
Re: Reddit is taking over Google
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Nobody is saying bot/shill accounts don't exist. Just that they aren't literally everywhere and in insane numbers . Also, it's about the distribution of the bots between the subs: are they mostly on the huge main subs, or do they also expand to the 10,000 person niche subs? If 1 formula company has 1 reddit bot that posts 1 post every month in every parenting subreddit, is that considered a bot infestation? How many…
Thank you, this is what I meant. I am well aware they exist but anytime I mention maybe I use reddit to do research before a purchase - everyone acts like not a single human even exists on there.
Re: Reddit is taking over Google
#119Do not worry, Reddit just had a IPO (or is having?), so soon enough it will be just as useless as Google.
Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too.
Not to mention google has a head start with dejanews. Reddit is just an over-glorified USENET. When google purchased dejanews all the did wzs ruin it instead of using it for decent information.
FWIW I am seeing more posts on USENET these days and many providers are blocking all posts from google groups. Google threw away a good opportunity by breaking dejanews.
Re: Reddit is taking over Google
#120To 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…
It's mind-boggling to me that Google didn't create a spec to work with special partners whereby they could get syndicated data in a format that was easy to ingest, and easy for their partners to produce. Lighting dollars on fire just to serve up pages to Googlebot, when you could just periodically dump a journal of updates to Google, is just crazy imo.
On edit: if only there were some way to do some kind of really simple syndication of your data.