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Reddit is taking over Google

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Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#121

Post by pixl97 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #90
post_break wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately many subs are set up so that if you go against the hivemind, you get instabanned, or close to it. There seem to be many mods on Reddit who have nothing more rewarding going on in their lives, or else just cherish that small bit of power over others.

I mean, yes and no. At the same time there are power hungry mods, there are limitless hordes of complete asshole users that are only there to cause problems and not engage in legitimate debate.

Forums really kind of suck once they get over particular sizes and never ending battles erupt.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#122

Post by autoexec »

JohnBooty wrote: post #39
wredue wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would state that I have very little in the way of good objective experience with Reddit opinions. But at the same time, I have zero good experience with everything else. Reddit comments are genuinely better, but not by much! One significant problem I find with Reddit users is that they tend to be unable to see past their purchase. Hordes of fanboyism. Even more Stockholm syndrome.

One significant problem I find with Reddit users is that they tend to be unable to see past their purchase. Hordes of fanboyism. This hasn't been my experience at all over 10 years on Reddit, but I can very much believe many subreddits are that way. Given Reddit's decentralization and breadth it makes sense that two people would have very different experiences.

I remember when "place" happened. It was a collaborative art project where for 72 hours users could place a single colored "pixel" on a blank canvas then had to wait 5 minutes before they could place another. Communities formed plans, and battles for space on the canvas were fought.

Given the freedom to create something unique and beautiful together what did reddit ultimately come up with? Mostly a collection of corporate logos and copyrighted characters along with memes and flags. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY)

"Hordes of fanboyism" seems fair.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#123

Post by chinchilla2020 »

letmeinhere wrote: post #14
Loughla wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly certain that pr companies figured reddit out about 5 years ago. It's still pretty good for niche products and hobbies, but as a recommendation machine, is pretty garbage.

Have any subreddit mods been exposed as paid corporate shills? I'm a bit surprised that I haven't noticed signs of that for subreddits with an obvious commercial angle. Maybe moderating is such a thankless slog that brands can't pay people to do it ;)

r/gaming has a series of "I made a game" ads that the moderators allow users to run promotional organic posts

Some of the headphone and electronics subs seem to have promotional accounts.

There are frequent issues in gaming subs with youtubers bribing mods to promote their content.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#124

Post by ivanjermakov »

mark242 wrote: post #120
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…

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 si…

Also, isn't this illegal? Either Google respected rate limits (which I doubt) or it was a form of a DDoS attack.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#125

Post by ammar2 »

rasz wrote: post #113
jedberg wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Saying they hide it might be a bit of a stretch, that URL just 302's to the comment link with the title-in-url as usual. I guess you're referring to being able to right-click and copy the url directly?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#126

Post by mattmaroon »

Somehow Reddit has avoided being overrun by bot/affiliate spam and has become a better source of certain types of information. I don't know how. Perhaps some combination of the voting system (effectively outsourcing getting rid of junk) and algorithms.

I'm building a photo booth and an example from today: if I search Google for the best budget PC with discrete graphics cards, everything other than the Reddit link is garbage/affiliate spam. But a few clicks on the Reddit links and voila, real options.

Google itself seems either unable to stop their site from being full of garbage, or they just don't care because what are you going to do, switch to Bing?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#127

Post by croes »

jmclnx wrote: post #119

Do 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…

Reddit IPO'd on March 21st

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#128

Post by LorenDB »

bloopernova wrote: post #107
LorenDB wrote: post #27

I'm not sure why you would promote Quora in search results. They lock non-members out after viewing just one or two answers, and the content on Quora is generally viewed as worse than Reddit (not that Reddit is particularly great...).

Obligatory recommendation to use Kagi. You can block sites from appearing in search results. Or you can just reduce the importance of them so they show up less.

I already use Brave search, so I'm not too worried personally. In fact, I haven't used Google as a default search engine for many years.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#129

Post by Human_Robot »

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?

[dead]

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#130

Post by rurp »

IshKebab wrote: post #23
xcrunner529 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Google is mostly useless these days aside from a Reddit search because everything is fake.

It's fine for things that people don't have a commercial interest in manipulating. But yeah for buying mainstream products (laptops, TVs, hoovers etc.) it's completely useless. Even Amazon reviews are better (at least in the UK; I understand they may be worse in America). Tbh I would not be surprised if spammers start posting LLM generated comments with affiliate links on Reddit. Maybe they already do.

These days I see mostly SEO spam articles for any topic that has even a modest amount of search traffic, commercial or not. Like if I search for how to do some random DIY home fix, or lookup information about a sort of niche topic, the front page will be 10 terribly written (likely automated) articles that all summarize the exact same points as each other. Clearly they have all copied from the same source. It's crazy how hard it has become to get Google search results from a human that put a bit of original thought into something.
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