Reddit is taking over Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#141

Post by mejutoco » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 8:47 PM UTC

owlninja wrote: post #61

Solvency wrote: post #56

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.

The founders admitted themselves to start traction on the site with a multitude of fake users.

All the "just asking questions" posts pushing certain narratives in every regional subrredit are also quite noticeable.

For me that is proof enough, but other people might have different standards.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#142

Post by zelphirkalt » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 8:47 PM UTC

bogtog wrote: post #133

rifty wrote: post #112

The 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 ro…

> Because Reddit has horrible search Sorry, but I've heard this so often, and I just don't know what people mean. I use the search whenever I need to get something from a specific subreddit, and it just seems fine. Also, why would a major website like Reddit have such a bad search? Aren't mostly fine search algorithms freely available?

One of the big mysteries of the software industry. Not specifically singling out reddit here, since I don't even search on reddit: Why can we not simply have search functions, that at least optionally do a substring search? If I had a $currency-unit for every search that fails at this basic thing, I wouldn't need to work any longer.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#143

Post by Workaccount2 » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 8:51 PM UTC

adamomada wrote: post #89

Klonoar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I describe Reddit to people is that you have zero clue if you’re arguing with a 13 year old who discovered $x concept this week. (Or a bot) If you move through the site with that understanding - and personally, using the old interface - it can still be bearable. I’m not the biggest fan of the company itself these days and I hold out hope that something else can take off, but I’ve not been impressed so far.

I have a theory that reddit was pretty decent when it first started because the majority of the site users were at least university or college students/age. Nowadays the average age is high school, and probably trending to grade school These are the people who are influencing the Google search user at large now. We’re fucked

There was a long period where the internet was intimidating and unattractive to regular people. It acted as a strong filter for determining who the people that frequented early sites where.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#144

Post by spacemadness » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 8:52 PM UTC

UberFly wrote: post #21

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.…

Good take and I agree totally. I visit reddit daily and avoid the front page like the plague. I'm sure I miss a lot of interesting stuff but the time-killing rabbit holes and concentrated venomous vitriol I don't miss.

The front page reads to me like a tabloid written by teenagers. Absolute trash.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#145

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 8:56 PM UTC

csa wrote: post #74

bun_terminator wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#146

Post by Magi604 » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 8:57 PM UTC

I use Reddit and 4chan equally. They are like the Yin and Yang of the internet.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#147

Post by tensor » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 9:00 PM UTC

It's a shame that the CEO started reddits downward spiral. I used to be a heavy use and definitely contributed a lot of technical comments. However, their choice to cut off people accessing content via the API so that they could both sell access to user data, and kill third party clients to force you to view their ads caused me to delete all my comments and stop using the site.

I actually have no problems with anyone using my public comments for training AI or other purposes, that's why I make them public. But changing the contract on me and denying access to my data and instead crow about selling it, while ALSO forcing me to view ads unless I pay a very steep fee? No freaking way.

By making reddit "closed" in this way I suspect it will very quickly degrade. Already many communities are gone or vastly less useful due to the better and more knowledgable posters leaving for the same reasons.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#148

Post by asdff » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 9:02 PM UTC

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…

Nowadays the reddit engineers perverted the link system for old reddit users. New reddit users link to posts using a syntax that for old reddit users returns the submit a new post page.

Also, just to twist the knife further, old reddit users can't open full resolution images hosted on reddit anymore. Click a link and you get thrown to this url:

https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/media/nice_hat/?url=...

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#149

Post by aeyes » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 9:07 PM UTC

ivanjermakov wrote: post #124

mark242 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess they wanted to be crawled because the Google crawler is easy to identify/block/rate limit.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#150

Post by nosecreek » Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 9:08 PM UTC

ivanjermakov wrote: post #124

mark242 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are there specific laws that deal with rate limits? Honest question - I get that something too fast could be considered DDoS, but so long as it’s below a certain threshold wouldn’t it be okay (not sure how said threshold would be determined)?