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

181–190 of 349 posts

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#181

Post by wepple »

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…

You’d have to trust that the data being dumped was 100% identical to the actual pages users would eventually see, or you could end up with very weird (including dangerous) behavior

Of course, I know that some version of this can and does occur with classic web scraping too, but that is an arms race that a search engine can win

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#182

Post by alisonkisk »

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.

Google respected rate limits. Reddit wanted the crawl.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#183

Post by beeboobaa3 »

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.…

The /r/Netherlands subreddit has been taken over by hostile expats years ago. They ban any discussion in Dutch, forcing everyone to speak English, and will delete everything that doesn't have "international appeal"

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#184

Post by legohead »

asdff wrote: post #148
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=...

I use RES and haven't had any problems opening images or videos... actually, I've noticed they load really slowly, often times I can watch the image loading like it was 56k days. I wonder if that's because I'm using old reddit+RES.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#185

Post by empath-nirvana »

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?

The reddit front page has been an absolute dumpster fire of repetitive, ai-generated (or at least content farm generated) rage bait posts since the mod revolt a while back. I wish there were a way to quantify it, but basically all the "generation" subreddits, personal finance subreddits and "am i the asshole"-type subreddits absolutely dominate the front page and /r/popular with rage bait posts.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#186

Post by empath-nirvana »

tayo42 wrote: post #87

> It's not just Reddit. Q&A forum Quora is getting a huge visibility bump in Google search results, Why? Landing on a quora page has to be the most confusing web experience in existence right now. Quora just reminds of yahoo answers but rebranded. I can't be the only one with that association and find it hard to take seriously. Assuming you can even find the content your looking for on a quora page.

I would love if I could blacklist quora from search results. I have no idea why it's ranked so highly. It's a garbage site with worthless answers.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#187

Post by Mountain_Skies »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #142
bogtog wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Users don't know what they want" is absolutely pervasive in the tech world.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#189

Post by dalyons »

mejutoco wrote: post #141
owlninja wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that was like, 17 years ago? and imho not an unreasonable thing to get a social site off the ground that had no users. Seems pretty irrelevant to the problems of today.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#190

Post by harimau777 »

gloryjulio wrote: post #174
asdff wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=...

You can still view the the full sized image by click and open it in a different tab. It's a bit of hassle but at least it works

At least for me that doesn't work. It still opens Reddit's weird view image page.
Post reply on HN