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Reddit is taking over Google

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Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#241

Post by pphysch »

mattmaroon wrote: post #126

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…

> But a few clicks on the Reddit links and voila, real options.

It costs very little (to hire a firm) to embed the exact same garbage ad link in a "real human" reddit comment.

Reddit is absolutely overrun with guerilla advertisement.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#242

Post by pavel_lishin »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #212
some_random wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with mods is that normal people do not have the interest nor energy to moderate a subreddit past a certain point, so they end up getting muscled out by weirdos as a sub grows.

I briefly modded a subreddit (before deleted my account in the blackout). It was neat at fist, but then it basically became people getting uptight about everything. “Your rules don’t say we can’t posted obvious spam”, “you need a transparent process for appealing things”, “mod suck here”. Like, I don’t care enough to provide a service for a multi-billion dollar company. If you don’t like it, start your own sub.

Yep. Most people don't read the rules, and are then surprised when we remove posts or comments. Some get very angry when we don't allow them to post wildly off topic content, or outright spam. I had to make an alt account after someone started sending death threats.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#243

Post by thebytefairy »

wstrange wrote: post #219
RileyJames wrote: post #198

Just last night I was looking to jailbreak an old phone. I did a few googles and everything I found seemed really dodgy. Added reddit to the query. Got exactly the info I needed. Moved on with my life. Google has become useless. (Jail break to use frida to mitm some cert pinned apps. That tool chain is amazing these days)

> Google has become useless Yet you found it through ..... Google (I get your drift, but it's got a little "What have the Romans ever done for us" vibe. )

Right, this is exactly the feedback that google is trying addressing by elevating Reddit posts. People complained so much about needing to add 'Reddit'; now those posts are surfaced, and people here are complaining again. Truly can't please everyone.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#244

Post by jgalt212 »

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…

Indeed. Human activity is cacheable as it respects Zipf's or a power law. Spider activity is not cacheable. Most pages are GETed within a few multiples of each other.

Probably a good way to detect bot traffic is put a URL on a sitemap, and have no links to it anywhere else.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#245

Post by pphysch »

spencerchubb wrote: post #171

I've said this before and I'll say it again. As companies realize how much people like reddit as a trusted source of information, they will learn how to optimize reddit. Then it will slowly degrade just like google has.

Even before 2016 when the Trump campaign used Reddit heavily to subtly and not-so-subtly promote their agenda, Reddit has been an obvious platform for astroturfing.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#247

Post by unclebucknasty »

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…

>the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content.

I think it's 100% this. But, maybe worse. While Google is claiming they are simply giving users what they want (e.g. observing that users were adding reddit to search terms), I believe they were also getting their asses handed to them by SEO spam / gaming and their search quality nose-dived. In the last year or so I have noticed a very sharp degradation in quality, including non-user language obvious content spam taking top results.

It's almost like their algo was finally broken for good and they had no response or didn't want to invest in the continued SEO cat-and-mouse while they pivot their search to AI.

So, hardcoding to Reddit et. al. was the quick fix.

>Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation

But, it does seem that at one time it was much better, and reliably provided reasonably useful results to non-explictly moderated results.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#248

Post by saurik »

gary_0 wrote: post #50
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…

> 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.

The problem is you can't trust it: people can modify that part of the URL arbitrarily and so you think the URL has meaning, but it doesn't.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#249

Post by pphysch »

Reddit isn't taking over Google, it (and other platforms) just ate up all the bespoke forum traffic.

It's largely the same traffic (people discussing things openly on the Internet), there's just much less diversity in the domains where that discussion takes place.

Celebrating reddit for this "achievement" is odd and has little to do with Google specifically.

But I understand $RDDT needs to get pumped, etc.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#250

Post by laurieg »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #151
pixl97 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>there are limitless hordes of complete asshole users that are only there to cause problems and not engage in legitimate debate Isn't that what downvotes are for?

You'd be surprised just how much effort people put into using a message board to cause harm to others.

I was a mod on a reasonably large subreddit. One day, someone decides to post links to extreme and shocking images but make them look like regular posts. Delete, ban, move on. They come back with a new account. Delete, ban, move on, implement limits on new accounts. They would then spend months warming up new accounts, using them to write regular posts and messages, before doing the same thing. This was a thankless task and most regular users never realized it was even going on.

Then, on the other side, there were people who absolutely lost it when they felt you made a bad decision. I deleted a post asking for cash under the table work in a local sub, combined with multiple people offering what looked like clearly illegal work. Multiple regular members of the community went absolutely crazy, as if I had personally wronged them.

I enjoyed running the subreddit but I had to give up. The person who took over after definitely enjoys the power a little bit too much. That's what you get when it's a volunteer gig.

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