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Reddit is taking over Google

businessinsider.com

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Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#251

Post by strix_varius »

dudus wrote: post #97
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.

True. But it's guaranteed to get worse. With genAI on the rise it'll get harder and harder to spot real from fake. It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse. But it will definitely be composed of more synthetic data than it is now.

> It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse.

It will be worse. If you want endless streams of synthetic text from an AI, you can already get that, today. What you can't get is a conversation with a human who has first-hand experience... Except via forums like reddit.

Given how trivial it would be for me, an amateur AI tinkerer to make a reddit bot that nobody can tell from a human - with an agenda subversively hidden in contextual responses - I can't imagine that even reddit knows the full scale of its bot problem today.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#253

Post by yieldcrv »

Havoc wrote: post #237
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.…

Yup. Banned from my home countries sub because I dared posting to another sub. Literally bot based autobans by monitoring user for ANY participation in subs the mods don’t approve of. That’s what counts as moderation these days on Reddit. Parts of Reddit are still ok but others are utter trashfires presided over by power tripping lunatics that have taken over the asylum

Throwaway accounts are the greatest

I have an account all about some particular vice and honestly its been well received

There are VERY FEW ad hominem attacks. Its like people treat you better when they know they cant hurt you in comparison to people that try to have a post history tip toeing around topics and subs.

I think it’s symptomatic of what you see with other extreme personalities, they wind up getting so many followers that either agree with them or amplify them that they keep up that character. But this reddit version actually lets me navigate mainstream subs easier too, and ppl that try to suggest I cant have an intelligent opinion because of my post history get jumped on for being unprogressive or something. It’s amusing, and freeing.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#254

Post by everforward »

MikePlacid wrote: post #226
CryptoBanker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you proposing pays for content moderation then? Reddit clearly can’t afford it

Allow each reader to have his own moderation. Basically, I want to be able to enforce 3 rules: 1. There are people I want to read always. 2. There are people I want to read never. 3. I want some random sample from all other people, in proportion from 1:1 to 1:1000, depending on my current mood. The server should keep my list and serve me text according to it. Also it should allow readers to exchange such lists. If I…

I have no idea relative to paying moderators, but I'm pretty sure that destroys caching. Each person having their own server-side settings means basically every request has to be served live.

I can't imagine advertisers would be a big fan of that either.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#255

Post by strix_varius »

poisonborz wrote: post #32

Great, so now spammers will target Reddit that much more. Give a year, few months even to see way worse Reddit content overall. The solution is federated search, federated forums.

I actually think the solution is a web of trust. I know real humans that I trust the opinions of. I would love to be able to search that distributed network with a rank that decreases with distance.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#256

Post by canjobear »

stevebmark wrote: post #200

Google’s AI results show “According to a Reddit user…” now, including for things like health / wellness searches. It’s horrifying. Reddit is a cesspool of the commons. It’s an information garbage dump where uninformed people are upvoted by uninformed people. It’s the Yahoo Answers of our day.

My experience is that the quality of answers is mixed, but uniformly vastly better than Yahoo Answers.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#257

Post by Octokiddie »

The irony is that when you know the result is on Reddit, it's far better to use the Reddit search bar. It's not even close. More than that, I've found myself just going to Reddit search rather than Google. Ditto StackOverflow.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#258

Post by unclebucknasty »

chomp wrote: post #8

> 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…

>so many Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening here.

Oh, I think they know. Their assertion that they're "just giving people what they want" in pointing to Reddit is likely PR for "we know our search is awful so we're hardcoding some cheats".

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#259

Post by StressedDev »

asdff wrote: post #203
piafraus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't ready my city's sub because it's always the same tired politics posts instead of "what are some good restaurants" or "here is a photo of a building I've never seen before". I find it funny, that I am completely opposite. I would very much prefer the local news/politics/crime, as this directly affects me and my life - e.g. don't go to the highway today, because protestors block it. Vs. the boring similar pho…

Usually the local news/politics/crime data slants a certain way you could probably guess. E.g. I used to argue with redditors about how they assume the local metro is nothing but homeless people and you will get mugged, citing my years and years of use with no issue and seeing plenty of seemingly sober and straight arrow people on my commute, but no. It goes against the prevailing narrative that everything is irredee…

One of the biggest problems with forums, reddit, X (Twitter), etc. is you don’t know which users know what they are talking about. In your case, you knew about the local metro because you used it. People who claimed it was a disaster obviously never used it and yet there was no easy way to determine which person was knowledgable and which person was making things up or repeating what they had read else where.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#260

Post by StressedDev »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #183
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"

What is a Karma farm?
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