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Reddit is taking over Google

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Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#271

Post by unclebucknasty »

StressedDev wrote: post #264
unclebucknasty wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> intentional misspelling and curse words will start to be used to "scare off" AIs and bots If they deem the content valuable enough, I suspect they'd instead just correct for it (e.g. auto-correct mispellings; replace and/or omit curse words). It may get to the point wherein the only way to secure content from AI ingestion is to hide it behind a paywall or otherwise make it non-public, then forbid via the TOS. There…

Criminals, SPAMers, foreign governments, PR firms, unethical corporations, etc. are not going to be stopped by a terms of service document. This will ignore it and keep on spreading disinformation. If AI helps them do this, they will use AI to do it.

I'm referring to protecting content from ingestion for AI model training.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#272

Post by m3kw9 »

The problem with Reddit or social media in general is you cannot tell when a post will be AI in the near future. Hence the Elon panic, he knows it will be the death of it. I foresee power going back to traditional media from social network where info is heavily vetted before getting posted.

CNN now a days has better info than social media, which is way more likely to be fakes.

Reddit will also need a way to prevent bots as AI will find a way past checks. Likely they will charge if Twitter is successful in charging

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#273

Post by kevincox »

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.

Off the top if my head I can think of two reasons.

1. Doing stemming is hard with substring search.

2. Substring search is more expensive. (Bigger indexed and more joins/merges)

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#274

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

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 this [extension][1] with firefox. It makes "open image in new tab" actually open the image in a new tab.

[1]: https://github.com/nopperl/load-reddit-images-directly

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#275

Post by asdff »

im3w1l wrote: post #270
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=...

I just find it hilarious that old.reddit is one version, new.reddit is another, and www.reddit is yet another.

Just a few years ago they had i.reddit.com as well, which I loved as a mobile interface to be honest...

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#276

Post by shirro »

Always disliked Quora. Full of dark patterns to draw people in, scores far to well in search results and often felt like very low quality results. Felt not much better than a bot driven SEO farm. Reddit was only as good as the subreddit mods and community but at its best the better subs felt more like a genuine community than an attention farm.

All of these businesses seem like a terrible foundation to build real communities and I despair at the loss of independently run forums, mailing lists, news groups, blogs, rss feeds, web rings etc. Over easy access to capital ruined the web IMO. Too many companies had access to funds to build unsustainable businesses based on half arsed ideas. They over ran the more organic/amateurish/complicated alternatives reducing diversity and then either folded, got absorbed or turned to nasty practices to become sustainable.

In relative terms the ratio of genuine organic content on independent platforms to content in closed platforms and generated content seems to have declined precipitously. It is possible there won't be enough content to sustain an ad driven search business. Search turning to machine learning allows them to synthesize results in the absence of indexed primary sources which can be impressive and perhaps useful in some situations but isn't what a lot of searchers want. When it comes to connecting with real people and communities I don't know how an LLM is going to entirely make up for a dying independent web.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#277

Post by Tiktaalik »

some_random wrote: post #177
verzali wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Niche subreddits are still good, but above a certain size they all seem to become awful. Moderation is a major problem - not just the unpaid nature of it, but because so many of the moderators are terrible at their jobs or just sold out to some other cause. I've found myself drifting away from Reddit in the past year and now actually spend more time on dedicated forums (I was surprised by how many are still out there…

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.

Just like every other political system IRL :)

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#278

Post by jedberg »

the_real_cher wrote: post #162
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…

Do you use the new design or stick with old.reddit.com?

I mostly use old.reddit but sometimes use sh.reddit

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#279

Post by jedberg »

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.

It was fine because we let them.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#280

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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