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Reddit is taking over Google

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Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#291

Post by szszrk »

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 literally have no idea how to open a large image on new reddit. I tried. The least amount od clicks I know to actually see it uncropped is 3 and it does full page redirects on each of them. Maybe it's ad blocker or something... Don't care anymore.

I started using both old and new reddit at the same time. Old one also has working notifications...

It's such a shitshow. I have no replacement for it, but combined with mobile app I've cut my usage by 95%. Barely post and reply anymore, stopped wiki edits and so on.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#292

Post by philwelch »

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"

Shouldn’t the Dutch language subreddit for the Netherlands be /r/Nederland?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#293

Post by TheCapeGreek »

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

I remember "Eternal September" being used to describe this behaviour on 4chan about 10 years ago (when 4chan's own userbase likely was more high schoolers).

Though the original definition seems to be about ISPs giving unfettered Usenet access in 1993, causing a similar flood of newbies everywhere.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#294

Post by eBombzor »

NayamAmarshe wrote: post #15

The only problem is bad advice that can come up quite often on Reddit. There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche community communication.

r/cscareerquestions

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#295

Post by avar »

SteveNuts wrote: post #28
NayamAmarshe wrote: post #15

The only problem is bad advice that can come up quite often on Reddit. There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche community communication.

> There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. I've yet to see a relationships advice thread where the top comment isn't "get divorced immediately" Which is scary, because these people are taking OP's comment at face value and only hearing one side of the story.

It's actually good advice. If you're the sort of person who's seeking out those narcissistic writing excersise subs for relationship advice you probably should get divorced.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#296

Post by mleo »

xsmasher wrote: post #201
gary_0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree; I wish JIRA did this. I actually asked for this feature in their support forum yers ago and got a chorus of "that's stupid, why would anyone want that?" in reply.

This is similar to when people create branches with just the Jira ID instead of using the ID and title slug as branch name. I’m often working on 3+ items at a time and need a quick way to know which branch is which; how do people that just use the ID as branch name know what the code changes are?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#297

Post by fnordian_slip »

canjobear wrote: post #256
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.

To be fair, so is augury.

Reddit often contains misinformation or useless information, but yahoo answers and quora thrive on it.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#298

Post by suby »

derbOac wrote: post #115
TulliusCicero wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say things like this, but the subs I frequent largely seem fine. I'm sure there are bad actors somewhere in there, but they don't seem prominent to me. > every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula companies. Okay, if it's every single one, show me all the formula company inundation in r/daddit. Should be easy if they're absolutely everywhere, like you say, right?

I felt that way until the other day. There was a post that got upvoted, seemed wholesome and innocuous, and then eventually someone pointed out it was borrowing material from an earlier post. So I go to check, and sure enough, the pattern of posts by the parent poster is very inhuman, to put it one way. Strings of reposts of the same thing to many many subs in a short period of time, over and over and over again. I w…

This is an irrelevant tangent, but bots reposting content which previously was highly upvoted reminds me of exponential backoff in networking. The reposting serves as an automated way to maximally spread popular content to the widest range of website visitors, until the value of additional reposts diminishes and the bots reduce their reposting frequency on that item because it's no longer hitting the highs.

It probably doesn't work out that way in practice since the karma farming bots may not be that sophisticated, but I think it's a cool idea at least.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#299

Post by poisonborz »

jijijijij wrote: post #173
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.

How is that the solution? How does it address the issue of spam?

By distributing targets. Attacking thousands of pools of a few million/100k users is both much harder and not worth it. Users joining these pools consciously will make them also more selective/aware of choice and easier to hop if they get poisoned - unlike just mindlessly joining the "default" networks. Not magic, not bulletproof, but an incomparably better internet.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#300

Post by birracerveza »

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.…

It’s incredible how the Reddit mod stereotype is not, in fact, a stereotype. I’ve been banned for some very asinine/trivial reasons, you could feel the fedora being tipped through the screen every time.

My favourite was when I commented on a post on /r/art of a naked woman, replying to a guy who was complaining that only naked women got on the front page, to which I commented with “it’s very simple, naked woman = upvotes”. I was permabanned immediately after with no reason given, so when I asked what rule I broke, I was replied with - and I quote literally - “the one you didn’t read :)”. I still have no idea what rule I broke, if I even broke one.

Now, I could honestly not care any less about it, it was just an interesting interaction because of how unprofessional it was. It is kind of understandable, given that these guys don’t even get paid to moderate a very considerable influx of content, but still, it’s a very mild example of a larger problem that spans across the whole website. You have power tripping moderators that just do whatever they feel, some of them even banning based on what subs you interacted prior, regardless of content, and some of them even moderate hundreds, if not thousands, of subs. It’s insane. And yeah, any sub that has even the slightest hint of anything political is FUBAR.

It’s almost like the moderation never evolved past what I would expect from a niche joomla forum from the 2000 with hundreds of users… except now it’s one of the biggest sites on the internet. It’s quite bizarre.

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