reddit is good for customer reviews of nieche products, not much else
Reddit can't build a better search engine
141–150 of 289 posts
Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently have noticed a business creating fictional threads on reddit (multiple on different communities) working as an AD to sell something. Example: „What is the cheapest best cooling for cpu now?” All discussions point to product that more experienced users know its crap. But still the wrong product is at the top with most (botted) upvotes. Companies realized that ppl look for opinions on reddit -> that created de…
This problem will only get worse as language models get better, making it cheaper to flood a forum with bot comments that look more and more like real humans. Moderators and users alike will spend far more time and resources weeding that stuff out, while it takes far fewer resources to post that stuff in large volumes. The only way to counter that is to have some kind of account verification requiring 1 account per p…
Reddit accounts for this already with friction like account creation dates or minimum karma. Seems to work decently
Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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how do you expect the producers of the content you consume to continue putting out the content you want to consume if they're unable to monetise that content?
I think the honest answer is that one expects to be in the minority that uses adblock -- and for the content to be monetized by the majority that don't.
Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
SponsorBlock might be of interest. > Skip sponsorships, subscription begging and more on YouTube videos. Report sponsors on videos you watch to save others' time. [0] [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
how do you expect the producers of the content you consume to continue putting out the content you want to consume if they're unable to monetise that content?
Behind a privacy respecting paywall if they want. Let the market decide if their content is worth some dollar amount. Advertisement is never the answer, IMO.
Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
SponsorBlock might be of interest. > Skip sponsorships, subscription begging and more on YouTube videos. Report sponsors on videos you watch to save others' time. [0] [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
how do you expect the producers of the content you consume to continue putting out the content you want to consume if they're unable to monetise that content?
Seriously. I don't get why people expect that they should pay nothing to watch their favorite content creators. Sure you bought an LTT water bottle, but make no mistake Google is a business, YouTube is a business and they are not providing these videos out of the goodness of their heart. If YouTube ever doesn't make sense (algorithmically, financially, or through whatever metric Google decides is important) Google will cut it.
Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine
#146Marketer perspective: you can not build a communication tool you find useful that won't end up being used to make money. It will get figured out. I could go into a bit more philosophical angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think it's much simpler to consider the following: between politics (where once any division in population is found, it becomes valuable instantly), classical business marketing…
What if you explicitly target it with respect to the money? Most of the crap on Google is going to be monetized sites. If you just block/downrank all the sites with e.g. ads, then the profit motive for spam goes down - the more value you extract, the less value you are able to extract.
It's an improvement, even though it's going to be gamed as well.
That said, I have no idea how you would do it. More specifically, 1) I see almost everything as an ad, 2) you're going to get an extremely biased internet and logistics/technicalities of the project are hellish.
1) you downgrade all blogs with ads. All journalism (if they advertise their own stuff that's still profit motive and ad, right?) and all company blogs. All social media (that have over 100mln users right now). Also all blogs that are meant to promote author as an authority to get them gigs down the road, I'm guessing. You will be left with more overt PR and
2) organizations who can afford to not have profit motive in any form. That's just unsustainable for almost everything. NGOs are still asking for donations. That's going to be mostly politically motivated messaging and tiny % of people who can afford to just post for free cause they like to (god forbid they lose that position and setup patreon).
Audience allows for attaching marketing, and that allows to attach all content production to business (and other cases I mentioned). Again, I like the idea in principal, but 'lets just get the money out of the system' was tried in many different contexts and the same structural issues resurface.
Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
how do you expect the producers of the content you consume to continue putting out the content you want to consume if they're unable to monetise that content?
I think the honest answer is that one expects to be in the minority that uses adblock -- and for the content to be monetized by the majority that don't.
I'm in a restrictive country that's extremely difficult to get stuff to, I don't have the standard payment methods and instead all these internal only services.
There is absolutely no point in me watching those because I couldn't buy anything even if I wanted to
Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine
#148“most of the sites back [when Google was created] were indie websites, which did not care about SEO and money and created websites for sharing information.”
This is a very bad misinterpretation of the history. At the time, we’d already passed the inflection point of most websites being just for sharing information (that probably happened in 1995). Traditional search engines like Lycos and AltaVista were being overwhelmed by SEO spam. I remember having given up on most searches for anything remotely commercial.
What made Google so revolutionary was that it worked around that with a very different algorithm that relied on incoming links and site reputation. Of course the spammers figured that out soon enough, and Google worked hard to stay ahead of things for a long time.
But now what we’re seeing is that Google has captured itself in the SEO game, and the incentives to continue investing in providing a high quality search engine are mostly gone. Google makes money off of showing you ads, and getting you to click on ads, and getting you to use other Google services that show you ads. And the ads they sell are a lot smaller and more tightly controlled search space than the spammy web. And they are more concerned with who you are and what you’ve been up to than what you are actually looking for in the moment.
I agree that Reddit won’t be replacing Google as a general purpose search engine, but eventually Google will become so user hostile that alternatives will emerge. It’ll just take longer than we want.
Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
SponsorBlock might be of interest. > Skip sponsorships, subscription begging and more on YouTube videos. Report sponsors on videos you watch to save others' time. [0] [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
how do you expect the producers of the content you consume to continue putting out the content you want to consume if they're unable to monetise that content?
I for one could do without a large percentage of the content made for monetization.
Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
how do you expect the producers of the content you consume to continue putting out the content you want to consume if they're unable to monetise that content?
Seriously. I don't get why people expect that they should pay nothing to watch their favorite content creators. Sure you bought an LTT water bottle, but make no mistake Google is a business, YouTube is a business and they are not providing these videos out of the goodness of their heart. If YouTube ever doesn't make sense (algorithmically, financially, or through whatever metric Google decides is important) Google wi…
I don't think people expect anything for free but I don't want to pay with getting bombarded with ads. If their business model is not viable then they have to find a new one. Just as we can't expect content for free they can't expect me to sit there and look at adverts out of the goodness of my heart. If at all possible, I will find a way to block ads out of my mind as much as I can.