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The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

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Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#161

Post by Quarrel »

hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

A big part is that a lot of the internet isn't available to google anymore.

Lots of good forums just have a robots.txt with "Disallow: /". Google can be a pain. People use DMCA in flagrantly illegal ways, etc, so lots of places just opt out of being easily found.

Then, as others have said, there are the discord etc, or irc style, that have never been very searchable, but have lots of good content.

It is fracturing back to more like it used to be?

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#162

Post by bjohnson225 »

masklinn wrote: post #44
MiguelX413 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would just be wanton destruction of information. Scorched Earth

It’s also stupid, reddit is not going to IPO on the back of its long tail of recorded knowledge and google search results. The site would likely be better if they did, as it’d incentivise heavy moderation and on site content production, but that’s not /r/all at all.

Selling content to OpenAI and anyone else building a language model is a potentially large revenue source for them.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#163

Post by Keyframe »

mentos wrote: post #31

Doesn’t this illuminate an opportunity for Reddit? Close the doors and invest in Reddit search monetized with ad placement like google has?

Or an opportunity for google to buy reddit? Seems google knows how to monetize and knows how to search. They do already have one huge successful online community (youtube). Yeah, I don't have much faith in google management and buyouts either, but maybe..?

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#164

Post by shswkna »

Humans built this wonderful common structure, where we can all communicate boundlessly.

The huge benefits only last briefly for humanity, until our inherent nature causes it to degenerate into a mess. Everybody goes back to doing their own thing.

Sounds like the Tower of Babylon from the bible.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#165

Post by orange_fritter »

willio58 wrote: post #106
hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

I think what's happening with Twitter and Reddit is actually a good thing in that it's exposing the failures of centralized networks. The thing is, these failures aren't big enough yet for people to jump ship and I think the main problem is none of the decentralized social networks have provided a solution that's better. Mastodon is theoretically a better version of Twitter, but normal people get lost the moment some…

I agree that decentralization would be great for social media because anything successful would have to solve some interesting problems that would push social media forward as a tool.

Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, email etc all have fairly complex vocabularies for curating your experience:

Domains, Subscriptions, Hashtags, Likes, Subscriptions, Downvotes, Bans, Replies, Subreddits, Groups, Posts, Retweets, Follow, etc.

These concepts caught on because they were presented in a gradual, simplistic way, even though they represent the workings of a complicated organism.

Basically what I'm saying is that Federation may be one more layer of complexity, but the vocabulary is already present for users- they've had a pretty long tutorial on social media. 99% of social media sites are aware that user growth requires removing friction and that includes typically dumping people into a "default" area, then allowing them to customize their experience. I think this kind of funnel would be necessary for federation, even though a "default experience" is kind of the antithesis of federation.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#166

Post by dfxm12 »

chrisrogers wrote: post #128
supernikio2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient…

Sounds a bit like IRC to be honest.

It's different in that IRC is designed & understood to be short lived real time chat. Who cares if I can't find that type of content via Google? Discord is being used as a permanent info repository, like a replacement for discussion boards, wikis, etc. This is the type of info I want to search for.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#167

Post by dale_glass »

black_puppydog wrote: post #121
dale_glass wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting easier to counteract though. Software development is easier than ever, CPU power and bandwidth are quite cheap, and there are working federated structures like Mastodon. There's no reason why Reddit couldn't be turned into a federated system as well, in fact it almost is one as it is. Eg, just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto…

> just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto-banned from somewhere if you post in a subreddit they dislike. That feels like a very incomplete implementation of federation, to say the least. Being able to defederate is one part of that, but "just make alts for the various mutually defederated subsets of subreddits" seems like a pretty unpractic…

That's Reddit for you, the actual site doesn't really serve the needs of many of its users, so they had to invent workarounds like "run a bot that auto-bans people that post in r/placewehate".

But the actual dynamic of that to me seems to resemble what you get under federation. It's just that Reddit doesn't let people do it easily, so weird workarounds are needed.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#169

Post by samstave »

delfinom wrote: post #4
bioemerl wrote: post #2

I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google to try to start to prioritize non reddit user content on the internet again. Web forums have been suppressed by their results for ages now and Google's choice to do that has been a big part of what killed the internet.

They didn't suppress web forums, they instead went to prioritize SEO factors that of course SEO spammers maximized to abuse. Of course the Google solution was to prioritize reddit because people were searching for " reddit" due to said SEO spam.

I posted this a few days ago, and in-line with your thoughts ;

-

I use OLD+RES for MY consumption and data density - if you dont know how to configure these together to create a much faster, and more aesthetically pleasing (to me) UX - then that sucks.

https://i.imgur.com/gdDawWz.png

https://i.imgur.com/jlTJGaT.png

So much more pleasant and quicker - especially with hover - I dont even need to click links

https://i.imgur.com/jDvjQwM.jpg

Which of the following do you find pleasing, its personal opinion, so choose what you like - I prefer old.

These are the same page, the only diff is old. vs www.

https://i.imgur.com/mnl5pCb.png https://i.imgur.com/JfFZMQX.png ---

So I just tested this again ; This is just btwn www.reddit and old.reddit, just now - notice the difference in content placement?

https://i.imgur.com/HtJhXqQ.png https://i.imgur.com/xm6DAP3.png <-- old (ads more subtle - but still there) none of that click-puke in the UI though.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#170

Post by toastercat »

chrisrogers wrote: post #128
supernikio2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient…

Sounds a bit like IRC to be honest.

I've seen some IRC channels archive their chat as search-able HTML pages that are also indexed by search engines. Wish Discord servers would do something similar.
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