The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

dale_glass wrote: post #94

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…

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…

    Software development is easier than ever

Yeah but also no? The skills required to be a basic "full stack" developer have multiplied to the point where I think that term is on the verge of obsolesence just as "webmaster" was before it.

There is of course nothing stopping anybody from simply writing PHP like it's 2005 even though it's 2023, but going against the currents has its own set of costs.

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

#222

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

pradn wrote: post #108

Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist. The open web is truly dying. I believe in the open web, but it seems like an ideological position, not something most people want to participate in. (Just like decentralization!) There's a few reasons: 1. Putting things on the web means your words are public, so they can be archived forever, and anyone can look at them. Do I want employers looking at my high school b…

> Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist.

Then it should index the internet that does, and stop trying to convince me that there are only 10 pages of results for any possible query.

> The open web is truly dying.

Of starvation, because the search indexes don't index it, preferring to index the part of the web that is aggressively marketing itself (and buying and showing ads.)

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

#223

Post by SoftTalker » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

lost_tourist wrote: post #180

mmh0000 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this exact experience, I had an email server running on the same ISP for 15 years, got great delivery. I got a new ISP, blacklisted nearly everywhere. IP reputation is super hard and time consuming to build. So I made the switch to Fastmail, and honestly, it's the best descision I made. Migrating was super simple, and they've been rock-solid for me. I didn't realize how much time I was wasting administrating an…

How much does it cost for a low to moderate traffic (annually) "your own domain" server?

$50/year for fastmail. One of the very few things I pay for online other than my ISP service.

A VPS is cheaper if you actually want to run your own, but the cheap VPSs typically have very bad IP reputations.

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

#224

Post by bamfly » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

EscapeFromNY wrote: post #9

My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.

For sure. They threw in the towel around '08 or '09. The prior years of yo-yoing between front page results containing ~60% webspam and 0% webspam settled into a permanent 60%, and they evidently just heavily downranked and/or started ignoring low-traffic sites to keep it from growing to 100%.

Their shifting from text-only "ethical" ads to being a more-ordinary web ad service, and putting ads inline with results, roughly corresponds with that, IIRC, which probably isn't a coincidence. Your ad-"results" probably get more clicks if much of the rest of first result page is crap. Many of the webspammers probably funnel money to Google one way or another, now. It screwed up their incentives to keep fighting that battle, I'd guess, which is likely part of why they stopped putting so much effort into it.

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

#225

Post by emaro » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:32 PM UTC

michaelchisari wrote: post #145

mrtksn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are now reduced to be a Subreddit. I don't know if anything else was possible, the IT need for communities is about the same and it makes total sense to have those on one place. It solves the infrastructure problem, it solves discoverability problem, it solves the user account management problem and it is all "free". It comes at the cost of fragility, true, but as always convenience is the king.

Maybe the solution isn't decentralization, but a non-profit approach like Wikipedia. Reddit already functions entirely on volunteer labor anyways, adding venture capital requirements makes much less sense than a just-keep-the-lights-on non-profit model.

I think opinions are harder to curate/moderate than knowledge. If you have one single organization, who's going to decide what you're allowed to say?

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

#226

Post by vagab0nd » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:32 PM UTC

pradn wrote: post #108

Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist. The open web is truly dying. I believe in the open web, but it seems like an ideological position, not something most people want to participate in. (Just like decentralization!) There's a few reasons: 1. Putting things on the web means your words are public, so they can be archived forever, and anyone can look at them. Do I want employers looking at my high school b…

Regarding 1: I firmly believe that in the future, what you say doesn't matter. What matters is what you can prove you've said.

What's the difference between the following two? (a) You say something and someone takes a screenshot of it, and (b) Someone just conjures up a fake screenshot of you saying something. These are indistinguishable. With LLM and SD, these fakes will become easier and easier.

The solution is some crypto that allows you to do two things: (a) Be able to prove that you said something, and (b) later revoke it, such that your prove doesn't work anymore and there's no trace it was ever used.

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

#227

Post by SoftTalker » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:33 PM UTC

vxNsr wrote: post #158

DirkH wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is stunning to me that Mastadon still hasn't come up with a simple onboarding solution to sidestep the issue of "instances" I completely agree with you. Mastadon even loses techies like me due to the decision fatigue of having to pick instances before I can even start exploring.

What’s shocking is everyone can wrap their heads around regular country post offices, emails, in general distinct entities interacting, but lose their minds when you tell them about mastodon. Just tell them it’s email for twitter. Just like you can interact with anyone who’s email address you know so too with their mastodon handle. The only real difference is that everyone also publishes all their “emails” for anyone…

The name itself is a problem. It sounds heavy, ponderous, and prehistoric.

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

#228

Post by NineStarPoint » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:34 PM UTC

bioemerl wrote: post #8

delfinom wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They definitely suppress web forums. There are a few I frequent that are prevalent on bing but nowhere to be seen on Google. Maybe it's just a difference in phrasing. Promoting clean SEO companies is suppressing web forums.

I think the primary issue is that no matter what Google prioritizes for, the SEO "blogs" will always switch over to attempting to look like it. Forums, whose goal is just people talking to each other, are never going to end up at the top of the list compared to people actively attempting to game the algorithm. Even if Google started actively promoting things that look like forums, SEO people would just make things that look like forums but are hyper optimized for whatever Google was looking for.

The only way around this is for google to start making a white list of known good forums, but people get (understandably) really pissed when a company of google's size starts actively choosing winners and losers instead of just tuning their algorithm.

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

#229

Post by SoftTalker » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #91

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…

Honestly I’d LOVE to revert to the old phpBB or vBulletin forum days There’s literally no reason why not and it’s never been cheaper to run

Those are way too heavyweight. They are clunky to use.

The old Joel on Software boards were the best I've seen for a web forum, along with HN.

Even email/listserv groups are way better than phpBB.

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

#230

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Jun 14, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

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…

    the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit.

How "open" were those blogs and forums, though in a functional sense?

Instead of an untrustworthy/unreliable corporation like Twitter or Reddit owning a data and community.... we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs and forums. "Your" "community" might be gone in the blink of an eye because the guy running it threw a hissy fit, or forgot to pay his hosting bill.

All other things being equal, the current near-monoculture does suck worse. But the old days sort of sucked too.