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Reddit is taking over Google

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Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#221

Post by asdff »

letmeinhere wrote: post #14
Loughla wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly certain that pr companies figured reddit out about 5 years ago. It's still pretty good for niche products and hobbies, but as a recommendation machine, is pretty garbage.

Have any subreddit mods been exposed as paid corporate shills? I'm a bit surprised that I haven't noticed signs of that for subreddits with an obvious commercial angle. Maybe moderating is such a thankless slog that brands can't pay people to do it ;)

There's plenty of signs if you take a look. E.g. most subreddits concerning an interest with products being made will have recommended products and such. Is this an organic, community made list of tools that is regularly vetted? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You can imagine how valuable it would be for your company if you convinced the niche forum in your space that you are the "buy it for life" option or some default no wrong move choice.

Sometimes there will also be discussion posts "hey anyone know a good x for z?" written by a shill account where other shill accounts come in with product recommendations, supported by upvotes from other bots over any other evidence.

Kind of an interesting thread on the subject in the marketing subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/vf5wmv/do_brands...

Basically people are saying yes, marketing on reddit is very effective, especially if you aren't obvious and using /u/mybrandname but /u/randomuser123.

This user is talking about starting a B2B company for this sort of subtle organic reddit posting, after having apparently a lot of success and thinking they can handle more clients than they currently do:

https://old.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/1c05w7c/thoughts...

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#222

Post by paulddraper »

mark242 wrote: post #120
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…

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…

That syndicated data format may or may not be up-to-date.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#223

Post by purpleblue »

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.

Another huge problem is the extreme left wing political bias almost everything has on the front page. I'm a centrist but the violently left views of everything on the front page is really offputting and I used to love reddit.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#224

Post by brightstep »

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.

That’s true, and it’s still more reliable for useful information than the top results on Google.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#225

Post by LordKeren »

isthatafact wrote: post #216
CryptoBanker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you proposing pays for content moderation then? Reddit clearly can’t afford it

Reddit has demonstrated that its moderation system is not stable and results in garbage. Try some different systems, for example: 1 -- The moderators pay for the privilege of moderating. or 2 -- No moderators at all. Let me decide what I want to see via some kind of interface to an "AI thingie".

While the market valuation isn’t what it used to be, let’s not be too quick to brush off the fact that Reddit has a market cap of 6 billion dollars.

I’m not sure you’re going to convince many stakeholders that completely uprooting the golden-goose of free moderation for the site is a worthwhile venture.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#226

Post by MikePlacid »

CryptoBanker wrote: post #65
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.…

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 trust some guy - he could serve as my personal moderator, but a mild one compared to the current regime - my list #1 will never be interfered with. Cheap?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#227

Post by germinator »

nosecreek wrote: post #150
ivanjermakov wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, isn't this illegal? Either Google respected rate limits (which I doubt) or it was a form of a DDoS attack.

Are there specific laws that deal with rate limits? Honest question - I get that something too fast could be considered DDoS, but so long as it’s below a certain threshold wouldn’t it be okay (not sure how said threshold would be determined)?

In the US, CFAA prohibits causing "damage", which includes "impairment to the integrity or availability" of data or systems. But as with many other things in law, it boils down to the court trying to assess your intent, whether you could've reasonably anticipated the outcome, and what that outcome ended up being.

There's no law that says "you can't send more than n packets per hour".

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#228

Post by oniony »

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…

Hmm, what's that on your belt?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#229

Post by [deleted] »

wepple wrote: post #181
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…

You’d have to trust that the data being dumped was 100% identical to the actual pages users would eventually see, or you could end up with very weird (including dangerous) behavior Of course, I know that some version of this can and does occur with classic web scraping too, but that is an arms race that a search engine can win

[deleted]

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#230

Post by interroboink »

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=...

Here's an explanation: https://old.reddit.com/r/help/comments/15kwhgy/why_is_every_...

It's not due to RES, as I understand it. Rather, redirection to "old.reddit...". Maybe RES does that too, but often it is a separate extension.

EDIT: One fix is to change the request headers, to not accept HTML (only images). More info here: https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/138xrw4/ireddit_links...

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