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Reddit is taking over Google

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Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#231

Post by Havoc »

gloryjulio wrote: post #174
asdff wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=...

You can still view the the full sized image by click and open it in a different tab. It's a bit of hassle but at least it works

They broke that too. Links to image just redirect to the Reddit UI for me

Saving it still gets full res though..for now anyway

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#232

Post by deepspace »

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.…

> I can't ready my city's sub

Interestingly, my (smaller) city's sub has quite a cozy community. There are sometimes lively debates, and we do have a few complete idiots hanging around, but for the most part, it is a pleasant place to be.

My county's main sub (r/Canada) on the other hand, is mostly moderated by foreigners with far-right connections. Yesterday's budget announcement was initially greeted by a flurry of positive posts. Less than 24 hours later, most of these had been removed by the mods, and replaced with a barrage of negative posts, obviously originating from Russian misinformation farms.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#233

Post by kevindamm »

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

> 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

Cloaked links and cloaked ads still happen on direct requests, too -- a search engine's crawlers come in a widely known IP range (or if they start using unknown or new IPs, they become known soon enough) so even spoofing the user agent of the bot isn't a reliable workaround.

I'd say the arms race is still escalating, though I've been out of that game for a little while I'm still rather sure of that.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#234

Post by encoderer »

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…

Basically we had the same infrastructure back in the day at Trulia - a dedicated “bot cluster”

We had two charges from management: let google crawl as fast as it possibly can, and don’t let it disrupt users.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#235

Post by hightrix »

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.

This is absolutely horrifying, that is the correct word to use here.

I've experienced it firsthand. Reading about a topic that I have very little knowledge about, nodding along thinking that this makes sense. Then doing some research and finding that the comment wasn't entirely wrong, but just wrong enough to cause harm to a users understanding.

It is very easy to see when it is a topic with which you are intimately familiar. Seeing people on video game subreddits confidently discuss game development and being not just wrong about game dev, but wrong about any software development practices.

If Google is really promoting Reddit comments as answers to real search topics... as cliche as it sounds, Idiocracy is upon us.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#236

Post by unclebucknasty »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #71
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 the last bastion of original content before the AI storm overruns search entirely. And likely puts reddit firmly in the the AI farm crosshairs as well, so reddit will be overrun. I think the only good content will be in archived discord channels, or obscure boards that aren't worth aiming AI farms at, but even then, it will probably get scanned and targeted. The only thing that might work is identifying AI infor…

>intentional misspelling and curse words will start to be used to "scare off" AIs and bots

If they deem the content valuable enough, I suspect they'd instead just correct for it (e.g. auto-correct mispellings; replace and/or omit curse words).

It may get to the point wherein the only way to secure content from AI ingestion is to hide it behind a paywall or otherwise make it non-public, then forbid via the TOS. There'd probably need to be court challenges even then.

I also wonder if the LinkedIn case involving scraping (wherein the ruling was essentially that public data was fair game), will be re-tested in the age of AI.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#237

Post by Havoc »

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.…

Yup. Banned from my home countries sub because I dared posting to another sub. Literally bot based autobans by monitoring user for ANY participation in subs the mods don’t approve of.

That’s what counts as moderation these days on Reddit. Parts of Reddit are still ok but others are utter trashfires presided over by power tripping lunatics that have taken over the asylum

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#238

Post by qingcharles »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #199
jmclnx wrote: post #119

Do not worry, Reddit just had a IPO (or is having?), so soon enough it will be just as useless as Google. Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too. Not to mention google has a head start with dejanews. Reddit is just an over-glorified USENET. When google purchased dejanews all the did wzs ruin it instead of using it for decent information. FWIW I am seeing more posts on USENET these days and many providers are blocking…

Can someone explain to me why the reddit leaders want the new interface? Is it because the old one can't track users as well or what? Why don't they just add trackers to the old interface? Or what's the reason?

There are three interfaces now:

old.reddit

new.reddit

www.reddit

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#239

Post by hightrix »

tensor wrote: post #147

It's a shame that the CEO started reddits downward spiral. I used to be a heavy use and definitely contributed a lot of technical comments. However, their choice to cut off people accessing content via the API so that they could both sell access to user data, and kill third party clients to force you to view their ads caused me to delete all my comments and stop using the site. I actually have no problems with anyone…

> By making reddit "closed" in this way I suspect it will very quickly degrade.

It already has. The time around the protests about the API closure saw many new subreddits rise drastically in popularity and many of these new subreddits are entirely rage-bait. The "fun and funny" front page has been replaced by "enraging and infuriating" content. You can feel the tone of comments has shifted, similar to the shift that happened in 2016 when Bernie lost.

Additionally, the amount of "viral advertising" has drastically increased. There are multiple posts, daily, with 5 figure vote totals that are simply ads disguised as posts.

Reddit's space is ripe for disruption. The next time money is free, I expect some big pockets to challenge reddit.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#240

Post by beeboobaa3 »

thinkling wrote: post #213
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

You might want to have another look. I don't visit there often, but when I look right now it's all in Dutch.

You're likely confusing it with /r/TheNetherlands, which was created after this takeover.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/ is all foreigners.

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