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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

#261

Post by plonk »

uLogMicheal wrote: post #160
moi2388 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think affiliate deals should be banned. I hate it that much. Whilst you’re at it, van advertisement without consent. You can use the kids argument if necessary.

So you want to live in a world where only companies with massive ad budgets breakthrough to end users? The ad empire only strengthens media/big app lock in.

I want the ads to be clearly labelled and only accessible when I've asked for them. Wasn't that the idea of Google AdWords? Show people results ranked by relevance, and insert a few related sponsored products at the beginning with a different presentation.

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

#262

Post by whimsicalism »

lamontcg wrote: post #192
unshavedyak wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good question. Regardless of Twitter, Kbin and Lemmy (and maybe others?) will be even more important for ensuring they get indexed properly. The organic/real nature of Reddit comments (at least those not astroturfed .. heh) were valuable to search. We (devs) need to make sure Fediverse stuff provides that value. At least in my view. Is there something Mastodon/Kbin/Lemmy might be doing that could cause poor in…

Pretty sure Mastodon doesn't allow indexing because that can be used to brigade users and they're trying very hard to actively avoid creating the dogpiles that twitter almost actively incentivizes.

Does not seem to be a worthwhile tradeoff to me. Twitter is also not really well-indexed.

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

#263

Post by kpaoneios »

mintplant wrote: post #203

I've been bumping into this a bunch trying to research different neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., for an upcoming three-month stay. A lot of useful info is locked up in r/washingtondc right now, with much of it missing from Google's cache and the Wayback Machine. I still support the blackouts—I used to mod a default subreddit—but I wasn't expecting this particular effect! (Tangentially, anyone know how the Mount Ve…

Where in Vernon Triangle? There's a big gradient between its eastern and western half. The western part, closer to downtown, has lots of restaurants and shopping, but it can feel a little dead further east. In general, an office-y vibe, not much green space.

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

#264

Post by shagie »

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…

This also displays where the federation that mastodon uses, has difficulty.

If a rural post office closes (they do from time to time), unless you're using a very old "rural route" style postal address ( https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28c2_021.htm ), your address doesn't change when a post office changes.

Additionally, if you happen to live next to a person with unsavory views, the post office will still deliver all your mail to you.

When a mastodon instance shuts down unexpectedly (it also happens from time to time), you need to start up a new identity somewhere else and your address changes.

If your neighbor on an instance becomes problematic you may find that your messages aren't visible to others anymore as other instances start defederating from the instance that you are on.

For situations where people say "well host your own...", for most of the populace, this is similar in practicality as staffing your own post office.

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

#265

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

supernikio2 wrote: post #83
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 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…

When I was researching some DVD menu stuff a couple of years ago I was able to read through long dead forums from 2002-2005 via google and get almost all of the information I needed from there.

When I was trying to resolve an issue with my hacked PS3's BluRay drive a few months ago I was able to deduce the solution from a fairly terribly maintained wiki from 2012.

When I was trying to reverse engineer a board game app from 2018 a few months ago I was barely able to find any information because the official Discord banned such discussions and the unofficial Discord didn't seem to exist anymore.

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

#266

Post by jtode »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #194
ajayyy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did. The mobile app by default signs you up on mastodon.social now

It's one of those battles you can't win: Ask people to choose up front, new users balk. Assign a default, the existing crowd absolutely riots about centralization, and half of everyone doesn't even notice the change anyways.

The difference there is, they're wrong about it being a centralizing move, because the user retains the right to move on at any time now or in the future. It's just a matter of continuing the conversation until it sinks in, I had to do it with a very forward-thinking friend who I only learned in that conversation, had no clue about FOSS stuff at all. I really did have it in my head that everyone who got on the internet also figured out how the internet works just by being here, but of course not, they've been using platforms that protect them from the real internet...

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

#267

Post by medellin »

TrackerFF wrote: post #126
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 still use a couple "old school" forums, but I have to say - the reddit tree format is just so, so much easier. It is impossible to de-rail a thread, and there's a certain level of anti-spam and self-moderation mechanism to the reddit format. The older forums still need some hardcore moderation, or else many threads become unreadable. Nothing worse than when two users start arguing, and the thread turns into shit. B…

Hard to derail a thread when almost no meaningful conversations take place outside of tiny subreddits.

Most of reddit is just parroting the same complaints over an over and using any content to justify their “opinion”.

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

#268

Post by plonk »

dv_dt wrote: post #11
bufio wrote: post #3

The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.

The stupid part is that profits are really not optimized by the enshittification profit campaigns - there is so much incompetence in isolated C-suites making these decisions.

Reddit's profits seem to have exploded along with its awful redesigns, see [1] and [2].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/reddit-charity/

[2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/reddits-ad-revenue-e...

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

#269

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

sleepytimetea wrote: post #249
SpacePortKnight wrote: post #33

I noticed this too when I was trying to search for local opinions like affordable clothing in netherlands and for general recommendations like cloud storage with execellent file management. Without reddit, outdated generic blogs with affliate links show up. They are just advertisement in disguise and not the genuine opinions which I'm looking for. In a way this shows the value of Reddit. Even with their awful UI and…

I search for reviews of DIY tools and all Google shows me are review sites that are just thinly veiled affiliate link farms. I even read a post somewhere about a guy boasting he has SEO optimized his review sites to show up at the top of google searches and he makes a bundle on all the Amazon affiliate links people follow. For me, the solution is not Reddit but Youtube - luckily, Google can now link you directly to t…

Video based solutions for many things are deeply ineffectual as they'll become outdated rapidly and are difficult to re-edit to add in missing context following publication

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

#270

Post by [deleted] »

throw7 wrote: post #252
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…

What is the appeal of discord? I've tried to multiple times and to me it's just ephemeral... something closer to irc then a web forum. The onboarding and UX is horrid (or I'm just an old dude... which is true :)

[deleted]
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