361–370 of 1001 posts
Just a heads up if someone is searching reddit for product reviews. I believe most of them are inauthentic. I worked in marketing for several companies and we always had some budget for whisper marketing aka shilling. There are third party agency specialized in shilling on reddit and making it all look authentic.
Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…
In my experience, the forum experience is far from dead, but it's effectively impossible to surface in a search engine - any search engine - unless you know the name of the forum. Oh, and the content must also be "fresh". If the content isn't "fresh" (which most of the best forum/blog posts are not), nobody shows it anymore. I can search for a specific blog post using a verbatim quote, but the result (if it exists) i…
It's interesting, and quite concerning, that Reddit has cemented its position as a key repository of useful information on just about everything just as its drive towards monetisation really kicks into gear. It's concerning because, as part of that monetisation strategy, Reddit is becoming increasingly walled off and anti-user. I am sure I am only one of many long-time Redditors who have vowed to stop using the site…
It's very interesting to me as somebody's who's been making and burning Reddit accounts since before the Digg implosion. 15 years ago, I trusted what I saw on Reddit when it came to things like products: If I came across a post on the best can openers, I had some certainty that people were just sharing their opinions on can openers. Now I don't trust a single damn thing I see on that site.
Yes, Reddit isn't perfect, but I've been hard pressed to find better options.
It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and whatever signal is there is just SEO spam t…
The problem begins and ends with the conflict of interest that Google both sells ads and selects search results. If they didn't have a vested interest in people visiting sites with their ads on them, they could decimate the number of spam results.
Search for "carbon monoxide" on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Google serves you an entire page about carbon monoxide poisoning, and recent news stories about carbon monoxide poisoning. You have to scroll through a lot of junk to get to Wikipedia's entry on "carbon monoxide". Bing and DuckDuckGo do a serviceable job telling you about the substance CO. You cannot search "carbon monoxide" to learn about carbon monoxide,…
The only difference is that Google also gives me links to Canda and Québec govs links (where I live) while DDG is all American links.
DDG is absolutely not better at giving me a chemistry lesson than Google is in this instance, they're both all about poisoning, and to be honest it makes ample sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
About the "dead internet conspiracy" - I've worked in writing how-to articles for a fairly large "help" website. They paid very little attention to the quality of the articles. I was paid for each piece and thus had about 30 minutes to write an article and later integrate feedback from internal review. Otherwise the payment became too low. The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on t…
How can you be sure that you're not a bot?
I've noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending reddit to my queries. There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals. At least going with a community site ther…
Those are infuriating. I hate to see ACTUAL content creators having their livelihoods stolen this way. Why wouldn't Google filter out the worst offenders? It takes literally one minute to get a nice list of a dozen imitation sites that nobody would miss. Maybe Google feels a little inhibited from 'choosing the winners' for all but the largest cases?
It would be a winning battle, since it is less work to blacklist than to make a high scoring site.
I guess Google Search internally is a mess. Maybe they have no clue what they are doing or have some really bad directors and lower managers messing stuff up.
Maybe there are so much blackbox ML called from 1000s of Perl files that the engineers don't understand what is happening.
Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
Any idea what reddit's valuation is currently looking like? I have long been surprised they havent been acquired .. I assume for sure they have had plenty of offerss in the past