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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

#41

Post by tayo42 »

danudey wrote: post #26
dv_dt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've said it before, but why do social media sites try to monetize through methods which provide no tangible benefits? A blue checkmark, some shitty NFT avatars, being able to badge someone's comment or post - I don't care about those things, definitely not enough to pay for them. If Reddit wanted to monetize me, give me something tangible. I'd pay $5/mo for a 'pro' tier or something if it had unlimited third-party a…

you can pay 5dollars a month for premium and not get ads along with some other minor features already

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

#42

Post by simion314 »

eugenekolo wrote: post #17
diegocg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more than the spam war...a lot of content is just no longer produced and exposed to the open web (think about how much content goes into tiktok, discord, etc and you will never get that into your search results). Google has less useful content to index, algorithms can't fix that. There is more spam only because that's the only open content that gets added massively. The winners of this battle will be the places…

I can't believe that. There's still so many personal blogs by real people. They just don't show up in the first 3 pages unless you query for them very specifically. Seems most queries result in something like 30% SEO spam sites, 30% quora, 30% reddit, 10% other. Edit: I don't disagree that Discord/Youtube/Other closed gardens have taken open searchable data away, but it's not like there's now no authentic searchable…

For me YouTube is always on the top, instead of the text pages where I can read the answer in a few seconds Google pushes me their video platform, probably in the hope of making money. I am logged in so I do not understand how those geniuses working at Google would think that videos in a language I do not know might be more relevant then text content.

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

#44

Post by masklinn »

MiguelX413 wrote: post #23
mcast wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably would be a more effective campaign for subreddits to have their users wipe all their old comments (older than 1 year) than a temporary blackout for a few days.

That would just be wanton destruction of information. Scorched Earth

It’s also stupid, reddit is not going to IPO on the back of its long tail of recorded knowledge and google search results.

The site would likely be better if they did, as it’d incentivise heavy moderation and on site content production, but that’s not /r/all at all.

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

#46

Post by dylan604 »

mentos wrote: post #31

Doesn’t this illuminate an opportunity for Reddit? Close the doors and invest in Reddit search monetized with ad placement like google has?

the realistic opp for Reddit is to charge Google access to the API which would more than cover all of the other API users. If Googs can afford to pay Apple and others to have their search be the default, they can afford to pay to crawl Reddit too

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

#47

Post by nocsi »

falcolas wrote: post #16
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.

Google's recency bias in search results hurts them too. There are many older resources which are still valid out there, but you won't find them (easily) via Google Search. Instead, you get the SEO spam which doesn't match the search as well, but is newer.

Is Google biased, or are it’s users biased? If someone is looking up something technical or diagnosing a problem, the most recent post on StackOverflow would be more relevant. Old stuff can be important, but if users searches mostly comprise recent stuff - what’s the point?

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

#48

Post by diffeomorphism »

falcolas wrote: post #16
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.

Google's recency bias in search results hurts them too. There are many older resources which are still valid out there, but you won't find them (easily) via Google Search. Instead, you get the SEO spam which doesn't match the search as well, but is newer.

Can you give an example? For many things (software, hardware, buying things,...) older resources might still be valid but dated. For more settled subjects, e.g. encyclopedic, I also have not had Google be worse than Bing.
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