The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by rafark » Fri, Jun 16, 2023, 4:11 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #428

rafark wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend that I hate the most is blogs without comments. I don’t know when it started, but a few years ago I suddenly noticed most blogs started to turn off their comments section one by one. I don’t know why they’d do that. Interacting with the author or other people was half the fun. Now there’s just silence. It’s what made me stop visiting blogs altogether. I used to browse a bunch of the same blogs everyday and…

It isn't the 1990s anymore. The vast majority of comments on blogs will be spam, bots or, in the extreme rare case of an actual human reader, raving lunatics. The chance of an actual human being reading your blog and leaving a sincere comment in good faith is so low that you can safely assume it will never happen.

I know spam is a ver big deal, but that wasn’t my experience. I wasn’t around in the 90s so I don’t know what it used to be like. But just a little over half a decade ago the blogs I used to visit still had people interacting with each other and it was common for posts to have meaningful conversations. I miss that a lot.

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

#432

Post by reincoder » Fri, Jun 16, 2023, 4:40 AM UTC

dingnuts wrote: post #305

a_humean wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the intial onboarding is a bit confusing. The appeal is for small private and semi-public communities. You are right that it is more like IRC than a web forum, but it serves much the same purpose for many people with its server channels and channel threads. I'm a member of a small community about 25-30 people that know it each from either university or work. We chat about games, politics, software development…

I host a Mattermost server for this purpose. It does what Discord does, just shittier, buggier, fewer features, and I have to pay a web host to have somewhere to run it. But it's -actually- private and our community owns the data, instead of whoever buys Discord next week. I wish there were more self-hosting offerings to compete with Discord. RocketChat, Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix/Element all leave something to be…

Discourse has a chatroom feature now. Although, Discourse is first and foremost forum platform and the chat is not the main appeal.

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

#433

Post by _Tev » Fri, Jun 16, 2023, 11:16 AM UTC

jjk166 wrote: post #116

falcolas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can filter results by time pretty easily. It's not perfect but it eliminates most of the SEO crap or current event stories.

In mobile version you can't do it easily. Also the UI is very basic, almost like google didn't want you to use it.

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

#434

Post by enugu » Sat, Jun 17, 2023, 10:35 AM UTC

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…

The cause seems to be software from private companies gets more resources for features, feedback, maintenance etc.

If that is correct, the obvious solution is generating some substantive funding for important open source projects which develop software and protocols for billions of users.

Of course, there are organizations already doing funding for open source projects, but maybe moving the scale of funding by a few orders of magnitude can help.

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

#435

Post by kirso » Tue, Jun 20, 2023, 1:18 AM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #383

kirso wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much this. You can't search discord but its a byproduct of a self-serving goal of the platform. Perhaps we need more projects like Reddit but without the VC money.

Still open to any alternatives. But as we saw from the thread earlier in the week, none of the answers seemed to have achieved that network effect yet. No real point in an indexable community if the community has no knowledge.

True, perhaps its still yet to reoccur in the future. I also didn't find the "decentralized" alternatives appealing.

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

#436

Post by zbuf » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 2:31 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #414

zbuf wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't throw in the towel, switch ISP. You can do everything right but are being judged by the history of your IP address with it's neighbours in the same AS block.

> switch ISP To what? Switching ISPs is what got me into this mess in the first place. Also, I really like Linode but for this one issue.

There's lots of smaller VPS and VM providers -- even local IT companies. Mythic Beasts and Bytemark have been good for me.

If you want to use Linode for your CPU time and disk, probably there are providers for outbound SMTP that you pay a small amount for to use as a smarthost.