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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

#71

Post by willis936 »

masklinn wrote: post #45
surgical_fire wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes destruction is the only way forward.

But usually destruction is just destruction.

It's the right of each user to redact their contributions. If that's the only bargaining tool then it seems entirely reasonable to use it when the other party refuses to negotiate or even be remotely transparent about their motives. If this was really about money then why do we have such little insight into their financials? Could it be that they fleeced the investors and will lie as hard as they can to not be outed for the crooks that they are? It's the most likely explanation from my perspective.

There's no reason to prop them up. The information will be rebuilt quickly or it won't.

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

#72

Post by silvestrov »

trollied wrote: post #32
bufio wrote: post #3

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

I think curated indexes, with associated search, will come back. Yahoo! was before its time. Now we need a human-curated search engine/index that only has verified human generated content. I guess everything goes in cycles.

Problem is that the curated index becomes so valuable that money speaks louder than the quality. As long as the company is on the stock market or is made using VC money, it will result in enshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai

The only solution I can see is a mom-and-pop site like Craigslist which are owned by a family which don't want to optimize for money as they think they already have more than enough money.

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

#74

Post by eastof »

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.

Maybe the ML model is predicting that popular curated sites generally have less spam?

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

#75

Post by hourago »

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 standing service that is way more open that the rest. But the raise of Whatsapp and equivalents are challenging that. One day all our communication will depend on a monopoly. We are starting to know what would have happened if AT&T have never been split.

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

#77

Post by aezart »

takoid wrote: post #52
OptionX wrote: post #18

Protip: If you really need to see the Reddit page on a private'd sub remember Google has a cached page feature.

Where did Google move the cached page feature? I can’t find it in the three dot menu for search results anymore.

Not all pages are cached. If a cached copy exists, it'll be in the 3-dots menu.

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

#78

Post by davidktr »

no-reply wrote: post #43
OptionX wrote: post #18

Protip: If you really need to see the Reddit page on a private'd sub remember Google has a cached page feature.

Paste the actual reddit link here and it should fetch from google cache - https://cachedview.com

wow, this is extremely helpful

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

#79

Post by Tostino »

bombcar wrote: post #24
eugenekolo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google flourished because it could find forums (and blogs) and mine those, but much of that content has disappeared into Facebook and Discord (and YouTube - we must not discount how many things that would have been easily parseable blogs are now buried in livestreams and videos).

So I've been working on a side project to make a Youtube channel I watch have its content be more discoverable through text. I've had great results by scraping the Youtube transcription, and running that for a few passes through GPT 3.5 with some prompts to essentially act as an editor. The original transcription was often terrible in some spots. Just whole phrases or multiple words mistranscribed throughout. For almost all of them, GPT 3.5 was able to clean them up and restore the original meaning through understanding the context of the monolog and fixing obviously incorrect words or phrases.

I've watched through a sample of about 20 of the 3,000 videos I'm working through, and the corrected transcription really did an amazing job at restoring the original meaning from the spoken words that was hard to understand from the original machine transcription.

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

#80

Post by mentos »

tester457 wrote: post #61
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?

Somehow after all these years reddit never got their search to work. You can paste a comment word for word in the search and reddit won't find it. They're dependent on google. Also if they somehow figure out search to work, it will be ruined because of users gaming the search system with SEO. > However, the argument that Reddit can build a better search than Google is a flawed argument. And that flaw is the same flaw…

What about Reddit search quietly powered by ChatGPT4

I’m day dreaming about Reddit telling OpenAI to foot the search bill or they’ll make the case that OpenAI needs to remove all of Reddit from its training?

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