A Reddit result in Google might take you to a private page now
The internet got a lot worse under the reign of big search and its associated ad platforms.
Milled content has taken over. Low-quality and corrupt product reviews, fake instructions, and repeated canned text.
It’s become less possible to get good information using search engines generally. Reddit was creating a stopgap because of its vote system and, frankly, its lack of available ad revenue for business meant that the information on it was more likely to be accurate than the information on the general internet.
One way or another this was about to go away. The good information that was available on Reddit was provided by volunteers who were not valued by the C-suite of that site. What was valuable was ad revenue, and pro-business content Farm bullshit is more valuable than good information to advertisers.
Thinking the reddit blackout is hurting search is the wrong take. Modern search algorithms and the SEO services that naturally follow them are hurting the free flow of information. Particularly useful information. And as AI chatbots become more powerful, we stand at serious risk of drowning in an ocean of bullshit and not being able to use the internet for any useful research.
This whole thing has made me realize just how dependent I was on reddit for making the entire internet experience better.
Fortunately, Chatgpt was trained on data sets from Reddit and other sources, so not all knowledge is lost. But totally feel the pain, I’m going to miss reddit (still haven’t been back since the blackout - I blocked reddit at the router level to prevent accessing it accidentally out of habit)
If our hope is on ChatGPT and its friends, we are doomed.
In a couple of years there will be entire webpages automatically generated with content no human has reviewed. Not even read. And they will be so optimized for SEO, they will be the first results on most search engines.
And the content of those webpages will be crappy. Elegantly written, yes, perfect English. No grammatical errors. But it will tell you the recipe of gazpacho is done with hot spicy tomato sauce and that the acne you have can be cured by sleeping naked under the moon the second Thursday of the month.
I already miss the human-generated internet and we are still here!
There are paid search engines like Kagi and at this point I block domains that seem to be SEO blog spam. Kagi makes money off subscriptions, not ads, and they let you block whichever domains you want. That’s the future, a federated internet where people pay to support the sites they want directly.
Yes but actually not. Federated, yes. Everyone contributing, yes. Paid for access… that’s a path I prefer not to walk into. Payment should be voluntary.
I am gladly paying for my mastodon account and I will gladly pay for my kbin account when/if recurrent payments are possible. But I understand I am a privileged one. 20€ a year for me is easy at this point of my life. But not everyone earns money. Not everyone lives in a country where 20€ a year is small change. 10 years ago I wouldn’t have been able to pay that easily.
A world in which we federate and each of us contribute and pay, if we can, the amount we can, that makes sense to me.
A world in which you can’t access the good parts of the internet unless you pay for it, that’s scary to me.
will be fun when the AIs get poisoned with AI-generated training materials
Likely already happening.
And as the AIs inevitably train on AI-generated content, their biases and blindspots will be infinitely reinforced.
There are open source AI models already, they suck, but it’s early days. I think the next step will be curated and open source training data.
And the content of those webpages will be crappy.
At first. Nothing starts out perfect.
I mean, yes. Yes it can. If you have access to GPT4 it absolutely can make those recipes and tell you things that reddit used to. Heck, it’s even got bing search now, I think people are underestimating what it’s capable of. You can also work alongside with Claude+. It’s the new original stuff that I worry about. New technologies, developments, and ideas that are completely novel will definitely become lost and i’m not sure what that will mean for the future.
There’s a glimmer of hope that search engines lose relevance, and so will SEO and SEO-related spam.
Reddit has outlived it’s usefulness. So much of the content is pushed by advertisers that it has become meaningless. Even in places like HomeImprovement you would see “questions” that were really prompts for an ad in the first comment: “This product is exactly what you are looking for!”
I loved the way you wrote this for some reason. Very clear and well-informed
Probably like most of us, I use reddit as my search for quite literally almost any question or research I do - and this was done multiple times a day
I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do to find information. I absolutely LOVED reading real people’s real and genuine with anything. Tech, cooking, intermittent fasting, specific games, guides, custom android roms, careers, I could go on forever. And I would look across dozens of threads and even more comments, and then smash them together in my head to come up with the most likely accurate answer to my problem. And let’s not forget when dbags or misinformation is dowvoted to oblivion!
As a techie, I can’t even count on my hands how many times I have found someone random person having the same completely random and specific PC issue that I had - and they showed what they tried, what didn’t work, then I look in comments and find 6 different valid potential solutions. It was absolutely glorious and so useful
I hope that somehow, something even greater emerges from all of this that fills in this “need”. I don’t think reddit will ever be the same, and now I’d feel dirty using it to find information even if most of it will probably still be there
EDIT: wanted to add that I’m also worried because reddit was so easy to use and user friendly (at least in the ways we modified it lol) which made it really easy for people to join and add to the mass amount of information on the platform. I’m concerned that kbin/lemmy won’t work as a true replacement because they don’t seem nearly as straightforward
Reddit’s UX for the first few years was hugely worse than kbin’s is right now, in my opinion. It took a while for it to get nice, and the lessons learned on it are freely available to successors.
All the fediverse stuff might seem like a speedbump, but for the average user, none of it actually matters.
Trying to Google for anything specific nowadays is almost completely useless, if you cannot find it in the first page of results the rest is usually trash. Googling with Reddit was one of the last ways to get actual insight and/or reviews on things. Corporations are crippling the usability of the internet entirely for the sake of profit.
I definitely moved to DuckDuckGo the moment I realized Google was ignoring the text I was writing on the search box. I was searching for a bug fix in my code for weeks, something very niche and difficult to find. When I finally got the answer and moved on to the following bug, Google kept mixing my previous bug with the new one, making it impossible to find the right answer. It got so used to me being focused on that niche thing, it couldn’t believe I moved past it.
DuckDuckGo forced me to write “smart queries” again, giving context on the search text. But it gave me the results I needed. Not the ones Google googlexplained me I needed.
To say nothing of content theft. The number of websites that just take the StackOverflow data exports and put them all on a shallow clone of the site in hopes of gaming Google is utterly ridiculous. I guess OpenAI has killed that now, in the worst possible way.
Lol. I mean, yeah, lol. Stack Overflow was always pretentious and a massive pain to actually use yourself. Now they’re throwing a tantrum and disabling archiving exports? Zero pity. I bet the archive is effectively zero maintenance and costs them nothing to run.
EDIT: It gets worse the more I read. “Profit off the work of the community”, what, you’re the ones doing that. The “community” wants their answers out in the world, they just want to help people, SO is the one using it to make money. This is enraging.
EDIT2: The very final comment is a link to a duplicate. Very SO.
This is another reason that the entire internet being centralized on a single site is a terrible idea.
Yeah I’m in agreement but it’s important to realize that the problem is not the blackout but the issues that it has made even more obvious, that SEO has become a plague and having all info consolidated in one location is a bad. Hopefully the knowledge on reddit can be recovered and we can adapt to the next big way to interact with the internet. I’m not sold on that being chatgpt tho
This funnily reminds me of the original rise of reddit. It killed off a lot of independent forum sites that used to dominate search results. There was a period where you might be looking for something, see a forum result, and find that the forum was now gone.
I wonder how much valuable information was lost to the sands of time as a result of that transition. And I wonder if the same thing is going to happen again with dead subreddits.
Reddit’s one aspect of this but I’ve always wondered if there would be massive fallout and failure if Reddit, StackOverflow and StackExchange were to all go private at once. Would we see catastrophic infrastructure failures since lots of people rely on those.
While I approve of the blackout (wouldn’t be here otherwise) some of that information is potentially important, so… I’ll just point out that there are two “common” ways of dealing with this: Google cache (assuming they haven’t fucked that up yet) and the Internet Wayback Machine (web.archive.org). The latter is a lot more powerful but might not have everything indexed. They’re also in legal issues lately, because of course we can’t have nice things.
I think that instead of the brute-force solution “Reddit alternative” like the fediverse, I think that we need a transitional period for some people to still access highly pertinent information… which can be potentially be done by self-hosting Reddit, a Reddit clone (much like with dead forums), or all that dataset of Reddit archived somewhere where it’s easy for querying and viewing for the end users. Granted, that might take extensive server capacity and violate the TOS of Reddit… (But I can’t query nor know anything more about the topic of
self-hosting Reddit with the flag site:reddit.com/r/selfhostedbecause the subreddit /r/selfhosted is private! Oh the irony!)
Yeah reddit is/was a giant user-generated information vault. A large amount of opinions/info about would suddenly be gone if reddit goes offline and we’re already starting to see that now.
Yeah, I feel like the generative AI Google has added (for those who opt-in) has been a pretty useful enhancement. It will read through the results and try to summarize it back to me in a useful way, the same kind of summary I’d typically try to find by including Reddit in the search term.
However…it’s pretty common for the AI result to get some of it’s information from Reddit postings. Like this morning I asked “on myfitnesspal is the fitbit calorie adjustment accurate?” and it had some of the generic chat answers about how calorie estimation is done in general in exercise science, but the most useful bit was the last sentence claiming that “MyFitnessPal overestimates calorie needs in 95% of cases because it overestimates calories burned from activity”.
That’s a pretty broad conclusion, and the first supporting link it provided was a detailed 8-year old reddit posting from a software developer examining the MFP calculation, comparing against measured study results on calorie burn estimates by activity, and noting a consistent overestimate by roughly 20-30% which appears to fall in line with the baseline calorie burn that users would experience even if they did not perform that exercise activity. His conclusion was that the estimate is directionally reliable if you deduct 20-30% for the double-counting of sedentary calorie burn.
That kind of in-depth examination by someone with expertise and without financial motivation is the contribution of the “hive mind” the critical mass of people serendipitously stumbling across topics/questions they have answers for and volunteering useful information. We’re going to lose a lot of that unless or until some replacement for reddit pops up. A diaspora of small niches of information may not be as useful if it is buried on bot-generated clutter in a way that search isn’t able to sift signal out of the noise.
I haven’t tried it yet, but is the fediverse indexable? If I Google a question + kbin will it pull up a link to a specific thread?
That’s honestly probably reddit’s best feature: a storage of specific questions across subs that were indexable to be searched randomly in the future. The discussions in those threads were always something very valuable to me
I haven’t tried it yet, but is the fediverse indexable?
Yes, it is. At least mastodon allows you to select on the profile if you want to appear on search engines or not. So I understand the rest can implement the same thing.
I expect someone will come up with a plugin or a site that searches specifically through all instances.
I’ll be honest, when I was looking for places to get a PC built, Reddit was of little help either. Constantly telling me to build it myself when I couldn’t even if I wanted to.
(Eventually did get a PC built, paid more mainly due to UK VAT)
Redditors love giving unsolicited and shitty advice! “Hey what should I wear to my friend’s wedding?” And they’d be like “Honestly you shouldn’t even go. Weddings are materialistic and you get no return in your outfit investment.”
By and large, this was my experience. People wouldn’t answer the question, they’d state their ideals.
As an old on the internet, I can tell you that this absolutely isn’t exclusive to Reddit.
It even happens here on kbin. The discourse over on /m/gaming is only marginally better than its Reddit equivalent.
It existed before Reddit, and it will exist long after Reddit is gone.
The antidote is smaller more focused communities with well enforced guidelines. It’s why /r/Games was so much better than /r/gaming (and still is to an extent), but there will always be a big popular place where people can shitpost and huff their own farts. It’s not for me, but for many it’s cathartic, relaxing, or simply the only thing they want to do while sitting on the toilet.
build it yourself, bro. lol - j/k. my one friend went to Origin, my other friend went to CyberPowerPC. Both had good experiences.
It’s extremely common for people to go on forums/subs and claim they cannot build a PC. In the overwhelming majority of those cases, there is no reason the person couldn’t build a PC on their own. Usually they’ve just decided for whatever reason that it’s beyond them, which is ridiculous.
I don’t know your situation, just pointing out that that particular scenario is extremely common in PC-building forums.
you do know that pc parts are very expensive and many people dont want to risk potentially damaging them
Nah I had no idea, thanks for educating me ಠ_ಠ
Yes, I am aware that PC parts are expensive. I am also aware that anyone with functional hands and eyes is physically capable of assembling those PC parts into a working computer. I know these things because I’ve built PCs before. It really is just as simple as we keep saying it is lol
I see the Lego comparison and I admit, when I built computers when I was younger I did that exact comparison.
Nowadays I would say it’s more akin to building Ikea furniture than Lego. It can be daunting, especially the more expensive you go, and depending on one’s situation it might even be better to have someone else do it, but if you do build it, it’s very rewarding. IIRC the CEO of AMD made that Ikea comparison and it’s a lot more apt IMO.
I’ve never really agreed with the Lego comparison, it’s…not like Lego at all.
Here’s another perspective though, I trust myself a hell of a lot more than I trust shipping companies. If my main concern is protecting my investment, those parts have a much better chance of reaching me intact if they are each in their individual packaging.
Google should’ve bought Reddit and just made it a Non-profit. Like Wikimedia/Wikipedia.
I’ve never paid for Reddit Gold etc., but if it were operated like Wikimedia/Wikipedia I would gladly donate every year to help cover operating costs. I already do for Wikipedia and Archive.org because I consider them essential internet services and appreciate that they don’t serve ads.
In the worst case, most threads should be saved on Archive.org to it should still be possible to retrieve the contents, let alone on other sites that mirror Reddit (Reveddit).
The team at /r/datahoarder was (and is, when the blackout is mostly over) is working on bulk-downloading reddit and eventually uploading to archive.org. I’m hopeful this can happen sooner than later.
