Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

  • cpt_kierk@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.

    In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we’ve built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn’t, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add “site:reddit.com” to the query. But if the niche communities die, that’s a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.

      • impulse@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I used the power delete suite to leave a nice explanation of Lemmy and ways how to migrate as well as a last happy fuck u/Spez on my main account.

        My NSFW account has an even more elegant solution: Each and every post or link was edited to a highlight reel of the 2 girls 1 cup video, with no warning whatsoever.

        Both accounts have been abandoned in this state, good luck restoring the OG content.

    • Ziro@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I’m new) smacks of the “old Internet.” I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.