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.
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.
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.
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.
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.