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.
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.
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.
Reminder to support archive.org
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
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!)
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)
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.
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.”
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.
