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)
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.
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.
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/selfhosted because the subreddit /r/selfhosted is private! Oh the irony!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.