[HN Gopher] Reddit is taking over Google
___________________________________________________________________
Reddit is taking over Google
Author : unclebucknasty
Score : 141 points
Date : 2024-04-17 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| phone8675309 wrote:
| https://archive.is/d9BYa
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240417190913/https://www.busin...
| dudus wrote:
| But how will Reddit fend off the increase of fake content from
| bots?
| antisthenes wrote:
| What do you mean "fend off" ?
|
| Reddit is the one generating fake content to prop up their
| engagement numbers and make it look like they didn't take a
| giant hit from last year.
| khalladay wrote:
| got a source for that?
| antisthenes wrote:
| Look for usernames that look like 2 words from a
| dictionary, then hyphen, then 4 digits.
|
| Almost always, it's a ragebait post that looks like it
| could be written by a specialized AI. Or some low-brow
| high-upvote take.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| That's what Reddit autogenerated usernames look like
| pixl97 wrote:
| That is correct.
|
| Now, what would be more interesting to know, but Reddit
| isn't going to tell us is "How many accounts banned for
| bot behavior use a custom username versus using the
| default generated username".
| cyost wrote:
| Not the best link, but this largely sums up an effort by
| reddit to hire "International Ambassadors" that would
| create a low-effort alternate language version of
| subreddits about 2 years ago. A dead comment below yours
| has somebody's personal-ish experience with the program.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/n8g2om/red
| d...
|
| Personally, it's pretty easy to find posts on reddit that
| pair a vague question with an image. I imagine that there
| are normal people that could be posting these, but it's
| such easy engagement bait that's both trivial to create as
| well as use as cover to recycle old comment threads for
| karma.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| The reddit front page has been an absolute dumpster fire of
| repetitive, ai-generated (or at least content farm
| generated) rage bait posts since the mod revolt a while
| back. I wish there were a way to quantify it, but basically
| all the "generation" subreddits, personal finance
| subreddits and "am i the asshole"-type subreddits
| absolutely dominate the front page and /r/popular with rage
| bait posts.
| dudus wrote:
| True. But it's guaranteed to get worse.
|
| With genAI on the rise it'll get harder and harder to spot
| real from fake.
|
| It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or
| worse. But it will definitely be composed of more synthetic
| data than it is now.
| paulpauper wrote:
| yeah because the majority of Reddit content reflects an objective
| and genuine human experience--not PR/fluff, or AI, or
| copywritten/outsourced shit. In a web overflowing with paid,
| shill, or automated shit or 'content', this is becoming
| increasingly had to find and is sought out. People do not want
| 'more content'-they want to read an experience by a user.
| Loughla wrote:
| I'm fairly certain that pr companies figured reddit out about 5
| years ago.
|
| It's still pretty good for niche products and hobbies, but as a
| recommendation machine, is pretty garbage.
| bozhark wrote:
| Yeah that's why you use Google to search back to the useful
| years
|
| edit: also because Reddit search is so abysmal
| wredue wrote:
| I would state that I have very little in the way of good
| objective experience with Reddit opinions. But at the same
| time, I have zero good experience with everything else.
|
| Reddit comments are genuinely better, but not by much! One
| significant problem I find with Reddit users is that they
| tend to be unable to see past their purchase. Hordes of
| fanboyism. Even more Stockholm syndrome.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| One significant problem I find with Reddit users
| is that they tend to be unable to see past their
| purchase. Hordes of fanboyism.
|
| This hasn't been my experience at all over 10 years on
| Reddit, but I can very much believe many subreddits are
| that way. Given Reddit's decentralization and breadth it
| makes sense that two people would have very different
| experiences.
| autoexec wrote:
| I remember when "place" happened. It was a collaborative
| art project where for 72 hours users could place a single
| colored "pixel" on a blank canvas then had to wait 5
| minutes before they could place another. Communities
| formed plans, and battles for space on the canvas were
| fought.
|
| Given the freedom to create something unique and
| beautiful together what did reddit ultimately come up
| with? Mostly a collection of corporate logos and
| copyrighted characters along with memes and flags. (see
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY)
|
| "Hordes of fanboyism" seems fair.
| letmeinhere wrote:
| Have any subreddit mods been exposed as paid corporate
| shills? I'm a bit surprised that I haven't noticed signs of
| that for subreddits with an obvious commercial angle. Maybe
| moderating is such a thankless slog that brands can't pay
| people to do it ;)
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Have any subreddit mods been exposed as paid corporate
| shills?
|
| Reddit is just as compromised as any place else, but (like
| Wikipedia) their user moderation system has effective and
| transparent enough to largely mitigate this -- at least
| relative to the rest of the internet.
|
| Please don't misunderstand. The challenges and problems
| with content and moderation at both of those places are
| very real. But, _relative to the most of rest of the
| internet,_ (a low bar to clear) they have coped very well.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Yeah there was a lot of that going on in 2012/2013. major
| scandals involving tech and gaming subs. Gaming and tech
| subs are especially vulnerable to this.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| r/gaming has a series of "I made a game" ads that the
| moderators allow users to run promotional organic posts
|
| Some of the headphone and electronics subs seem to have
| promotional accounts.
|
| There are frequent issues in gaming subs with youtubers
| bribing mods to promote their content.
| devprogrammer wrote:
| Also many affiliate marketers are trying to spam Reddit,
| since they lost a lot of Google traffic last year. We can't
| have nice things.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| If they did, they did a damned good job of being subtle about
| it.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| All possible because of the work of countless unpaid
| moderators.
| Terr_ wrote:
| When doing such searches I don't _actually_ want Reddit
| specifically, my real goal is just to find information that is
| (supposedly) from a _human discussion_ between individuals, as
| opposed to conclusory "articles" or "best of 20XX" or "top 10"
| etc.
|
| In other words, I don't want Google to elevate Reddit, I want
| them to classify site-types and allow me to filter results for
| "forums", which would include the long-tail of less-known smaller
| places.
| dageshi wrote:
| Just putting "forum" at the end of your query does a reasonable
| job of that. I've been doing a lot of searching on niche air
| rifle stuff on forums recently and it worked well for me.
| rowbin wrote:
| IIRC Google used to do that and have a search option to
| specifically look for discussion type results only
| chomp wrote:
| > Responding to a post on X, Google search liaison Danny Sullivan
| said users not only like seeing "forum content" but that they
| "proactively seek it out."
|
| Nothing cures my imposter syndrome more than seeing so many
| Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening
| here.
|
| People aren't tacking Reddit to queries because they particularly
| like Reddit or because they want to see user generated content,
| it's because it is literally the only way to get a result from
| Google that is not spam listicles or affiliates grifts. They're
| applying a bandaid to their rapidly deteriorating search, but
| championing it as giving the people what they want.
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| Yep. Google is mostly useless these days aside from a Reddit
| search because everything is fake.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's fine for things that people don't have a commercial
| interest in manipulating. But yeah for buying mainstream
| products (laptops, TVs, hoovers etc.) it's completely
| useless. Even Amazon reviews are better (at least in the UK;
| I understand they may be worse in America).
|
| Tbh I would not be surprised if spammers start posting LLM
| generated comments with affiliate links on Reddit. Maybe they
| already do.
| rurp wrote:
| These days I see mostly SEO spam articles for any topic
| that has even a modest amount of search traffic, commercial
| or not. Like if I search for how to do some random DIY home
| fix, or lookup information about a sort of niche topic, the
| front page will be 10 terribly written (likely automated)
| articles that all summarize the exact same points as each
| other. Clearly they have all copied from the same source.
| It's crazy how hard it has become to get Google search
| results from a human that put a bit of original thought
| into something.
| pyb wrote:
| Not, it's because Google is promoting fake stuff.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| And of course, this is only because the spammers filling the
| web with shit were focused on the greater web. If Google makes
| Reddit a major search result for regular searches, that shit
| hose will naturally begin to focus on Reddit as well, until
| eventually Reddit's quality content is equally hard to find,
| and then presumably the cycle will repeat with a new platform.
| pavon wrote:
| Yes, that is why I would much rather Google promote Reddit
| than forums in general. If they did the latter, it would just
| encourage SEO spam to move from generating fake blogs to
| generating fake forums full of AI discussions, and cause
| product spam to focus even more on posting in forums (which
| is already a problem).
|
| The current arrangement requires a two-step search to find
| good forums on a subject, then search those forums for my
| question rather than have Google directly surface content
| from the forums when I search for my question. But the extra
| effort is worth it to keep forums from becoming SEO targets.
| sylens wrote:
| Spot on. I seek out the Reddit result because it is the only
| valuable one left.
| dageshi wrote:
| That's presumably because very few people will make new
| websites on subjects when they can make a youtube channel
| instead.
|
| The web has been hollowing out for a while, AI has just
| massively increased the speed of that process recently.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I don't get how people have so much time to watch amateur
| YouTube.
| autoexec wrote:
| > People aren't tacking Reddit to queries because they
| particularly like Reddit or because they want to see user
| generated content, it's because it is literally the only way to
| get a result from Google that is not spam listicles or
| affiliates grifts. They're applying a bandaid to their rapidly
| deteriorating search, but championing it as giving the people
| what they want.
|
| Google knows what they're doing. A long time ago they needed
| your internet searches to learn about you and what you were
| thinking. Today, they have an endless stream of data from your
| android phone, from chrome, from every website using google
| analytics, from their DNS servers, etc. They don't need their
| search engine to spy on you anymore so they aren't going to
| waste money making it not suck. Search is basically dead to
| them. They just have to keep up appearances so that they can
| keep selling ads and preferential placement to the very same
| companies/spammers that are pushing relevant content out of
| sight.
|
| Enjoy it while it lasts because Reddit will quickly fill with
| AI and ads and Google search will become entirely useless
| again.
| didip wrote:
| Naturally, Google should buy Reddit.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| I think it's only a matter of when at this point, not if.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| To close it after a few years?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Well that would certainly be a more effective way to get Reddit
| shut down than the sub blackouts.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| The only problem is bad advice that can come up quite often on
| Reddit.
|
| There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice
| and other young people with no experience are giving advice that
| might influence others negatively.
|
| Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche
| community communication.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| > There are various subreddits where young people ask for
| advice and other young people with no experience are giving
| advice that might influence others negatively.
|
| I've yet to see a relationships advice thread where the top
| comment isn't "get divorced immediately"
|
| Which is scary, because these people are taking OP's comment at
| face value _and_ only hearing one side of the story.
| cjk2 wrote:
| Worked for me!
| WWLink wrote:
| If there's one thing I learned from reddit, it's how not to
| build a wooden deck lol.
| buffet_overflow wrote:
| I'd love to see two types of upvotes on the site. One for
| "thanks for answering/engaging" and another for "this answer is
| correct and high quality". Not sure how you'd restrict or
| verify the votes, but I think the issue you're pointing out is
| a result of only having one metric of engagement.
| adamomada wrote:
| Slashdot solved it more than twenty years ago.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Slashdot also had the concept of meta-moderation, where the
| site's users could vote on whether a particular mod's
| actions were appropriate/fair or not. Presumably mods that
| were voted as problematic stopped getting the ability to
| mod.
|
| Slashdot was in many ways way ahead of their time. I think
| Reddit (and even HN) could benefit from this kind of
| check/balance.
| Klonoar wrote:
| The way I describe Reddit to people is that you have zero clue
| if you're arguing with a 13 year old who discovered $x concept
| this week.
|
| (Or a bot)
|
| If you move through the site with that understanding - and
| personally, using the old interface - it can still be bearable.
|
| I'm not the biggest fan of the company itself these days and I
| hold out hope that something else can take off, but I've not
| been impressed so far.
| adamomada wrote:
| I have a theory that reddit was pretty decent when it first
| started because the majority of the site users were at least
| university or college students/age.
|
| Nowadays the average age is high school, and probably
| trending to grade school
|
| These are the people who are influencing the Google search
| user at large now.
|
| We're fucked
| bogtog wrote:
| > Nowadays the average age is high school, and probably
| trending to grade school
|
| Have you ever seen one of the site surveys that subreddits
| typically do? The median age is almost always above college
| graduation (22 years old), at least for the subs I
| frequent. I could see the front page subs having a median
| in college age (18-22), but I'd be really surprised if it
| was below 18.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There was a long period where the internet was intimidating
| and unattractive to regular people. It acted as a strong
| filter for determining who the people that frequented early
| sites where.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Eternal summer...
| sph wrote:
| Bang on. I deleted my account when I started to notice that
| I would grow older (and wiser) while the average Redditor
| always stayed the same age.
|
| When I created my account more than a decade ago, I felt
| most people knew more than I did about the world. Now
| almost in my 40s, and there is the definite feeling that
| the average redditor you're replying to is a white, 16 year
| old American boy. The apex of civilisation indeed.
| smitty1110 wrote:
| The real indictment here isn't that Reddit serves bad advice,
| it's that Google is just bad at providing you with relevant
| information. This is a symptom of people trying to find real
| humans talking about stuff by slapping "reddit" on the front of
| every search, because the SEO garbage that rises to the top
| isn't worth a read.
| haunter wrote:
| I still prefer reddit most of the time. Front page (default) subs
| are highly manipulated (especially anything news, politics,
| current things etc.) but for hobbies, video games, and sports
| it's still the best site. Video game discusssions especially
| because unlike Discord every tip, guide, and walkthrough is
| archived and searchable. And for sports mostly because it's
| _insane_ how quickly you get highlights and videos. I watch a
| game on my TV > goal scored > reddit alrady has the highlight
| posted 30secs ago. And there are countless wholesome little hobby
| subs which are focusing on one thing only and that what makes
| them great.
|
| Honestly my main problem with reddit was always the moderation,
| that how one sub can be taken over by certain ideologies. Which
| is worse when it happens to local (country, city) subs. I can't
| ready my city's sub because it's always the same tired politics
| posts instead of "what are some good restaurants" or "here is a
| photo of a building I've never seen before".
| UberFly wrote:
| Good take and I agree totally. I visit reddit daily and avoid
| the front page like the plague. I'm sure I miss a lot of
| interesting stuff but the time-killing rabbit holes and
| concentrated venomous vitriol I don't miss.
| spacemadness wrote:
| The front page reads to me like a tabloid written by
| teenagers. Absolute trash.
| abstrusemoose wrote:
| Communist teenagers detached from reality.
| Solvency wrote:
| every single sub no matter how niche is infested with bots or
| spam/schill accounts.
|
| every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula
| companies.
|
| every fan niche like comicbooks is full of bot accounts in
| training (building up karma with low effort posts and repeat
| copy posts from previous days from other posters).
|
| everything, everywhere.
| owlninja wrote:
| People always say this but no one ever proves it.
| adamomada wrote:
| At this point especially considering the article we're
| commenting on, it would be amazing if there weren't spam
| shills and bots - they go where eyeballs go
|
| There is an enormous vested interest to not let this become
| public and should make you question the concept that
| conspiracy can't exist somehow
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Nobody is saying bot/shill accounts don't exist. Just
| that they aren't _literally everywhere and in insane
| numbers_. Also, it 's about the distribution of the bots
| between the subs: are they mostly on the huge main subs,
| or do they also expand to the 10,000 person niche subs?
|
| If 1 formula company has 1 reddit bot that posts 1 post
| every month in every parenting subreddit, is that
| considered a bot infestation? How many bot posts is
| necessary to be considered endemic?
| owlninja wrote:
| Thank you, this is what I meant. I am well aware they
| exist but anytime I mention maybe I use reddit to do
| research before a purchase - everyone acts like not a
| single human even exists on there.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| If there's a better source for general purpose product
| recommendations than Reddit, I haven't found it.
|
| I'd say the only real weakness is that sometimes the
| recommendations lean too hard on being for enthusiasts,
| and don't always fit what a casual user of a thing cares
| about. But other than that they're pretty great.
| astura wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-
| i...
|
| Unless you actually have a reason to have good idea of who
| you're interacting with you should probably assume they are
| trolls, shills, or children. Those are BY FAR the most
| common Internet activity.
|
| For example - I'm a normal human. I'll post a few comments
| on HN once in a while. Maybe a few up votes from time-to-
| time. Sometimes I don't think about HN for days. I don't
| post on other social media/forums. My father-in-law is a
| troll, he spends 10+ hours a day every day commenting and
| voting on various articles with his hundreds of sock puppet
| accounts. Which one are you more likely to see? Myself or
| my FIL?
| mejutoco wrote:
| The founders admitted themselves to start traction on the
| site with a multitude of fake users.
|
| All the "just asking questions" posts pushing certain
| narratives in every regional subrredit are also quite
| noticeable.
|
| For me that is proof enough, but other people might have
| different standards.
| dalyons wrote:
| that was like, 17 years ago? and imho not an unreasonable
| thing to get a social site off the ground that had no
| users. Seems pretty irrelevant to the problems of today.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > every fan niche like comicbooks is full of bot accounts in
| training (building up karma with low effort posts and repeat
| copy posts from previous days from other posters)
|
| If such things exist in subs I visit, I don't see it. Either
| the reposts are downvoted so I don't see them, the repost is
| the first time I'm seeing it making it a good post from my
| perspective, or they aren't reposts and the bots are making
| good contributions.
|
| I definitely notice the astroturfing accounts in the subs
| that are marketing profitable (usually lifestyle subs like
| fitness, fashion, cooking, investing, etc), but not every sub
| is profitable or even open to product endorsement. At least,
| I _very rarely_ ever see such things in the video games subs
| I visit. I 'm not even sure how you could mix in such posts
| into a sub like /r/rimworld.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| People say things like this, but the subs I frequent largely
| seem fine. I'm sure there are bad actors somewhere in there,
| but they don't seem prominent to me.
|
| > every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula
| companies.
|
| Okay, if it's every single one, show me all the formula
| company inundation in r/daddit. Should be easy if they're
| absolutely everywhere, like you say, right?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Look for reposts of the same topics and comments.
|
| Quite often the bots just look like contributors until you
| realize they've never had an original comment in their
| posting history. More often it seems they are involved in
| creating consensus and nudging votes up and down and in
| general making it more painful karma wise for those that
| don't toe the line.
|
| Not a daddit visitor, but it appears that formula is an
| uncommon discussion on that sub. Either it's not a popular
| topic, or it's being banned when it's too obvious.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Okay, that poster making the claim was completely wrong
| then. Almost like they pulled their claim entirely out of
| their ass.
| derbOac wrote:
| I felt that way until the other day. There was a post that
| got upvoted, seemed wholesome and innocuous, and then
| eventually someone pointed out it was borrowing material
| from an earlier post. So I go to check, and sure enough,
| the pattern of posts by the parent poster is very inhuman,
| to put it one way. Strings of reposts of the same thing to
| many many subs in a short period of time, over and over and
| over again.
|
| I wouldn't go so far as to say reddit has been taken over
| by bots but I've started to wonder more and more about it.
|
| I generally feel like things have subtly but noticably
| changed for the worse since the exodus but I can't name a
| replacement in general except for some topic specific
| forums here and there.
|
| On the bright side I do think the new UI has improved
| noticably. I still revert to the old site often but the new
| site is better than it used to be.
| bun_terminator wrote:
| I don't understand how they still have mods. Reddits boss hates
| them. Everyone else, too. They have 100% a negative impact. The
| site would be wonderful without moderation as that's already
| covered by the voting mechanism.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| What are you talking about? The mods are the only thing
| letting Reddit get away without employing or contracting
| content teams of their own. Reddit would lose so much more
| money than it already does if it had no mods
| tayo42 wrote:
| I would say mods are a little to heavy handed. But I think
| they handle spam? And also some community stuff like mega
| threads and weekly stuff?
|
| Idk I feel like there's a better middle ground then what we
| experience now with reddit mods and having it be a total free
| for all
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > I would say mods are a little to heavy handed.
|
| Some mods are, but the only reason people really think this
| is because the heavy-handed aspects are the visible ones.
| Nobody really sees mods removing random spam threads and
| comments, that's the whole point. Good modding is mostly
| invisible.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Maybe, I think it seems like that. I felt similar until I
| had some posts moderated away or banned, which made me
| realize there is probably a lot more of those going on
| then I realized. There isn't a big notification when
| things get removed. There is also trying to post and
| dealing with automoderator. There's subreddits I don't
| read or participate in anymore becasue of how annoying it
| is to get a post through.
|
| I get their necessary, at least for now, because of spam.
| But like I'm said I think there's a better middle ground
| and we can rely on the community users more.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| You cannot, in fact, rely on the community users more. It
| does not scale.
|
| You'll see situations where most people are nominally
| opposed to low-effort memes while everyone upvotes the
| low-effort memes, and then people complain that there are
| too many low-effort memes cluttering the front page and
| now the sub is trash and they're leaving.
|
| edit: though honestly I don't think volunteer mods scale
| well either. A tiny niche sub can get by with just a
| couple mods just fine, but when they get 100x as popular,
| can they then have 200 mods? Or have 2000 mods for the
| most popular subs? No, there's just no way to coordinate
| that many volunteers sensibly, not in an environment like
| Reddit.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _The site would be wonderful without moderation_
|
| Is this tongue in cheek? I can't tell if this is sarcasm.
| Reddit would be awful without moderation.
| csa wrote:
| > I don't understand how they still have mods.
|
| This makes me think that you've never been a mod of an active
| forum or subreddit.
|
| Without mods, popular forums will be spammed and/or gamed
| into oblivion. Most voting mechanisms are trivially easy to
| manipulate when potential earnings are involved.
| post_break wrote:
| As a mod of a larger subreddit this comment makes me laugh.
| Good mods are invisible. In fact I do everything in my power
| to not use my power for bad, and only to help people out.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Unfortunately many subs are set up so that if you go
| against the hivemind, you get instabanned, or close to it.
| There seem to be many mods on Reddit who have nothing more
| rewarding going on in their lives, or else just cherish
| that small bit of power over others.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >There seem to be many mods on Reddit who have nothing
| more rewarding going on in their lives, or else just
| cherish that small bit of power over others.
|
| Correct. There are powermods who "moderate" hundreds of
| subreddits. This is not an exaggeration. Hundreds. At
| least one has/had thousands.
|
| Why do they do this, when they are not paid? When
| questioned, they invariably say that they "just watch the
| incoming queue" or something, and the other mods "do all
| the work". While likely true in the literal sense (again,
| hundreds), such answers of course completely evade the
| question.
|
| Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is
| Written by Insane People" <https://np.reddit.com/r/slates
| tarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to
| powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to
| push some ideology (/r/politics being an obvious
| example).
|
| As you said, losers who crave ruling a petty fiefdom
| because it's the only thing they can exercise agency over
| in their lives. And/or are mentally ill.
|
| Quoting another:
|
| >and for each moderator there are 100 sycophants and
| narcissists lined up to take their place
|
| Most mods know this, which is why so many surrendered and
| reopened their subreddits during the recent "protest" the
| moment admins told them that otherwise they would be
| replaced. /r/formula1's mods forthrightly said as much;
| those of /r/nba claimed that negotiations had progressed
| far enough to justify reopening, which the thousands of
| replies show that the userbase 100% disbelieves.
|
| Even worse, a) /r/nba's top mod made more than 150
| comments to six other NBA teams' subreddits during the
| blackout. b) /r/nba mods posted secret threads--including
| the Game 5 discussion that they denied from their own
| users--and made comments during the blackout. When users
| discovered the threads the mods of course scrubbed the
| comments, but there is no way for mods to actually delete
| (as opposed to hiding) posts, so evidence of their
| hypocritical behavior will live on forever.
|
| Bonus: The classic post in which a mod thinks what he
| does is worth $175K a year <https://np.reddit.com/r/35orq
| uit/comments/qw1v3e/what_do_peo...>. Be sure to read to
| the end, where he explains how he "saves lives".
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, yes and no. At the same time there are power
| hungry mods, there are limitless hordes of complete
| asshole users that are only there to cause problems and
| not engage in legitimate debate.
|
| Forums really kind of suck once they get over particular
| sizes and never ending battles erupt.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| >there are limitless hordes of complete asshole users
| that are only there to cause problems and not engage in
| legitimate debate
|
| Isn't that what downvotes are for?
| pixl97 wrote:
| You're like 20 years behind on forum manipulation if you
| think so...
|
| So, if the admins of the site to a really good job of
| banning accounts that exist for the purpose of vote
| manipulation, then voting works ok. If not the votes that
| generally dictate how well a post/topic does occur within
| the first few minutes of posting.
|
| Post topic -> Upvote -> Post conformation messages of
| approval of the topic -> bots upvote these posts -> bots
| downvote anyone that disagree.
|
| Moreso, downvotes themselves don't directly address
| things like raids and sustained attacks by bad actors.
| These kinds of attacks make the end user feel like they
| don't want to be in that subforum driving them off
| elsewhere and lowering participation. It can also
| embolden others to post more similar content to what the
| bots are posting.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > The site would be wonderful without moderation as that's
| already covered by the voting mechanism.
|
| Tell me you've never moderated anything popular without
| telling me you've never moderated anything popular.
|
| Even _4chan_ has some moderation these days.
| bloopernova wrote:
| May I suggest you sign up for moderator duties on a medium
| sized subreddit.
|
| Then report back in 8 weeks.
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| I help moderate a large sub, a country sub. I dare you to
| just be a mod for one week, the amount of SHIT that gets
| posted every single fucking day is insane, without mods (good
| or bad) reddit would be worse than 4chan in its crappier
| moment.
|
| A disclaimer, I'm super against on how reddit is being
| managed nowadays, I've been a user since 2010, the golden
| era, no political bias crap, no stupid woke mods, everyone
| was happy and content was objectively moderated. Having said
| that, I can assure you moderation is a necessity.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Reddit would be an absolute, unmitigated disaster without
| moderation.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Who are you proposing pays for content moderation then? Reddit
| clearly can't afford it
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It's the last bastion of original content before the AI storm
| overruns search entirely.
|
| And likely puts reddit firmly in the the AI farm crosshairs as
| well, so reddit will be overrun.
|
| I think the only good content will be in archived discord
| channels, or obscure boards that aren't worth aiming AI farms
| at, but even then, it will probably get scanned and targeted.
|
| The only thing that might work is identifying AI information
| vacuums by their distinct behavior and serving them counter-
| fake AI content, while user access patterns (as referenced in
| the above comments about Google-specific reddit robots
| infrastruction) get the "real stuff".
|
| I almost wonder if intentional misspelling and curse words will
| start to be used to "scare off" AIs and bots from content, and
| that will become the new codewords for actual information. Like
| people online in China these days.
| piafraus wrote:
| > I can't ready my city's sub because it's always the same
| tired politics posts instead of "what are some good
| restaurants" or "here is a photo of a building I've never seen
| before".
|
| I find it funny, that I am completely opposite. I would very
| much prefer the local news/politics/crime, as this directly
| affects me and my life - e.g. don't go to the highway today,
| because protestors block it. Vs. the boring similar photos I've
| probably already saw like 100 times from a slightly different
| angle or they are not interesting at all and author highly
| overestimates their photography skill.
| xhevahir wrote:
| That's probably not the kind of political post OP is talking
| about. They probably mean ones like "Mayor Quimby continues
| his war on the unhoused," or "City council are determined to
| drive out small business."
| piafraus wrote:
| Both of those are important to me, as I am the one who
| would need to remember stuff like this when I vote in my
| local elections.
| nox101 wrote:
| I hate reddit because the way close threads for topics that
| need an update or a follow up. The auto closing seems pointless
|
| Further, People keep telling me the communities are great but
| I've yet to find one of these mythical great communities. Or
| maybe my definition of great community is different than
| others. For me a great community was a forum I was on in 2004-5
| where people stuck around and actually responded. on reddit I
| rare find useful responses
| yurishimo wrote:
| Auto closing is a sub-by-sub decision.
| verzali wrote:
| Niche subreddits are still good, but above a certain size they
| all seem to become awful. Moderation is a major problem - not
| just the unpaid nature of it, but because so many of the
| moderators are terrible at their jobs or just sold out to some
| other cause. I've found myself drifting away from Reddit in the
| past year and now actually spend more time on dedicated forums
| (I was surprised by how many are still out there!)
| some_random wrote:
| The biggest problem with mods is that normal people do not
| have the interest nor energy to moderate a subreddit past a
| certain point, so they end up getting muscled out by weirdos
| as a sub grows.
| robswc wrote:
| This is 1000% the reason.
|
| It almost self-selects for the worst type of people. You
| not only have to have tons of free time, you have to be
| willing to be "paid" for your work in the small amounts of
| power you can wield in an online discussion board. In
| theory if you have a few people they could contribute a bit
| of time and have it covered... but like you say, the
| weirdos "out-spend" them on time and muscle their way in.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| The /r/Netherlands subreddit has been taken over by hostile
| expats years ago. They ban any discussion in Dutch, forcing
| everyone to speak English, and will delete everything that
| doesn't have "international appeal"
| DinoDad13 wrote:
| which ideologies?
| bilsbie wrote:
| I honestly think google should just flip their SEO score at this
| point.
|
| It's been gamed to such a degree that good SEO is actually an
| anti signal.
| Terr_ wrote:
| For your amusement, a relevant music-video titled "The current
| state of search engines" [0] Yes, I know about
| the quotes I know about the dash and OR It's all
| ass Google doesn't work... Anymore I have to
| add the word "Reddit" To every goddamn search to read
| Content made by humans Google doesn't work... Anymore
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I just want a little _plonk_ button under each result so I can
| blacklist sites that I am not interested in.
| Timshel wrote:
| You can check https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
| depingus wrote:
| uBlackList is fantastic. It even works for DuckDuckGo! If
| anyone is interested, here are some ruleset subscriptions to
| start with.
|
| https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
| bramhaag wrote:
| I recently switched to Kagi, and this feature ensures that I
| can never go back to Google or DDG.
|
| Not having pinterest show up for every search I do is
| incredible (but should really be a basic feature of any search
| engine...).
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| There you go:
|
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
|
| It's VERY convenient.
|
| (usable via greasemonkey / tampermonkey / violentmonkey)
| LorenDB wrote:
| I'm not sure why you would promote Quora in search results. They
| lock non-members out after viewing just one or two answers, and
| the content on Quora is generally viewed as worse than Reddit
| (not that Reddit is particularly great...).
| asciii wrote:
| Quora's top answer is always an AI chatbot IIRC. It is very
| annoying compared to what it used to be...I still miss Yahoo
| Answers
| etc-hosts wrote:
| I can't figure out why Quora does that. sticking in obvious
| AI summaries, to me, seems to devalue their brand.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Obligatory recommendation to use Kagi. You can block sites from
| appearing in search results. Or you can just reduce the
| importance of them so they show up less.
| LorenDB wrote:
| I already use Brave search, so I'm not too worried
| personally. In fact, I haven't used Google as a default
| search engine for many years.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Quora used to be decent years ago.
|
| But at some point (My speculation), answering on Quora became a
| thing in India. Something that looks good on your resume or
| something.
|
| After that it went to shit pretty quickly.
| koreth1 wrote:
| The Indian influx was fine, at least in the topics I
| followed. But at some point after the big increase in Indian
| users, Quora decided to prioritize quantity of questions over
| quality of questions, and as I recall, they even set up
| incentive programs to reward people for asking as many
| questions as possible.
|
| The site was inundated with repetitive low-effort questions,
| often with false premises that seemed intentionally crafted
| to provoke people. The crappy questions drowned out the
| interesting ones that had previously made me a regular
| visitor.
| jedberg wrote:
| To this day, my most public contribution to reddit is that I
| wrote the code to put the title of the post in the URL. That was
| done specifically for SEO purposes.
|
| It was pretty much the only SEO optimization we ever did (along
| with a few DOM changes), because shortly after that, Google
| basically dedicated engineering effort specifically to crawling
| reddit. So much so that we lost the "crawl rate" button in our
| SEO admin page on Google, it was just set to "Custom".
|
| I had to stand up a fleet of app servers and caches and
| databases, and change the load balancers so that Google basically
| had their own infrastructure (although we would shunt all
| crawlers there). Crawler traffic was very different than regular
| traffic -- it looked at pages more than two days old, something
| humans rarely did at the time. It would blow out every cache
| (memory, database, disk, etc.). So we put them on their own infra
| to keep them from killing the rest of the site.
|
| And now I will hang an onion on my belt, which was the style at
| the time.
| gary_0 wrote:
| > That was done specifically for SEO purposes.
|
| As a human I also like it when I can see what topic a URL
| points to (eg. when it's being shared on HN, or pasted into
| source code, etc). URLs that just have an opaque ID or terse
| filename are not very user-friendly.
| jedberg wrote:
| Oh yeah, it turned out to be great for humans. It just
| happened to be the one thing that we specifically did for SEO
| first. Funny enough, it turns out that most "SEO
| optimizations" are just "make this better for humans,
| especially disabled humans".
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >SEO optimizations are just "make this better for humans,
| especially disabled humans"
|
| I'm gonna embroider that on a throw pillow and use it to
| hit webdevs.
| jedberg wrote:
| Please do! And please send me a picture if you actually
| do it. :)
| gary_0 wrote:
| I see. I suppose in a perfect world, devs would just follow
| general best practices and search engines would reward
| that, and nobody would be looking for evil voodoo to boost
| traffic. And I would have a pet unicorn!
| rasz wrote:
| Nowadays reddit hides it, I use this to revert back to full
| url for (let value of
| document.querySelectorAll('.first a.bylink.comments')) {
| let href = value.closest('.top-matter').querySelector('.title
| a.title.may-blank').href; if (href != value.href &&
| ( href.startsWith('https://www.reddit.com/') ||
| href.startsWith('https://v.redd.it')) ) {
| console.log (href, value.href);
| value.closest('.top-matter').querySelector('.title
| a.title.may-blank').href = value.href; } }
| jedberg wrote:
| What do you mean the hide it now? I still see it in the
| URL?
| rasz wrote:
| This is what I see https://v.redd.it/pzma14ni23vc1 for
| post titles, while comment link https://www.reddit.com/r/
| UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1c6h...
|
| First one is also dynamic, so next ~day its different
| breaking one of the fundamental features of HTML -
| :visited link color.
| ammar2 wrote:
| Saying they hide it might be a bit of a stretch, that URL
| just 302's to the comment link with the title-in-url as
| usual. I guess you're referring to being able to right-
| click and copy the url directly?
| mark242 wrote:
| It's mind-boggling to me that Google didn't create a spec to
| work with special partners whereby they could get syndicated
| data in a format that was easy to ingest, and easy for their
| partners to produce. Lighting dollars on fire just to serve up
| pages to Googlebot, when you could just periodically dump a
| journal of updates to Google, is just crazy imo.
|
| On edit: if only there were some way to do some kind of really
| simple syndication of your data.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Also, isn't this illegal? Either Google respected rate limits
| (which I doubt) or it was a form of a DDoS attack.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's only illegal if you poor people do it. For us rich
| corporations, we do what we want
| aeyes wrote:
| I guess they wanted to be crawled because the Google
| crawler is easy to identify/block/rate limit.
| nosecreek wrote:
| Are there specific laws that deal with rate limits? Honest
| question - I get that something too fast could be
| considered DDoS, but so long as it's below a certain
| threshold wouldn't it be okay (not sure how said threshold
| would be determined)?
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| Google's entire business model is based on behavior that is
| now illegal.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| In the past Google just requested the HTML, and didn't bother
| with the javascript, so it was a simple document request.
|
| People started serving up pages that required Javascript to
| show content, so they had cope with that. I'm sure it's
| dramatically more expensive for them as well.
| wepple wrote:
| You'd have to trust that the data being dumped was 100%
| identical to the actual pages users would eventually see, or
| you could end up with very weird (including dangerous)
| behavior
|
| Of course, I know that some version of this can and does
| occur with classic web scraping too, but that is an arms race
| that a search engine can win
| sorenjan wrote:
| Isn't that what WeSub (previously PubSubHubbub) is?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
| asdff wrote:
| Nowadays the reddit engineers perverted the link system for old
| reddit users. New reddit users link to posts using a syntax
| that for old reddit users returns the submit a new post page.
|
| Also, just to twist the knife further, old reddit users can't
| open full resolution images hosted on reddit anymore. Click a
| link and you get thrown to this url:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/media/nice_hat/?url=...
| gloryjulio wrote:
| You can still view the the full sized image by click and open
| it in a different tab. It's a bit of hassle but at least it
| works
| harimau777 wrote:
| At least for me that doesn't work. It still opens Reddit's
| weird view image page.
| legohead wrote:
| I use RES and haven't had any problems opening images or
| videos... actually, I've noticed they load really slowly,
| often times I can watch the image loading like it was 56k
| days. I wonder if that's because I'm using old reddit+RES.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Also, just to twist the knife further, old reddit users
| can't open full resolution images hosted on reddit anymore.
| Click a link and you get thrown to this url:
|
| Do you use RES? If so, try updating it to the latest version
| and see if this still happens.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Do you use the new design or stick with old.reddit.com?
| mouzogu wrote:
| reddit front page used to be all memes and humour
|
| ...now it's all US bizarro world politics and weird interpersonal
| sexual TMI stuff.
| carlos_rpn wrote:
| You can make it a lot better by taking some time to remove a
| lot of the default subreddits and adding content you like. I
| think that's pretty much why I created my account years ago: to
| get rid of politics on the front page.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| That's got to be Reddit's biggest challenge.
|
| The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise.
| Quality of discussion is on par with YouTube comments (ie
| abyssmal)
|
| A lot of the individual, smaller, focused subreddits are
| extremely valuable. But, nobody would know it at first glance.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise
|
| I have a really, really, really hard time believing that the
| ultra-uselessness of the default subreddits is anything other
| than a _deliberate_ attempt on the part of the reddit admins
| to make them that way.
|
| Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ that the
| political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.
| NegativeK wrote:
| I've seen too many forums degrade into political
| shitfighting to think that reddit's political bent in the
| popular forums has to be manipulated.
|
| Like, it might be, but it honestly takes effort to not have
| something like that form into a big political pile.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ that the
| political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.
|
| The day after election day 2016 in the US, it was actually
| possible to post non-leftist comments/articles in
| /r/politics. Basically, the mods and bot owners hadn't been
| given their new marching orders, and didn't know what to
| do.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| Don't forget the heartbreaking betrayals: "I just figure out my
| husbands supporting a child molester, and even taking their
| side" "My wife of 10 yearz told me none of the kidz r mine,
| banged all my friends in giant orgy, then they beat me up, put
| me in a hospital. Anyway I was also fired"
|
| Pretty new, but now 80% of reddit goes to reddit to vent all
| relationship problems. I think it was less of a problem 10-20
| years ago, but ~5 years back we started to see more and more.
|
| We can probably blame /r/relationshipadvice, /r/aitah, etc.,
| etc., etc. It really makes me want to never be in a
| relationship again.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Great, so now spammers will target Reddit that much more. Give a
| year, few months even to see way worse Reddit content overall.
|
| The solution is federated search, federated forums.
| jijijijij wrote:
| How is that the solution? How does it address the issue of
| spam?
| pebblesun wrote:
| When I am undecided about some product, I usually search google
| and throw reddit word in the search box to search for reddit.
| Google search results tend to give either ads related to my
| search or getting sponsored content highlighted(which is a
| sophisticated ad). These days, I can't remember getting the
| content I was looking for on the first try(except stackoverflow
| results).
| samyar wrote:
| when you read an article, you have to go through several sections
| to finally maybe reach what you wanted :D in reddit it's straight
| forward
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Glad to see this. This has helped make finding organic writing
| easier. I don't care if the data isn't accurate but I want to
| read about other people's feedback on stuff and not the
| aggregated fluff crap that flows up on search engines now.
|
| Even then, I loathe quora and ignore it entirely.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > It's not just Reddit. Q&A forum Quora is getting a huge
| visibility bump in Google search results,
|
| Why? Landing on a quora page has to be the most confusing web
| experience in existence right now.
|
| Quora just reminds of yahoo answers but rebranded. I can't be the
| only one with that association and find it hard to take
| seriously. Assuming you can even find the content your looking
| for on a quora page.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I would love if I could blacklist quora from search results. I
| have no idea why it's ranked so highly. It's a garbage site
| with worthless answers.
| alecco wrote:
| Another data point for the Enshittocene theory.
| jsemrau wrote:
| The SV buddy economy in a nutshell. More traffic from Google to
| Reddit and Quora.
| rifty wrote:
| The relationship between Google and Reddit goes beyond just
| improving normal web search for Google - it's actually symbiotic.
| Because Reddit has horrible search, the best way to search Reddit
| content is actually using Google's indexing instead. Every time
| the Google algorithm feeds Reddit, it's feeding itself with more
| '...reddit' queries.
|
| Further, I feel the role subreddits are playing is not too
| different to the role curated directories used to play in sorting
| and filtering the web ecosystem for Google when it's algorithm
| was considered good. So while there is a lot of user generated
| content, i feel the real benefit of Reddit to the Google
| algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content.
|
| So my theory follows: the Google algorithm has never been
| independently good, it has always been dependant on a large
| source of human curation. The Google algorithm only works well
| when Reddit is applied to it, because Google supplanted, or
| ignores the other places it happens on the web. Or worse, they've
| promoted and paid attention to unauthentic content curation
| through their SEO and 'trusted' sources initiatives.
| bogtog wrote:
| > Because Reddit has horrible search
|
| Sorry, but I've heard this so often, and I just don't know what
| people mean. I use the search whenever I need to get something
| from a specific subreddit, and it just seems fine. Also, why
| would a major website like Reddit have such a bad search?
| Aren't mostly fine search algorithms freely available?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| One of the big mysteries of the software industry. Not
| specifically singling out reddit here, since I don't even
| search on reddit: Why can we not simply have search
| functions, that at least optionally do a substring search? If
| I had a $currency-unit for every search that fails at this
| basic thing, I wouldn't need to work any longer.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| "Users don't know what they want" is absolutely pervasive
| in the tech world.
| rifty wrote:
| Perhaps a bit hyperbolic on my part, it is fine, but it's
| poor for the velocity of content it produces. Up until 2
| years ago it lacked comment search... [1] which afaik can
| only search only so far back as well. It also doesn't search
| it's full corpus. There are third party tools which which
| allow for search a specific time period for this reason [2].
| Although google works better here too. With better listing.
|
| 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_w
| it...
|
| 2. https://www.redditsearchtool.com
| sweetdekker wrote:
| I will never understand why anybody still uses Google as their
| search engine.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Do not worry, Reddit just had a IPO (or is having?), so soon
| enough it will be just as _useless_ as Google.
|
| Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too.
|
| Not to mention google has a head start with dejanews. Reddit is
| just an over-glorified USENET. When google purchased dejanews all
| the did wzs ruin it instead of using it for decent information.
|
| FWIW I am seeing more posts on USENET these days and many
| providers are blocking all posts from google groups. Google threw
| away a good opportunity by breaking dejanews.
| croes wrote:
| Reddit IPO'd on March 21st
| elwell wrote:
| > Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too.
|
| Please don't remove old
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Can someone explain to me why the reddit leaders want the new
| interface? Is it because the old one can't track users as well
| or what? Why don't they just add trackers to the old interface?
| Or what's the reason?
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Somehow Reddit has avoided being overrun by bot/affiliate spam
| and has become a better source of certain types of information. I
| don't know how. Perhaps some combination of the voting system
| (effectively outsourcing getting rid of junk) and algorithms.
|
| I'm building a photo booth and an example from today: if I search
| Google for the best budget PC with discrete graphics cards,
| everything other than the Reddit link is garbage/affiliate spam.
| But a few clicks on the Reddit links and voila, real options.
|
| Google itself seems either unable to stop their site from being
| full of garbage, or they just don't care because what are you
| going to do, switch to Bing?
| sct202 wrote:
| The legions of unpaid mods manually reviewing user comments and
| posts are such an advantage. A lot of people attempt to run
| their own shill subreddits but they end up being such poor
| quality and isolated that no one goes to them and they're
| basically invisible. I feel like one of the reasons reddit
| search is so bad, is that you actually get exposed to all the
| low quality subs that way whereas Google just ignores unpopular
| subs.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Yes I think that's the case. Google does a better job of
| indexing Reddit than Reddit does for sure.
|
| That's why I still type the search in Google rather than
| Reddit. That seems like something Reddit could and should
| fix.
| mike50 wrote:
| I beg to differ look at the amount of conde nast reposts, posts
| that just link to Wikipedia and posts that are repated over and
| over.
| deskr wrote:
| No wonder. I was reading a about historical battles the other day
| and wanted to research the armour that the knights whore. When I
| searched for "knight armour" (I didn't know "plate armour" is the
| generic term), ONE result was wikipedia. ALL the others were
| trying to sell me knight armour.
|
| Really Google?
| morkalork wrote:
| I hate how it's translating words or when you highlight
| something on mobile and select search web, it prefixes "define"
| or replaces the word entirely with a more generalized term.
| Just this week, I searched for Clatite. The first result is a
| giant full page (on mobile) information box about Crepes.
| Which, yes, the same, but also not the same. If I wanted to
| read about crepes, I would have searched for crepes. When I'm
| searching for Clatite, it's because I'm interested in the
| specifics of what is different. Giving information about the
| French variety is missing the point entirely. If you're on
| Android, try it yourself. Highlight the word Clatite and see
| what it puts in the search box when you click "web search".
| robswc wrote:
| Wow, just tried it and you're right. So much clutter and BS to
| get to an actual result.
| skilled wrote:
| Google released an updated called the Helpful Content Update[0]
| in Sep 2023 that decimated tens of thousands of sites, many of
| which were extremely prominent for general queries. Glenn Gabe[1]
| has been tracking 400~ sites since then (those that were
| impacted), and Google has refused to lift the classifier. That's
| 7 months of no updates or guidance from Google, and sites like
| Reddit have tripled their traffic. The same goes for LinkedIn and
| Quora.
|
| This article[2] also highlights Google defending the stance, even
| though this LinkedIn post[3] shows that there are issues with
| this. Google literally made Reddit the number one site for _all_
| queries with no regard for other creators.
|
| They might as well delete their entire search engine and simply
| act as the front-end of Reddit's search, which everyone knows is
| completely dogshit.
|
| [0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-
| co...
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1780563588756676890
|
| [2]: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-defends-statements-
| searc...
|
| [3]:
| https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:71838511...
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Whats really odd is I've noticed the exact opposite. I used to
| always get Reddit results on the first page for any random search
| I did, and the past year-ish I've found myself needing to add
| `site:reddit.com` to searches if I want to see Reddit results
| more and more often. I pretty much never see Reddit results
| without it.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Reddit doesn't allow vpns or or cloud/hosted ips and unlike
| google, when it censors you, you lose data plus their horrible
| clinky ui and "please install our spyware app if you want our
| artificial ui slowdowns to go away" b.s.. i don't know why so
| many people think this is a good thing. It might as well be
| facebook or twitter.
| Magi604 wrote:
| I use Reddit and 4chan equally. They are like the Yin and Yang of
| the internet.
| tensor wrote:
| It's a shame that the CEO started reddits downward spiral. I used
| to be a heavy use and definitely contributed a lot of technical
| comments. However, their choice to cut off people accessing
| content via the API so that they could both sell access to user
| data, and kill third party clients to force you to view their ads
| caused me to delete all my comments and stop using the site.
|
| I actually have no problems with anyone using my public comments
| for training AI or other purposes, that's why I make them public.
| But changing the contract on me and denying access to my data and
| instead crow about selling it, while ALSO forcing me to view ads
| unless I pay a very steep fee? No freaking way.
|
| By making reddit "closed" in this way I suspect it will very
| quickly degrade. Already many communities are gone or vastly less
| useful due to the better and more knowledgable posters leaving
| for the same reasons.
| programjames wrote:
| > Google started dropping hints in 2022 when it promised to do a
| better job of promoting sites that weren't just chasing the top
| of search but were more helpful and human.
|
| Wasn't this Google's policy in the "don't be evil" stage, until
| they started encouraging SEO in 2018?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Or is Google providing less useful data coupled with the fact I
| have to scroll down considerably to avoid advertisements with an
| ad blocker? Only to be met with reddit results...
| spencerchubb wrote:
| I've said this before and I'll say it again. As companies realize
| how much people like reddit as a trusted source of information,
| they will learn how to optimize reddit. Then it will slowly
| degrade just like google has.
| verzali wrote:
| Companies realised that a few years ago, we're well past the
| point where Reddit started to degrade.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Google doesn't understand search.
| RileyJames wrote:
| Just last night I was looking to jailbreak an old phone. I did a
| few googles and everything I found seemed really dodgy.
|
| Added reddit to the query. Got exactly the info I needed. Moved
| on with my life.
|
| Google has become useless.
|
| (Jail break to use frida to mitm some cert pinned apps. That tool
| chain is amazing these days)
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