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!
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
