honestly we should have collectively realized way earlier that putting all the useful, readable, un-touched-by-SEO help content for basically every niche hobby fandom and ideology in the hands of one for-profit entity was not very wisdom-pilled of us
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
338 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37730 readers
445 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I agree, but I also have serious concerns about this being the replacement strategy. It could be because of my ignorance of how this all works though. Like many of you, I am new and here because of the reddexodus.
These servers are going to cost money, and for many of them the money will run out. Is there a function to preserve the collective content of an entire server once it goes dark? I know that you can migrate your own account to another server, but what happens to everything Google has indexed at Lemmy.world if the worst happens? Is it all just dead links? What if many of the users do not migrate? Is it just gone?
I am concerned that in the current state we are setting up to burn everything that loses a couple admins or becomes too old to economically host.
Before reddit removed them most of this compiled knowledge was in the subreddit wikis. I honestly believe a return to communities with wikis is the long term replacement.
I was on a mastodon server and the owner decided it was not worth his money to keep running. He did not inform anyone on the server or allow any account backups and all was lost.
With federated services, I feel like it's somewhat important to get to know the admins of the server you use. You don't have to be best friends, but at least know their name, motivation for running the server, and how it's funded.
load more comments
(1 replies)
In practice the content is distributed to all the other servers, so people who have been reading it before will still be able to on their own instance, but you're right the indexed domain is gone and so are the results in Google.
But there is one difference, one instance of lemmy only stores a very small fraction of the content. And it's much easier to fuck up one reddit compared to fuck up thousands of lemmy instances simultaneously. So if one instance goes down, the rest of the fediverse is still up and running.
load more comments
(5 replies)
we should have collectively realized way earlier
some people have, but whenever you'd mention it, you'd be met with "lol take the tinfoil hat off", "but we're already using [for-profit platform] why would we move when everyone's here" and "but it's haaaaaaard".
Source: https://xkcd.com/743/
The fact that the alt-text directly mentions Diaspora is more than amusing in this context
load more comments
(2 replies)
Yes. When everyone enters info on corporate sites, sooner or later they'll decide to monetize it.
Reddit going evil on charges and showing their colours in the AMA has been a wake up.
I've said it numerous times over the years, the Internet has been centralizing rapidly and it benefits none of us.
In 2005 you'd wander around, going from peoples' personal pages to forums to whatever else people linked. In 2015 half of those websites were dead because everyone got their content on reddit anyway.
we can still easily fall into this trap if there isn't a good way to migrate communities between instances. And even if we could just take /c/[email protected] and move the whole thing to /c/[email protected] or something, that would still break all the indexers' links
load more comments
(4 replies)
I just can't agree more with you. Like wow this reddit blackout has truthfully opened my eyes to the massive, giant and incredibly amount of useful information that is currently resting on reddit servers.
That is the main reason why I've been blogging on my own website since 2004 https://paradies.jeena.net/weblog/2004/apr/ersteintrag (and switched to English in 2010 https://jeena.net/posts )
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
Am I the only one that's noticed how reddit has been fucking with web crawlers? They insert newer comments into older posts so the crawlers pick up false results.
A few years back they started injecting a "related posts" box into pages. What that does is multiply the amount of results a crawler will pick up. But all those are false results. There's only one true search result which is the original comment/post. Some times I find myself sifting though the search engine results to find the actual original post. The rest are completely worthless, off topic, reddit posts littering the search index.
I know all this blackout stuff hurts now. I see it as necessary for the platform to lose its status as the "front page of the internet". Reddit turned evil a long time ago. It's long past time it be deposed of.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Reddit actions are tragic for the web. I can't even tell you how many times I searched something and typed Reddit at the end of the query. Not just because Reddit search SUCKS, but mostly because it's a gold mine of information. Especially for technical stuff.
Your game crash? Reddit. Weird bug on your laptop? Reddit. Looking for a cool app? Reddit. Have a weird question? Reddit.
Reddit saved me countless hours and headache. I felt that yesterday when doing a search about something without even putting Reddit on it, kept bringing up Reddit links. I'd click on it without reading and end up on a locked sub because of the blackout.
It sucks but I hope it's going to continue. But at the same time, I don't see Reddit backing down. And even lf they do? I'm not going back. Because how dare you? Like... screw you for even trying to pull that crap on your users.
Agree, but I think that's the point: this is the proof we have to switch to a different model. It will take time to replace Reddit as the huge information source it was (and to a certain extent still is), but I'm willing to hope it can happen.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Had this happen today. Was searching for some programming related stuff and top pages are all inaccessible Reddit posts.
Hopefully it will help people realise that a profit motive being attached to everything is actually counterproductive societally.
Same. Had some things I needed to look up for my 3D printer and much of the results were inaccessible.
Was a pain.
load more comments
(1 replies)
About 4 people at work Monday discovered the blackouts and learned the reason from following Google results. I'd say that shows the effectiveness of the protest. That's 4 individuals that I work with personally who wouldn't have known otherwise about the api problem that now do. I can only imagine how many people are in that same boat.
Same. I found it funny though. Showed that if we tried we can cause some chaos
load more comments
(4 replies)
This also highlights the problem with a lot of communities moving to Discord, which inevitably ends up as repositories for critical information, but can't be indexed by Google. Reddit is still valuable as a problem solving resource, and I hope they fix this API fiasco.
load more comments
(5 replies)
People rely far too heavily on reddit for public resources. Here's hoping that changes now.
Tacking "Reddit" onto search queries almost became a prerequisite. Never imagined I'd have to replace that with "-Reddit".
It's made researching a media centre setup very difficult this week...
load more comments
(3 replies)
For many people google (or whatever engine) was just a gateway to get informations on reddit. With all those sub reddits down at the moment, a lot of searches are really hard to get informations, because like it, or not, reddit is a big part of getting informations or opinions etc.
Before reddit removed them most of this compiled knowledge was in the subreddit wikis. I honestly believe a return to communities with wikis is the long term replacement.
Honestly, not a bad opinion, when the wikis were done well, they did have some extremely useful information. I wonder if we could do something like that in Lemmy...
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Google Search has been sucking for quite a long time.
"site:old.reddit.com" was just a temporary fix
This has been deeply frustrating, but since that's the whole point, I support this collective inconvenience.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Definitely saw this coming… can’t imagine what will happen if Stack Overflow pulls something similar. All WebDev/DevOps work will halt overnight.
I’ve been trying to put my issues/solutions in a personal blog or wiki, but there’s so much old info out there in sites like Reddit/SO/medium/etc, it’d be a huge loss when it goes away.
Maybe it really is time to get open sourced AI and bots to archive useful information so they don't get monopolized.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I've actively found this as well but honestly, I think it's for the best because most of the time Reddit posts with actual answers aren't well-cited. So if anyone asks how you know something, "uhh Reddit told me" is pretty weak. So Google is getting better because Reddit has gotten worse. It means that you have to go to the actual articles and find the actual sources instead of this daisy chain of information. We have a huge issue with misinformation and this actually helps resolve it.
Wait you use reddit posts to inform yourself on things where misinformation is possible? I also was mildy inconvenienced by the blackouts but it was mostly related to programming stuff, where it is very obvious if an answer is wrong. I don't think I would even consider using reddit as a source for anything factual
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
GOOD!
I think it's more appropriate to say that internet searches in general had been getting worse over the last several years, but it just so happened to be the case that your answer could likely be found in a reddit thread.
That’s why I used shreddit to delete all my posts and comments on Reddit. It’s not much, but if everyone does it Reddit will feel the repercussions. They won’t benefit from my content anymore.
I don't want to take away ressources from people who will look into Monero in the future :/
In the past I commented many explanations when people asked for help and I don't want someone to find a thread with a question and deleted comment with a "Thanks!" reply. I guess a script to change all my past comments into something along the lines of "Removed. In case this was a support-related comment, feel free to ask for help on monero.town" could work?
load more comments
(1 replies)
I mean if you do hit this, like I have. You can just use google's webcached view. or sometimes the internet archive.
I found this covers most of my needs: https://cachedview.com/
Ah yes, working as intended. It's probably affecting people more than reddit themselves. Hope the content draught continues though.
I've definitely felt like my Google searches have been lackluster after a lot of subreddits went dark. from advices to game communities, it sucks to check other forums you have no knowledge of browsing or worse shudders quora
Are lemmy instances indexed properly as well? Would it be enough to put "lemmy" into the search
The federated nature of instances unfortunately might nerf the SEO because they're from different domains. Google wouldn't value instance_1. com more because the clicks to related_instance_2. com are higher.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Makes me want to go back and edit my posts to f*** /u/spez because I don't want them getting traffic off of my content. But also don't want that entire collection of human data gone if everyone did the same.
Too bad we can't all export and reconstruct our conversations here somehow.
My posts are 99% shitposts anyway, so it doesn't really matter, nothing constructive to mankind.
load more comments
(2 replies)
It is - but you can still access via archive.org and similar resources.
load more comments
(5 replies)
view more: next ›