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 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
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.
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.
There should be a service or extension or something like that that performs regular backups for you. Of course, lemmy needs to implement a backup/transfer feature first.
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.
This one point about the fediverse that I find essential to consider when thinking about reliability. Distributed ownership of servers drastically decreases the chances of the fediverse as a whole going down (not considering differences in the reliability of individual servers). But each individual server has a much higher chance of going down than say an individual subreddit. This is a subject I'd very much like to understand better, but it's clear it has implications to the chance of any given post getting lost.
The best solution to that possibility is for everyone to self-host. It has some costs and require some technical know-how though (but it's now way easier than a few years ago).
I'm fantasizing quite hard here, but I wouldn't question it that in a few years we might be able to host our servers on a containerized application in our phones. We can already do that with an old PC/laptop connected to the WiFi 24/7.
These are certainly possibilities! It's happened elsewhere in the Fediverse... but already we can export most of our data and migrate to a different instance. Getting these base features right is important before enhancing their functionality. Planning for the future is important too. So far I've been impressed by Lemmy, though it's not nearly as portable as Mastodon or Calckey or Pleroma etc. Part of that is that in Lemmy/kbin we don't follow other users... we subscribe to groups (subs/communities/magazines).
Still, with the nature of ActivityPub, it's inevitable that migration tools for Reddit-like federated apps will get built quick-like
Makes a lot of sense, especially due to the drama earlier on with Imgur and its image policy
I think it's a fair concern. We've seen other parts of the fediverse successfully implement crowd sourced funding via patron and similar to keep mastodon servers running and I suspect if Lemmy remains "the place to be" admins will have reasonable success with a similar model. Lemmy is super efficient and can support 100s of users on a single box so I think if 1% of users paid like $5 a month you could probably still support 99% of users "for free".
I'm sorry, but clearly you have not looked for niche information on Google for a while now. Lots of links end in dead ones, particularly when I am looking for vehicle information on older models.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say, we shouldn't be concerned because this problem already happened?
A lot niche older vehicle information, if it wasn't hosted on Reddit, was often on forums funded by enthusiasts, which eventually ran out of money and no longer exist. This is exactly the problem that I'm concerned about. Particularly so if a certain community balloons in popularity and an admin nukes it to keep the server costs under control for the other members.
Completely what I'm saying, but to add on it is not just forums. With the new web, I've hit a deadend on many OEM websites as well, and part websites, and others. I'm sure cell phone and computer information is similar, in fact after trying to research a power supply for my old prebuilt I know it's a fight.
If we have communities sync'ed on multiple instances we can solve that. At first this was my presumption for how the federation works, but I then learned /c/Pennsylvania on one instance is helpful local news and on another its right-wing propaganda.
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.
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/technology@beehaw.org and move the whole thing to /c/technology@feddit.de or something, that would still break all the indexers' links
What we really need is some sort of torrent-like system for this content with something equivalent to magnet links.
Sounds like you're describing ipfs :D
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.
One thing the FOSS world really needs to get on right now is some form of search engine accessible distributed content archival. We need a way to store useful content from the past in a way that no one individual or group of individuals is capable of deleting it.
I believe archive.org fits the definition
That is the main reason why I've been blogging on my own website since 2004 https://paradies.jeena.net/... (and switched to English in 2010 https://jeena.net/posts )
Yep. I blog infrequently but I’ve said a few times in my posts, I am writing this article because I need to remember the steps to do this weird niche thing in case something breaks in the future. If it happens to help someone else out, great.
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.
Try using ChatGPT if you haven't. Ive used Reddit in the past for a lot of troubleshooting, but ChatGPT is easier to get the answers I'm looking for unless I asked the question myself. But there's no judgement from ChatGPT lol
Though, take care to factcheck what you get from it; all it really is is just a word predictor, and it can be pretty good at confidently telling you absolute nonsense that sounds right
Used chatgpt to rework my resume recently, holy shit that site is a godsend.
It's completely unsustainable though. So much new content is being generated by LLMs that other LLMs are training on it. When that happens, you get model collapse. It's already started happening in limited cases, there's an interesting paper on it here with examples. They need a fresh feed of data to learn and train on, and reddit was arguably the world's best source, otherwise it's bots learning from other bots.
I 100% understand Reddit's desire to stop LLM makers from exploiting user data for free, we all should, but they've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and gone full late stage capitalist. On one hand saying that content is the most valuable thing, so restricting access to it, whilst simultaneously making it harder for those who generate and moderate said content for free to do so.
Reddit and its information will not disappear. As long as the subreddits go public again which I think most will in the long term, the info will be available. Plus it feels like many of the active and helpful members of many communities are also the first ones to move to lemmy so we seem to have an okay start to a new chapter.
Not trying to be hostile, but you just went on about how useful reddit is, but you also hope it dies? I just don't understand why people support these long blackouts while admitting it won't make reddit change it's mind.
Not OP but I think this type of information is not something a for-profit company should be able to hold against everyone on the Internet. At this point I think reddit has to 'die' in order for a better, more open standard to take its place. Even if they do cave to the demands they have shown that they are willing to sacrifice the platform and usability for more profits, so there is no knowing what they will do in the future. It's a great loss, but I would rather get it over with now so there is solid foundation to build on and this doesn't happen again.
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.
That explains why the search page quotes a comment that doesn't exist on the post. That always confused me. It's insane how dependent on searching with "reddit" appended on the end of the search term I am. I have qualms as to how this'll bode for search engines if reddit loses interest or goes under.
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...
But how would this work with broader federation? Searching other instances like beehaw or kbin? We'll needan new search optimization to search the fediverse more efficiently.
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.
Same. I found it funny though. Showed that if we tried we can cause some chaos
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.
Now that they know, what happens next?
For those 4, reddit was a tool not a community, so they weren't major users and even if they never visit reddit again, reddit will likely never notice. However, it does raise awareness that reddit is being greedy and that their IPO is a bad thing for the world. As such, it devaluates them. This puts pressure on reddit to respect their community and content creators, which is the only thing they have of value.
Same, but it’s just growing pains.
We should start rewriting posts in lemmy with the correct information.
Sad thing is most search engines suck/haven't really indexed mostly anything in the fediverse. Wonder why
Agreed. But it's a nice reminder that these huge companies that get money by renting out our eyeballs actually provide very little content - just the platform we happen to be stuck with for the time being.
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.
I'm willing to bet the lack of api access going forward will make all reddit posts disappear from crawler results anyways. I'm no expert, but I imagine the crawler is picking up on all of the interconnected references to reddit that are all due to free api access. As soon as those connections disappear, so dies the value to the entire community. It will be just like the garbage results we get from every single source now. This is the path of neo digital feudalism.
API calls are almost always private between the caller and the endpoint (think telegram bots or mobile apps). There isn't really a technically feasible way for a crawler to somehow "infer" any kind of knowledge of how api calls are being used unless the result has some kind of publically visible side effect (E. G. The program using the api is generating a web page and uploading it somewhere crawlable). Google et Al go by how many links from other pages to the page of interest exist (inbound links) and multiply by a smattering of other things like quality of keywords, length of content etc.
That said, if you're implying that the api changes mean that:
That is a plausible concern.
fewer inbound links will be generated that point to existing posts
pages stagnate and drop in ranking
This is what I mean, the external references people had in the periphery will dry up. Like if I'm not using Infinity to generate better refined search results, now I don't post the link to Stack Exchange, and this reference fails to cascade across various copy paste blog resources. Now the original reddit post is a dead end source with no external weighted reference value. It's all of these advanced features implemented in the periphery using the free API that create the usefulness in the first place.
Searching reddit will be just like YouTube searches now. No matter what technical wording you use, you'll never find technical references again. I can type the title of a video on YT verbatim and still won't get the correct results, but I can log into an old account and find the content in my hundreds of playlists I kept as references. It is still there, it is still public.
Yeah that makes sense! I totally agree! Search is becoming pretty difficult these days!
The other thing is that Discord search is god awful. There's absolutely no way to modify your search for better results, whether that's to require something to appear exactly as typed, or to exclude certain results, it's just you put in the words and hope you get the right thing. Sometimes that works out, but sometimes it will make the dumbest connections and render your search useless unless you want to trawl through pages of crap you don't want. Like I've found out that Discord considers the words universal, universe, and university to be the same...
Google Search has been sucking for quite a long time.
"site:old.reddit.com" was just a temporary fix
Yeah, I think everyones experience has been:
"thing I want to find" => seo spam blogs/spammy content that are related, but not what you are after (and all seem to have the same content, just worded differently...)
"try again but more specific" => basically the same results
Google's problem is that so much of the internet is behind logins now. The dark net has taken over the internet and the free internet is dying.
Also so much content in Google is just seo spam. The worst is trying to find an honest comparison of two or three tech options. Almost all of the sites like stackshare would serve the planet better by going dark and falling out of the indexes.
The free internet won't die, it's alive and well right here. You'll just see resets and upsets like this one every now and then whenever capitalists get too greedy and take their userbase for granted in a mad dash for a cashout.
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.
Agree. The problem the article is talking about wouldn't exist if Google returned results other than sponsored listicles.
in my experience, the good answers are usually found in reddit threads. at least honest answers, and more importantly, differing opinions, which is importing when looking at a review of something
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...
Yeah, the wikis came in clutch a lot of times for me. Really well done with how organized they were for the ones that had them.
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.
Exactly, reddit was huge on getting information and opinions
Im really worried how we can replace it, Im all in for supporting the blackout, Im just hoping that we will have a good alternative to get the info and opinions we need.
I mean is it really a good thing that Reddit, with its rampant platforming of misinformation, was often the first search result for a myriad of incredibly nuanced topics?
It is - but you can still access via archive.org and similar resources.
It's also a super clunky way to search. If I'm skimming posts for technical issues that I need a quick turnaround for, I'm probably not going through that hassle unless I'm desperate.
try this script
// ==UserScript==
// @name reddit archive link
// @include *://*.google*/search*
// @include *://*.reddit.com/r/*
// @grant none
// @version 1.0
// @author memchr
// @description 6/15/2023, 6:57:32 AM
// ==/UserScript==
function get_archive_href(href) {
return href.replace(/https:\/\/www\.reddit/,"https://web.archive.org/web/https://old.reddit");
}
if (window.location.hostname.match(/^(\w*\.)?google.*$/)) { // google
const results = document.querySelectorAll('div.yuRUbf > a');
results.forEach(e => {
let href = e.getAttribute('href');
if (href.match(/reddit\.com\/r\//)) {
href = get_archive_href(href);
let archive_link = document.createElement('a');
archive_link.href = href;
archive_link.textContent = "archive";
archive_link.style.marginLeft = "10px";
e.insertAdjacentElement("afterend", archive_link);
}
})
} else if (window.location.hostname.match(/^(\w*\.)?redd.*$/)) { // reddit shit
const href = get_archive_href(location.href);
const button = document.createElement('button');
button.textContent = 'archive';
button.style.position = 'fixed';
button.style.bottom = '20px';
button.style.left = '20px';
button.style.backgroundColor = '#655CF2ff';
button.style.color = 'white';
button.style.zIndex = '9999';
button.style.borderRadius = '20px';
button.style.padding = '5px';
document.body.appendChild(button);
button.addEventListener('click', () => {location.replace(href)});
}
It will add a link to archive.org next to the reddit Google search result, or a blue link to archive button in the bottom left corner of a reddit page.
Script manager such as violentmonkey is required.
Love how this is the whole topic in a nutshell: Found an article lamenting an issue, go out with an userscript attempting to fix it.
(Well, I personally use DuckDuckGo, but the point stands)
DDG is not immune. The content is not there. The blackout is drawing attention to problems with reddit, but it will not change the course. Investors will not buy something they can't control. That means limiting API access.
The change is bad for reddit and bad for the internet but it's good for the IPO - guess who will win out.
Grab the Wayback Machine chrome extension. It has a button that will take you directly to the newest or oldest archived version of the page.
So you hit the Reddit post that's blocked, then click on the button for the extension and click on "Newest" and it will open a tab directly to the archived copy.
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.
All the stuff i would use reddit as an actual source for is things where it's either obvious that the person is wrong or easy to check or think through. Same for lemmy
Yeah I mostly use it for like product reviews/recommendations or like personal help topics. Not stuff where factual information is required
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
That may be true for most questions, but there are many niche communities with dedicated people that gathered in subreddits to post their informations, experience or discoveries, and these are simply not found anywhere else.
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.
I think it's time to get back to old habits. Back in my cyber café days (and after too, since internet was not as reliable here), I would save pages to view them later at home offline.
Manual scrapping, basically.
Getting the language reference/docs in HTML format, like I used to for PHP.
One thing that is designed to be future-proof is MarkDown, I've been taking profesional and personal notes and exporting important information from web pages to markdown and hosting it on my own PC for a while.
MarkDown it's text based so you can have a huge amount of data with just a tiny bit of space. And it is easily translated/rendered as HTML. Apps like Logseq, Obsidian or Markor are good starts for managing huge vaults of information.
I'm thinking that whe should create a MarkDown community here.
edit: There's one already! https://lemmy.ml/c/pkb
Thanks a lot! You're right, backing up with MarkDown is much better.
You just reminded me of an old software I used to use, called WikidPad. It had some sort of MarkDown and it was FOSS. It was great for making portable/offline wikis.
We're going to have to actually read official documentation instead of relying on some greybeard's wisdom on SO 🥲
Well, at least stack overflow database dump is available.
At least with SO, they have historically put up dumps of all user data on archive.org (that stopped recently but it's allegedly coming back). If something were to happen, at least the information would still be decently accessible, just not indexed as well.
Wait until Google bots catch up and drop many of the links back to Reddit.
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/
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
I was not a fan of this change
Reddit was my go to !bang to search for solutions and opinions because it felt so natural. Always got a pros and cons, different ways to fix or do things.. everything in a central place. Sad to see it go.
On the other hand reddit has been declining in quality over the years so I think this kind of reset is natural and something we should support. I'm all in lemmy right now. Feels good so far.
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.
I thought links between domains helped pagerank score? Mind you, it's been a while since I learned SEO. A lot of the content, especially the federated stuff, seems to be loaded via javascript. I wonder if that affects what can be indexed.
[DELETED]
Who will be the fediverse google search equivalent?🤷♂️
It allows you to define "lenses" which are presets modifying the search (such as including or excluding a set of sites, but sadly max 10) and it allows you to change priorities of domains in the search result ranking (so I usually block usual stackoverflow copycats and sometimes raise intriguing niche sites). It's not everything imaginable in terms of customizability, but it's good enough not to be a pain to use, unlike everything else including DDG (although arguably, DDG is miles ahead of Google, Bing, or provincial engines).
5/mo is too much I think.
I'm not sure what to think about the price. I can't really imagine life without a search engine, even though I was alive for a couple of decades before search engines existed. I pay $400/month for my car, but my search engine arguably gives me more value (I am lucky not to need to drive a lot). I wouldn't pay $400/month for a search engine. But $5-10 to have a degree of freedom from the tracking and results that aren't just trying to get my money? I am intrigued.
Idk, maybe it should be usage based. I feel like 60/yr is too much. I'd be fine with 19.99/yr but idk what they're costs are. Otherwise, I do like the idea. Confession, I haven't used it yet but I plan to signup and try the first 100 searches free.
Run searxng. Thank me later. Better yet, don't thank me. Thank the people who contribute to the code and if you have the wherewithall and a domain host a public instance on a free oracle cloud account.
Depending on how much you use it, it might not be that much worse though... The old price was 10$/mo for unlimited searches. Now they offer different tiers starting at 5$/mo for 300 searches.
Personally, I use about 300-500 searches per month, so my monthly bill is actually less than it used to be (5-7$).
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.
Use a tool to edit all your comments to a Lorem ipsum, the more useless data they have filling their database the better, I prefer this to simply deleting them all and freeing up their database storage.
Btw, I don't know any tool for that, but I guess there should be some because I saw some users editing all their comments.
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?
If you've ever owned an older car, you know that this is the absolute best approach.
Good luck getting exceptionally niche advice for things like that on reddit. Forums get so much more specific, you get an entire forum dedicated to one car model that was only built for 5 years and a bunch of people there know literally everything about it, like the fact that you're better off getting an aftermarket PCV valve because those are built a bit better and don't fail early, or the fact that the shifter cable has the tendency to get water in it so you better be careful shifting out of park on a really cold morning, you might just snap the cable if it's old.
I've run into this several times already
yeah, me, too - for me it was /r/trackballs which hosts a lot of great trackball reviews and comparisons. crazy how many great resources are locked up in those forums.
You can prepend a link with "cache:" to view Google's cached version of the site. This works automatically with the url bar in at least Firefox and Chrome (likely other browsers as well). If your browser doesn't support that you can enter it in the google search bar and the result will be the cached version of the site (if available)
I noticed this as well, but it also made me reflect on why I even started adding "reddit" to my searches.
It's kind of crazy how bad most other results are. They are almost universally some kind of sponsored ad or blog content written by the marketing department of some brand. It's strangely difficult to find the information you are looking for on google these days.
Reddit was a band-aid but the larger issue is more in how search became an outlet for ads. Modern billboards on the information superhighway.
I'm not sure if there's a proper solution anymore.
I don't think it's just search. It's pretty much the entire internet. Reddit is just one of the last places where the people posting aren't trying to monetize themselves. I mean, what else are you hoping for? Some guy's self-hosted blog? Those are all dead or monetized. A news org? Even the niche ones have sold out to the very corporations that they're supposed to cover and review. Same with pretty much every social media influencer and personality.
Reddit has held out because no single person can gain enough inertia and influence to be worth buying out (astroturfing bots on the other hand...) The rest of the internet is just trying to sell you shit.
Never heard about Kag before, thanks for mentioning it! How is your experience with it? I tried DuckDuckGo for a while and wasn't to happy about it. Is it comparable?
kinda think we need a search engine that can index fedirated sites . like lemmy /mastedon /pleroma .etc .etc
searching for help with technical /specific things has become a nightmare .as al the usefull subreddits have gone dark due to the ongoing protest . making google not so helpfull at all to use
easy to do with a privacy friendly search engine like searxng. I set mine to block reddit.com from any results because so many of the links are useless right now. You can set it to search particular sites and add those into your searches.
wish i knew, maybe something with AI?
the reality is that current-day SEO isn't even Optimization, it's Lying. try googling a recipe or an alternative to a popular software and see how the first four pages are all ad-ridden, useless spam-bot articles designed to retain users rather than give them the information they are looking for
It's not, lol
Reddit was one of the last places on the internet that you could read without logging into somewhere. It's sad to see it go.
I just wrote a Tampermonkey script to streamline this
Result:
I'm going back to some old sources of information. For hardware at least, there's several forums already.
Nowadays we have virtually infinite email space. Create an account for forums, use an alias service like spamgourmet/Firefox relay/simplelogin/etc or the email's own + tag trick.
Search with "-reddit".
Create the content elsewhere.
Also, while Stack Exchange could go belly up as well one day for any reason, it does have several different thematic portals. I've been landing on those now that I filter out reddit results.
100% has this happen today. Wanted and answer, the only answer was on Reddit, and the Google link was busted.
I think IPFS often unfairly gets lumped in with crypto bro shite but it seems to me like a pretty useful technology in many other contexts too.
Google was deprecated when Microsoft released Bing Chat. Only further deprecated by Claude, GPT 4, and even some open source models. I've googled maybe 5 times this month vs hundreds before AI.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
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
save