The internet got a lot worse under the reign of big search and its associated ad platforms.
Milled content has taken over. Low-quality and corrupt product reviews, fake instructions, and repeated canned text.
It’s become less possible to get good information using search engines generally. Reddit was creating a stopgap because of its vote system and, frankly, its lack of available ad revenue for business meant that the information on it was more likely to be accurate than the information on the general internet.
One way or another this was about to go away. The good information that was available on Reddit was provided by volunteers who were not valued by the C-suite of that site. What was valuable was ad revenue, and pro-business content Farm bullshit is more valuable than good information to advertisers.
Thinking the reddit blackout is hurting search is the wrong take. Modern search algorithms and the SEO services that naturally follow them are hurting the free flow of information. Particularly useful information. And as AI chatbots become more powerful, we stand at serious risk of drowning in an ocean of bullshit and not being able to use the internet for any useful research.
Fortunately, Chatgpt was trained on data sets from Reddit and other sources, so not all knowledge is lost. But totally feel the pain, I’m going to miss reddit (still haven’t been back since the blackout - I blocked reddit at the router level to prevent accessing it accidentally out of habit)
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!
There are paid search engines like Kagi and at this point I block domains that seem to be SEO blog spam. Kagi makes money off subscriptions, not ads, and they let you block whichever domains you want. That’s the future, a federated internet where people pay to support the sites they want directly.
Yes but actually not. Federated, yes. Everyone contributing, yes. Paid for access… that’s a path I prefer not to walk into. Payment should be voluntary.
I am gladly paying for my mastodon account and I will gladly pay for my kbin account when/if recurrent payments are possible. But I understand I am a privileged one. 20€ a year for me is easy at this point of my life. But not everyone earns money. Not everyone lives in a country where 20€ a year is small change. 10 years ago I wouldn’t have been able to pay that easily.
A world in which we federate and each of us contribute and pay, if we can, the amount we can, that makes sense to me.
A world in which you can’t access the good parts of the internet unless you pay for it, that’s scary to me.
I mean, yes. Yes it can. If you have access to GPT4 it absolutely can make those recipes and tell you things that reddit used to. Heck, it’s even got bing search now, I think people are underestimating what it’s capable of. You can also work alongside with Claude+. It’s the new original stuff that I worry about. New technologies, developments, and ideas that are completely novel will definitely become lost and i’m not sure what that will mean for the future.
I loved the way you wrote this for some reason. Very clear and well-informed
Probably like most of us, I use reddit as my search for quite literally almost any question or research I do - and this was done multiple times a day
I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do to find information. I absolutely LOVED reading real people’s real and genuine with anything. Tech, cooking, intermittent fasting, specific games, guides, custom android roms, careers, I could go on forever. And I would look across dozens of threads and even more comments, and then smash them together in my head to come up with the most likely accurate answer to my problem. And let’s not forget when dbags or misinformation is dowvoted to oblivion!
As a techie, I can’t even count on my hands how many times I have found someone random person having the same completely random and specific PC issue that I had - and they showed what they tried, what didn’t work, then I look in comments and find 6 different valid potential solutions. It was absolutely glorious and so useful
I hope that somehow, something even greater emerges from all of this that fills in this “need”. I don’t think reddit will ever be the same, and now I’d feel dirty using it to find information even if most of it will probably still be there
EDIT: wanted to add that I’m also worried because reddit was so easy to use and user friendly (at least in the ways we modified it lol) which made it really easy for people to join and add to the mass amount of information on the platform. I’m concerned that kbin/lemmy won’t work as a true replacement because they don’t seem nearly as straightforward
Reddit’s UX for the first few years was hugely worse than kbin’s is right now, in my opinion. It took a while for it to get nice, and the lessons learned on it are freely available to successors.
All the fediverse stuff might seem like a speedbump, but for the average user, none of it actually matters.
Trying to Google for anything specific nowadays is almost completely useless, if you cannot find it in the first page of results the rest is usually trash. Googling with Reddit was one of the last ways to get actual insight and/or reviews on things. Corporations are crippling the usability of the internet entirely for the sake of profit.
I definitely moved to DuckDuckGo the moment I realized Google was ignoring the text I was writing on the search box. I was searching for a bug fix in my code for weeks, something very niche and difficult to find. When I finally got the answer and moved on to the following bug, Google kept mixing my previous bug with the new one, making it impossible to find the right answer. It got so used to me being focused on that niche thing, it couldn’t believe I moved past it.
DuckDuckGo forced me to write “smart queries” again, giving context on the search text. But it gave me the results I needed. Not the ones Google googlexplained me I needed.
Reddit has outlived it’s usefulness. So much of the content is pushed by advertisers that it has become meaningless. Even in places like HomeImprovement you would see “questions” that were really prompts for an ad in the first comment: “This product is exactly what you are looking for!”
To say nothing of content theft. The number of websites that just take the StackOverflow data exports and put them all on a shallow clone of the site in hopes of gaming Google is utterly ridiculous. I guess OpenAI has killed that now, in the worst possible way.
Lol. I mean, yeah, lol. Stack Overflow was always pretentious and a massive pain to actually use yourself. Now they’re throwing a tantrum and disabling archiving exports? Zero pity. I bet the archive is effectively zero maintenance and costs them nothing to run.
EDIT: It gets worse the more I read. “Profit off the work of the community”, what, you’re the ones doing that. The “community” wants their answers out in the world, they just want to help people, SO is the one using it to make money. This is enraging.
EDIT2: The very final comment is a link to a duplicate. Very SO.
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!
There are paid search engines like Kagi and at this point I block domains that seem to be SEO blog spam. Kagi makes money off subscriptions, not ads, and they let you block whichever domains you want. That’s the future, a federated internet where people pay to support the sites they want directly.
Yes but actually not. Federated, yes. Everyone contributing, yes. Paid for access… that’s a path I prefer not to walk into. Payment should be voluntary.
I am gladly paying for my mastodon account and I will gladly pay for my kbin account when/if recurrent payments are possible. But I understand I am a privileged one. 20€ a year for me is easy at this point of my life. But not everyone earns money. Not everyone lives in a country where 20€ a year is small change. 10 years ago I wouldn’t have been able to pay that easily.
A world in which we federate and each of us contribute and pay, if we can, the amount we can, that makes sense to me.
A world in which you can’t access the good parts of the internet unless you pay for it, that’s scary to me.
There’s a glimmer of hope that search engines lose relevance, and so will SEO and SEO-related spam.
will be fun when the AIs get poisoned with AI-generated training materials
Likely already happening.
And as the AIs inevitably train on AI-generated content, their biases and blindspots will be infinitely reinforced.
There are open source AI models already, they suck, but it’s early days. I think the next step will be curated and open source training data.
I mean, yes. Yes it can. If you have access to GPT4 it absolutely can make those recipes and tell you things that reddit used to. Heck, it’s even got bing search now, I think people are underestimating what it’s capable of. You can also work alongside with Claude+. It’s the new original stuff that I worry about. New technologies, developments, and ideas that are completely novel will definitely become lost and i’m not sure what that will mean for the future.
I loved the way you wrote this for some reason. Very clear and well-informed
Probably like most of us, I use reddit as my search for quite literally almost any question or research I do - and this was done multiple times a day
I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do to find information. I absolutely LOVED reading real people’s real and genuine with anything. Tech, cooking, intermittent fasting, specific games, guides, custom android roms, careers, I could go on forever. And I would look across dozens of threads and even more comments, and then smash them together in my head to come up with the most likely accurate answer to my problem. And let’s not forget when dbags or misinformation is dowvoted to oblivion!
As a techie, I can’t even count on my hands how many times I have found someone random person having the same completely random and specific PC issue that I had - and they showed what they tried, what didn’t work, then I look in comments and find 6 different valid potential solutions. It was absolutely glorious and so useful
I hope that somehow, something even greater emerges from all of this that fills in this “need”. I don’t think reddit will ever be the same, and now I’d feel dirty using it to find information even if most of it will probably still be there
EDIT: wanted to add that I’m also worried because reddit was so easy to use and user friendly (at least in the ways we modified it lol) which made it really easy for people to join and add to the mass amount of information on the platform. I’m concerned that kbin/lemmy won’t work as a true replacement because they don’t seem nearly as straightforward
Reddit’s UX for the first few years was hugely worse than kbin’s is right now, in my opinion. It took a while for it to get nice, and the lessons learned on it are freely available to successors.
All the fediverse stuff might seem like a speedbump, but for the average user, none of it actually matters.
Trying to Google for anything specific nowadays is almost completely useless, if you cannot find it in the first page of results the rest is usually trash. Googling with Reddit was one of the last ways to get actual insight and/or reviews on things. Corporations are crippling the usability of the internet entirely for the sake of profit.
I definitely moved to DuckDuckGo the moment I realized Google was ignoring the text I was writing on the search box. I was searching for a bug fix in my code for weeks, something very niche and difficult to find. When I finally got the answer and moved on to the following bug, Google kept mixing my previous bug with the new one, making it impossible to find the right answer. It got so used to me being focused on that niche thing, it couldn’t believe I moved past it.
DuckDuckGo forced me to write “smart queries” again, giving context on the search text. But it gave me the results I needed. Not the ones Google googlexplained me I needed.
Reddit has outlived it’s usefulness. So much of the content is pushed by advertisers that it has become meaningless. Even in places like HomeImprovement you would see “questions” that were really prompts for an ad in the first comment: “This product is exactly what you are looking for!”
To say nothing of content theft. The number of websites that just take the StackOverflow data exports and put them all on a shallow clone of the site in hopes of gaming Google is utterly ridiculous. I guess OpenAI has killed that now, in the worst possible way.
Lol. I mean, yeah, lol. Stack Overflow was always pretentious and a massive pain to actually use yourself. Now they’re throwing a tantrum and disabling archiving exports? Zero pity. I bet the archive is effectively zero maintenance and costs them nothing to run.
EDIT: It gets worse the more I read. “Profit off the work of the community”, what, you’re the ones doing that. The “community” wants their answers out in the world, they just want to help people, SO is the one using it to make money. This is enraging.
EDIT2: The very final comment is a link to a duplicate. Very SO.