Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts

[acters]

This is the biggest benefit reddit provided to the user base. Google search has been lackluster and appending the word reddit allowed me to see plenty of good anecdotal and informative focused discussions without fluffing up the content for SEO.

[harimau777]

Unless you happen to already know of a specialized forum for a topic, it increasingly feels like Reddit and Wikipedia are the only parts of the internet that are still valuable; everything else is content farms or SEO spam.

Even then I'm finding that Wikipedia's quality has dropped dramatically in recent years. As they become more zealous about only including "encyclopedic information", I'm increasingly finding pages that have had all of their useful information sucked out of them.

[paulddraper]

I find myself doing that.

Reddit

GitHub

Stackoverflow

Even Hacker News

Quality goes way way up depending on topic.

I kinda wish Google would apply some more personalized ML to my searches

[bagacrap]

Plenty of paid content on the mattress subs and I'm sure many others

[ramraj07]

I actually started going directly to the Reddit app and finding the relevant subreddit and searching within it - hope Reddit realizes the gold mine it’s sitting on but I doubt it.

[badrabbit]

I see people say this all the time, can you give me an example of your search queries? I never had to search reddit specific stuff but I do add 'github' all the time.

[borg16]

I used to think I might be the only one who does this and was beginning to wonder if I am overly reliant on reddit for my search results. Looks like I was not the only one.

[pcurve]

yup. Without the 'reddit' suffix, the search quality is borderline garbage.

[klyonrad]

so basically (cheap) human content moderation helps against SEO

[gumballindie]

It’s not google thats getting worse, it’s the overall internet.

I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects or sealing them off.

Similarly, companies will limit access to ensure monetisation.

No one wants their work stolen to train ais and then monetised for not even a mention in exchange.

The dead internet is even more likely to happen.

[Cpoll]

> No one wants their work stolen to train ais and then monetised for not even a mention in exchange.

I feel (or perhaps hope) the spirit of FOSS precludes the notion of "stealing." Besides, open source is no stranger to being monetized for the bare minimum mention required by whatever license.

[seebye]

> I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects

This will just lead to forks (if your project was popular).

[JohnFen]

> It’s not google thats getting worse, it’s the overall internet

It's also that google is getting worse. It has been slowly declining in quality for a very long time.

[mu53]

Monopolization effects from social networks is so powerful. I really wish decentralization would take off again, but it's a vicious cycle.

Search incentives SEO hacking. SEO hacking causes searches engines to stick to weigh reputation scores more. Reputation scores favor large social media platforms that have strong moderation practices. Quora, reddit, and other platforms become more valuable than SEO hacked blog spam.

[binkHN]

> Quora

This has to be one of these most useless sites on the Internet and it blows my mind how frequently the content from this site is exposed via Google search. Now that I think about it, I think I should probably just block it on my local DNS server.

[pharmakom]

Google should buy Reddit and run it like a non profit, keep the users happy.

But also they can use it for LLM training and put it into the Google index.

[argulane]

They would probably suht it down after few years.

[ChoGGi]

Google groups and Google+ say hi

[ectospheno]

Not sure why google should get a pass on the reddit blackout. Ublock:

  google.*###rso .MjjYud a[href*="reddit.com"]:upward(.MjjYud)

[arcanemachiner]

Yeah, no thanks. Those old threads contain some of the only remaining quality content for like half of my queries.

[narrator]

Just use Yandex.com already. It's like Google search from 15 years ago.

[solarkraft]

For some reason I don't trust them that much anymore since the beginning of last year

[ge96]

It has good reverse image search

[InCityDreams]

Yandex, I just use for 'spicier' content...they can have my sordid thoughts. Amazing how many .com companies are on there with a lot of Russian sub-content.

[savandriy]

no thanks

[newoldhead]

use a searx instance. can aggregate search from almost any relatively known search engine and bypasses tracking.

[sh34r]

Ah, I'm not the only one. Even duckduckgo has been corrupted by censorship and DMCA abuse.

[maegul]

So, genuine question, how much of Reddit is archived? If there’s a lot on the internet archive, say, could that now be bundled up similar to how the Usenet stuff is on Google groups?

[quadsteel]

"These archives are purely text and include no media. They are json items scraped from the Reddit API and include all information for every post and comment 2005-06 to 2023-03."

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/histor...

[fsflover]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254172

[asnyder]

WaPo's take on this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/14/reddit-...

[villgax]

I'm glad that reddit not being profitable up until right now is being highlighted very well. So much for raising money from autocracies & then whining about dissent

[tedunangst]

Are reddit posts not archived or cached anywhere?

[foresto]

They were being archived by pushshift.io until Reddit cut off their API access. Pushshift's API stopped returning results around that time.

It looks like Reddit is going to let them resume, but with access restricted to Reddit moderators:

https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin...

Other sites, like archive.org and Google, scrape and archive Reddit pages, but coverage is spotty at best.

[Rebelgecko]

I've been using the cached version in the Google search results. It doesn't always work but I've had good luck with reddit during the blackout

[taopai]

There is a torrent with a large compressed dataset with reddit's text, I remember it was ~2TB. I can't find the url right now because it was discussed in a reddit thread.

[fsflover]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254172

[anenefan]

I don't do reddit much, so unless the results in google are inaccessible while the blackout is ongoing, this won't affect google's ability to serve the same results as it did last week.

[marcellus23]

Yes, the results are inaccessible during the blackout.

[xkbarkar]

I dont think I have ever got a quality search result by appending reddit. Cant for the life of me figure out how HN users find useful results there.

chatgpt has improved search for me by orders of magnitude. Especially since google has started to border on useless.

Bur searching reddit? Meh. Not for technical stuff at least.

Niche high quality subs may point me in the right direction. Like r/ponds for example. Wonderful little sub.

r/doggroomers is absolute shit mostly full of shaming dog owner pics and toxic comments.

r/programming was great 8 years ago. Now I doubt any human over 18 posts there.

Honestly if reddit never comes back again I think the interwebs have gained a level in quality as it is just a toxic echo chamber for young people who think they are some form of superiour liberals.

Good riddance.

[badtension]

Reddit is one of the few places where you can find an honest (on average) discussion between common people about a variety of topics. This is very unique if you understand that the world is a complex beast and yes/no or authoritative answers may not be the best way to learn about it. Having perspective of many people that you can parse and apply to your own world model is very powerful, be it politics, local events or headphone reviews, personal experiences, relationships.

[Fyrezerk]

I challenge you to provide me a better resource than reddit for finding reliable product reviews and discussions for just about anything you can buy.

[AugurCognito]

I append reddit for my gaming related queries. If you are looking for game suggestions or genre-specific games or queries related to them and want to avoid SEO spam then appending reddit is the only genuine option.

[nashashmi]

What are the chances of Reddit charging subreddits a $$ for going private?

What are the chances of Reddit adding red tape for removing subreddits?

[deliriumchn]

It cannot charge subs anything since they don't pay them anything. They can try to forcefully make them go public or change mods (I kinda see how it can go bad and turn into r/anarchychess) but thats kinda it.