Source

What do you guys think about this? (Wasn’t sure which community to post this in)

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been linking this text fairly often, but I think that it’s worth a read. People might be focusing on the blackout but that’s just the “now” - with or without blackouts, Reddit is a ticking bomb bound to eventually explode, and all the information there will be lost when it does.

    And the fact that people have been relying on Reddit to look for information shows even deeper issues, not just with Reddit but the internet. Let’s see…

    1. Google monopoly over the search market. Why would it need to make its product better, if you’re still going to use it?
    2. Corporations always trying to prevent you from reaching the best result (because it won’t lead you to their product), and engaging on an arms race through search engine optimisation. That’s why people did that “reddit” trick.
    3. The encroachment of the ad industry into the internet. Oh look, I found the content that I wanted… no wait it’s another ad. Move on…
    4. Governments more often pandering to corporations than defending the best interests of their taxpayers, and the legislation on what’s allowed or disallowed on the internet suffering in result of that.
    5. Reddit monopoly over discussions.
    6. People sharing info in Reddit instead of through more resilient forms of digital media, as shown in the link.
    • MochiGamerEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Honestly I think there should be a bigger effort to preserve information from subreddits either indefinitely going dark or permanently going down. I’ve seen some go into a psuedo “archive mode”. But given the changes on the site most likely it’ll be undone, mods removed, and the subreddits restarted under new pro-reddit guidance. It’d be nice if we could have a way to “strip” subreddits/accounts of it’s information for storage. I’m not sure what the best way of going about it is, but when half of the questions you ask google are best answered by reddit it’d be nice to see this be address sooner rather than later, and google/reddit ain’t gonna be helping us anytime soon. That or we wait for other communities to grow to the size able to fill the same roll, such as lemmy. But TBH, even lemmy can have a community shut down and lose all it’s information. This is a big problem that the solution will most likely only be able to come from the open source community at large… or I’m being idealistic lol

  • Jozzo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    At least in Google Chrome, you can add “cache:” to the beginning of the reddit URL to retrieve a cached version of the site. It’s worked for most of the reddit links I’ve needed to access.

    eg: cache:https://reddit.com/r/…

  • ShutYourPieHole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    The irony is that Google is treated as an evil enterprise that only wants your data and yet we all willingly gave Reddit all our data and information while talking about how evil Google is.

    I’ve gone looking for a few solutions to issues and the results were Reddit threads. Thanks for the cache trick, I’ll keep that in mind to hopefully continue to avoid Reddit. Ideally we have a better solution in the future that does not result in all our data being held hostage.

  • sourcery@lemmy.oneEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I think it’s a major loss considering the SEO garbage results you get nowadays. But the fault is on Reddit for doing this to themself, don’t forget.

    • derived_allegory@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Reddit needs to be replaced sooner or later. Unless they stay true to their goal and never have capital screwing the community.

      A federated and community-based services is the better way to keep useful conversation on the internet to help everyone.

  • orthizaR@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I already encountered this a few times while searching for something specific. Even though the protests are understandable it makes it so much harder to find information.

  • spulkin@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think it would be more accurate to say that Google has gotten a lot worse over time, and removing the crutch of reddit results is making that suddenly more obvious. Google results mostly suck, but you can sometimes find what you’re actually looking for on reddit.

    • RoundSparrow@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I agree, too many communities here keep getting meta discussion about Reddit - and the open community aspect of Lemmy isn’t very organized.

      That said…

      This sort of change by the community isn’t new. One of Twitter’s great strengths was that it was an identifiable brand and you could tell someone a username and it was mostly unambiguous.

      I remember the days when Usenet archive ran out of money, before Google purchased it back in early 2001: https://www.wired.com/2001/02/google-buys-deja-archive/ - searching Usenet archives was going to be lost.