DuckDuckGo, Bing, Mojeek, and other search engines are not returning full Reddit results any more.
Is Reddit dead yet?
No, they’re transitioning to different use bases that don’t give a shit when they’re screwed over.
Go to reddit now and it’s celebrity drama, pop music, and Indian sub reddit. Oh and Love Island.
And astroturfing AI-bots. So many bots.
Oh yes! They have a quite popular sub where people actively hate Taylor Swift. The sub’s mods remove your comments and threaten to ban you if you ask: “Guys, are you okay? Is this how you want to live your life?” I don’t care about her much, but this is so bizarre. Absolute madness.
Some subs are very negative. I remember antimlm was, as well, people spent all day mocking people who got involved in MLM schemes. I subbed for a while because my wife was in one, and I was hoping for help, advice, tips, etc., but it was all just mocking them and calling them “hon bots” or whatever the term was. I had to unsub, I don’t need that negativity in my life.
The hobby subs, on the other hand, always seemed extremely supportive, or at least the ones I was in were. For example, the radio control (cars, planes, boats, etc.) sub members were totally into it and totally supportive of whatever it was you were doing. It was inspiring and made me want to get back into the hobby. Those kinds of subs were the best part of reddit, and unfortunately we haven’t recreated that energy for things like that here - just not enough users.
Sadly, no
Doesn’t look like it, far too many groups that don’t care about the degradation
They’re sure giving it their best half-assed try.
It will probably go the course of Digg eventually, still around but nobody really cares.
I think Reddit is already in the “too big to die” stage, but I hope you will be right.
For example Elon made everything significantly more awful on Twitter, seemingly like his objective is to just kill Twitter, but it’s still only lost like 15% of users, after ALL the dramas.
More like undead.
Fuck Reddit
i like how the only reason i’d use reddit is to search “site:reddit.com/r/thesimpsons <random simpsons quote>” to see what the simpsons reddit says about the episode.
Seems anticompetitive
Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner
Removed by mod
I searched for a specific post: No result from DDG, correct result from google. I will try again in a day. https://duckduckgo.com/?q="advise+for+bringing+my+son+into+the+fold"+reddit&t=fpas&ia=web https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="advise for bringing my son into the fold" reddit
There are easier ways to check. Here is how i did it
(no way there hasn’t been a trump reddit post in a week)Cutoff appears to be on 2nd of July
I’m not understanding what stops a search engine from scraping a publicly accessible website. ?
robots.txt, I guess? Yes, you can just ignore it, but you shouldn’t, if you develop a responsible web scraper.
Doesn’t seem legal that a robots.txt could pick and choose who scrapes. Seems like legally it would have to be all or nothing. Here’s hoping one of the search engines ignores it and makes it a legal case.
You’d probably feel differently if it were your service. Should you be able to control who scrapes your sites or should that be all or nothing?
For the record, I fucking hate what the internet is becoming. I naively believed that even if shit got cordoned off into the walled gardens that are mobile phone apps, the web would remain as open as it was. This is a terrible sign of things to come.
No, I wouldn’t feel differently. In fact letting search engines scrape and point to your content is what leads people to your site. It’s free advertising. If you’re going to let one search engine in, you should let them all in. If you want to be public, be public. Otherwise put up a login firewall and go private.
It’s not just search engines. Lots of people on Mastodon were using robots.txt to block ChatGPT (and any other LLM company they knew of) from scraping their sites/blogs.
I disagree, to a point. I want to be able to control my services to the greatest extent possible, including picking who scrapes me.
On the other hand, orgs as large as Google doing this poses a real threat to how the internet works right now which I hate.
Actually currently it contains this:
User-agent: * Disallow: /Well, that actually is a blanket ban for everyone, so something else must be at play here.
https://merj.com/blog/investigating-reddits-robots-txt-cloaking-strategy
Reddit is serving different file to google
We believe in the open internet, but we do not believe in the misuse of public content.
That’s real rich, coming from Reddit.
Also, rate limiting. A publicly accessible website doesn’t mean that it will allow scrapers to read millions of pages each week. They can easily identify and block scrapers because of the pattern of their activity. I don’t know if Reddit has rate-limiting, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they implement one.
To be fair, Reddit is no longer that good of a source for answers in the later years.
Quality drop in comments is insane. Sometimes it looks like Quora.
Lemmy Will be king soon…is there a Lemmy search engine?
Haha wtf are you saying Lemmy is now like what reddit was in 2016 and by the end of next year it will be like reddit is now.
Same reason for the downfall too: Activist mods and hands-off admins that don’t care if their mods harass.
Only a matter of time
This is patently untrue. I want Lemmy to be successful as much as any other user on here but reddit had 150-200 million MAU in 2016. Lemmy is being recorded as a generous 2 million.
Lemmy needs people with a wider range of expertise and interests. Right now it’s more niche than reddit c.2010
Seems insulting to quora haha
I was looking for Bluetooth speakers recommendations and it’s the first time I really noticed “generic bot replies” like “I’ve got this great product to recommend, not only is it good but it offers great sound quality as well! The product is [link to Amazon page]”
Gotta start searching using “before:” to get quality results…
I’m seeing bots promoted and sold to generate those kinds of replies, RIP internet, looking forward to SSN/DNA+background check review verification (I kid but I half dream of that privacy nightmare partially plugging the review fraud hole).
I’m with you on embracing the privacy nightmare to kill off cheaters in games. Tie an account to a real identity and that problem will quickly reduce.
Am I bbbrrrregnant?
If we consider all possible outcomes on a galaxy scale, then No.
Also my collection of hobbies seems to match up well with the people who nuked their post history after the API-ocalypse. Even when I get good search results I click through and… so many deleted comments…
As someone who hobby hops I’ve had to just accept reddit is just not a viable option anymore. I’ve been using YouTube (revanced) to learn and get tips. I miss the interactions with people though…
It irritates me that so many forums and media sites allow you to edit your posts at will. There’s one site I go to that I like very much - it has a 5 minute edit window, and after that, your post can no longer be edited. You can’t change what you said, pretend you never said things, etc, once you say something it remains. It would be nice if more sites were like that. Or at least, if you edit/delete something, for there to be an option to check the history to see what it used to be, so if you try to delete some comment you made people can still check it. Whether it’s informational, or it’s because you’re trying to hide something you said that you realize was actually super shitty and people are getting angry at you for it, I prefer things to stick.
Nah, people should be able to take back what they said. No humans in all of history had to account for every thing thing they ever said. Better to let the past be forgotten. Can that be abused? Sure. But I think there’s value in letting people realize what they said was bad and take it down.
Better to acknowledge it in a response. I prefer to do that myself if I’m wrong or something of that nature, post a reply acknowledging instead of trying to cover up that I was ever wrong in the first place.
I agree with you, and I never delete what I post unless it was straight-up a glitch or a typo or something. But, I still think other people should have that option if they want it.
I think there’s a happy middle ground where deletion just disassociates the comment with you. It will show (deleted) or something but the original text remains.
Maybe there should be exclusions for personal or identifying information in such a system.
text can easily be traced back to its original writer nowadays using AI statistical analysis. especially on internet forums where people are not necessarily worrying about grammar and accuracy.
If you’re going that far you could probably just pull an old cached version of the page from before it was deleted
Best search meta is “searchterm -reddit +forum” anyway
Use
-site:reddit.comif you don’t want to exclude sites that mention reddit
Poople
That’s fine. I don’t want Reddit results anyway.
Unfortunately (for me, I guess), appending ‘reddit’ is still the way to go for many queries…
I’ve notice a huge decline in the reliability of using this now that every company on earth knows about this trick. You’ll just be served up posts with 0-3 comments and few upvotes when searching for product reviews or recommendations for example.
Really? For what queries though? I mostly look up tech troubleshooting when ime there are much higher quality results from forums or sometimes stack exchange sites
Yeah for tech stuff stack exchange is the way to go. But if I’m looking for info on non-tech stuff, there’s not really a site that I know of that has a bunch of general user submitted q&a. There’s quora, but that’s absolutely horrible.
Also even with stack exchange, the rules are a bit more strict there, low effort posts are uncommon which can mean you can’t find some stuff there. Although usually there’s some other forum you can find your answer on.
The way the article is written you’ll still get existing information, just not new posts.
Great, neither Google search or reddit work anymore. They deserve each other.
It’s honestly a travesty what’s happened to Reddit. If I want to search for a forum topic or something where random people give their honest opinions, Reddit was about the only place left on the internet and now that’s gone too.
We still have Lemmy
I mean, the people still exist and the need for honest opinions is still there. We just need to find a new place where money isn’t such a big problem (although it will always be a problem to some degree). I really think a more stable and easy to use Lemmy could attract a large crowd.
Reddit has been viral marketing for over a decade. Very little of what is on there should be taken at face value in terms of reviews of products. The only thing it’s good for is to find information about fixes for things or some very broad generic info.
The recent crowdstrike debacle had a fix on their subreddit before it was communicated anywhere else. Stuff like that is still relevant at least.
Niche subreddits were still good. Fuck the mains, but there was a lot of really good content, even very technical, in tightly focused communities like r/LocalLLaMA, etc. In a lot of ways the format of how conversations flow there work better (and worse) than stackoverflow. Still is good content, but I really can’t bring myself to go there because of the nasty shenanigans that spez put the communities through.
I really hoped for a while that Reddit would be the one to break the embrace, extend, extend, enshittify mold that so many great techs succumb.
But everyone has a sellout price and so the EEEE seems to be a law of nature.
paywalled link :(
I got you https://archive.ph/GS2I0
yar har
We are indebted to Archive.ph which allows us to jump over paywalls.
