18 ms·

The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

476 points by pg_1234 3y ago

bioemerl 3y ago
I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google to try to start to prioritize non reddit user content on the internet again. Web forums have been suppressed by their results for ages now and Google's choice to do that has been a big part of what killed the internet.
- delfinom 3y ago
  They didn't suppress web forums, they instead went to prioritize SEO factors that of course SEO spammers maximized to abuse. Of course the Google solution was to prioritize reddit because people were searching for "<topic> reddit" due to said SEO spam.
  - bioemerl 3y ago
    They definitely suppress web forums. There are a few I frequent that are prevalent on bing but nowhere to be seen on Google. Maybe it's just a difference in phrasing. Promoting clean SEO companies is suppressing web forums.
    - NineStarPoint 3y ago
      I think the primary issue is that no matter what Google prioritizes for, the SEO "blogs" will always switch over to attempting to look like it. Forums, whose goal is just people talking to each other, are never going to end up at the top of the list compared to people actively attempting to game the algorithm. Even if Google started actively promoting things that look like forums, SEO people would just make things that look like forums but are hyper optimized for whatever Google was looking for. The only way around this is for google to start making a white list of known good forums, but people get (understandably) really pissed when a company of google's size starts actively choosing winners and losers instead of just tuning their algorithm.
    - rfgmendoza 3y ago
      bing accounts for your history in promoting search results. and has a different algorithm to google, inevitable really because google's algorithm is secret and unknowable. the problem is that google WANTs to promote forums because forums are reliable sources of truth, but with automation all they can do is look for subject authority markers (incoming link count, keywords, text references on other highly authoritative pages, etc) SEO as an industry is about optimizing those markers to appear above "organic" results in a search page. changing the markers only means the SEO industry will adjust to target the new priorities, but forum operators are always the last to optimize. it's a fundamentally unwinnable game
    - costco 3y ago
      Maybe another factor is that (almost) no one is optimizing to be at the top of the Bing results.
  - samstave 3y ago
    I posted this a few days ago, and in-line with your thoughts ; - I use OLD+RES for MY consumption and data density - if you dont know how to configure these together to create a much faster, and more aesthetically pleasing (to me) UX - then that sucks. https://i.imgur.com/gdDawWz.png https://i.imgur.com/gdDawWz.png https://i.imgur.com/jlTJGaT.png https://i.imgur.com/jlTJGaT.png So much more pleasant and quicker - especially with hover - I dont even need to click links https://i.imgur.com/jDvjQwM.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jDvjQwM.jpg Which of the following do you find pleasing, its personal opinion, so choose what you like - I prefer old. These are the same page, the only diff is old. vs www. https://i.imgur.com/mnl5pCb.png https://i.imgur.com/mnl5pCb.png <-- www https://i.imgur.com/JfFZMQX.png https://i.imgur.com/JfFZMQX.png <-- old --- So I just tested this again ; This is just btwn www.reddit and old.reddit, just now - notice the difference in content placement? https://i.imgur.com/HtJhXqQ.png https://i.imgur.com/HtJhXqQ.png <-- www (notice the first story [ad]) https://i.imgur.com/xm6DAP3.png https://i.imgur.com/xm6DAP3.png <-- old (ads more subtle - but still there) none of that click-puke in the UI though.
- skilled 3y ago
  They apparently[0] have plans to do this for their next "Helpful" content update. And that update should happen soon if we go by the current update metrics[1]. (I also manage sites myself and they've been doing some heavy A/B testing the last couple of weeks, but we have to wait and see how big of an impact it will actually have.) [0]: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1656362551456993288 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1656362551456993288 [1]: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw... For people who don't want to click the Twitter link: > We're also improving how we rank results in Search overall. Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard-to-find places: a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these “hidden gems” on Search, particularly when we think they’ll improve the results.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  Many years ago, one of the search options on Google, alongside Images, News, etc., was "Discussions." It would explicitly show results from web forums. I defaulted to this when I was looking for, e.g., product reviews -- because it would bypass the endless SEO spam where someone found some highly-rated products on Amazon and published an article "reviewing" them. Unfortunately, Google killed that search type. There are some browser extensions and bookmarklets that help, mostly by creating a very complicated search query that looks for specific things in the URL, but the discussion search is something I still mourn. For what it's worth, my technique these days is to find a forum which has a large amount of discussion, then add a site filter to my Google query and only search that site. For something like product reviews, I can usually find the lesser-known products that don't show up on the SEO lists, at which point I now have a good keyword to find other enthusiast discussions online, which begins to open a lot of doors. Unfortunately, I haven't quite refined the method for anything other than product reviews. At this point, I've started just using ChatGPT for factual questions before trying Google. :(
  - the_pwner224 3y ago
    Simply adding "forum" onto the search query has worked pretty well for me. Of course, when I am aware of a specific forum which exists for that topic, site:... works well too.
    - owlninja 3y ago
      Same, if I am done reading reddit discussions I will just switch to 'forum' and occasionally stumble into some forum threads. Most are dead now though!
      - Gloomily3819 3y ago
        I wonder how much more active would forum websites be today if Google hadn't shut down the discussion search mode.
    - denimnerd42 3y ago
      I used to frequently add vbulletin onto searches about 10 years ago.
- dylan604 3y ago
  >I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google Google checks it's bank account, hits the snooze button, and goes back to sleep
- samstave 3y ago
  Similarly with Quora. I ditched Quora when they had a similar policy change as Reddit, which I disagreed with (honestly, I cannot recall what the kerfuffle was about, but I deleted my Quora account and never went back.) I hate when quora pops up in results. But google has engineered themselves, deliberately so, into the "black-box behometh in the corner nobody can poke or question, and it just does its damn thing despite any of your riff-raff's ramblings"
  - soundsgoodtome 3y ago
    Quora content is so blatantly useless these days. I haven’t seen a single useful piece of information on that site in years.
- stainablesteel 3y ago
  i never get reddit results in my google searches, i have to add the word reddit to it if i want that
bufio 3y ago
The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.
- aphatankha 3y ago
  None of it is due to organic interest anymore. Just gamification of attention to try and spread a viral sales pitch. Paul Graham did some napkin math on Twitter a few months ago highlighting his approach is just try to get ahead of a trending but still not quite super popular idea. It’s Shark Tank; film the show months in advance, get the viable product for sale before it airs, because you know copycats will be right behind you. All to preserve a hallucination reality will collapse without a fiat currency game to play.
  - biorach 3y ago
    > Paul Graham did some napkin math on Twitter a few months ago highlighting his approach is just try to get ahead of a trending but still not quite super popular idea. got a link?
- noman-land 3y ago
  I've been referring to it for years as the corporate web but unfortunately I think these are the same things.
- dv_dt 3y ago
  The stupid part is that profits are really not optimized by the enshittification profit campaigns - there is so much incompetence in isolated C-suites making these decisions.
  - danudey 3y ago
    I've said it before, but why do social media sites try to monetize through methods which provide no tangible benefits? A blue checkmark, some shitty NFT avatars, being able to badge someone's comment or post - I don't care about those things, definitely not enough to pay for them. If Reddit wanted to monetize me, give me something tangible. I'd pay $5/mo for a 'pro' tier or something if it had unlimited third-party app access on top of some other real benefits. Instead, Reddit is making everything worse (like their new, awful, web view, or their official, awful, app) and then getting mad that people don't like the shit sandwich they're being fed. Charge people for pro tiers, charge subreddits for 'pro' moderation tools (and actually build the moderation tools you say you're going to), introduce some kind of subscription service (YouTube Premium, Discord Nitro, that kind of thing) that actually benefits both users and subreddit moderators. Let subreddits provide perks to community members who are willing to contribute, or be able to make them subscription-only (or posts and comments only by subscribers) and the money will roll in. Generally just make the site better and people will appreciate that. Don't isolate us from the apps we like and then tell us "we're doing it because we care", because no one believes that.
MAGZine 3y ago
it's not just google. it's the web. all of the web's useful information--decades of discussion--is stored in reddit's garage. and they've decided to close the door.
- mcast 3y ago
  It probably would be a more effective campaign for subreddits to have their users wipe all their old comments (older than 1 year) than a temporary blackout for a few days.
  - drowsspa 3y ago
    It would be nice if there was somewhere ready to upload the archive, though.
  - MiguelX413 3y ago
    That would just be wanton destruction of information. Scorched Earth
    - surgical_fire 3y ago
      Sometimes destruction is the only way forward.
      - masklinn 3y ago
        But usually destruction is just destruction.
        willis936 3y ago
        It's the right of each user to redact their contributions. If that's the only bargaining tool then it seems entirely reasonable to use it when the other party refuses to negotiate or even be remotely transparent about their motives. If this was really about money then why do we have such little insight into their financials? Could it be that they fleeced the investors and will lie as hard as they can to not be outed for the crooks that they are? It's the most likely explanation from my perspective. There's no reason to prop them up. The information will be rebuilt quickly or it won't.
EscapeFromNY 3y ago
My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.
- xnx 3y ago
  Expecting Google's code to flawlessly understand the truth and trustworthiness of all possible sources for every conceivable question is a fair/unbiased way for all topics past present and future is a very high bar. This is a really hard problem, and unlike many other hard problems (rocket science, neurosurgery, particle physics, etc.), Google has millions of financially motivated adversaries actively trying to trick them.
- diegocg 3y ago
  It is more than the spam war...a lot of content is just no longer produced and exposed to the open web (think about how much content goes into tiktok, discord, etc and you will never get that into your search results). Google has less useful content to index, algorithms can't fix that. There is more spam only because that's the only open content that gets added massively. The winners of this battle will be the places where content is generated (or curated) - and reddit is perhaps the most important content hub generator (it's not just an aggregator anymore - comments about some news can be often more interesting than the news itself). Indexers (and language models) are useless without content to scrap.
  - eugenekolo 3y ago
    I can't believe that. There's still so many personal blogs by real people. They just don't show up in the first 3 pages unless you query for them very specifically. Seems most queries result in something like 30% SEO spam sites, 30% quora, 30% reddit, 10% other. Edit: I don't disagree that Discord/Youtube/Other closed gardens have taken open searchable data away, but it's not like there's now no authentic searchable data at all. Perhaps Google also needs to learn to search those closed gardens better.
peoplearepeople 3y ago
Most of my google searches the last few days have been ruined by the reddit blackout. Google should really buy reddit so that they have some search results to point to
OptionX 3y ago
Protip: If you really need to see the Reddit page on a private'd sub remember Google has a cached page feature.
- no-reply 3y ago
  Paste the actual reddit link here and it should fetch from google cache - https://cachedview.com https://cachedview.com
  - davidktr 3y ago
    wow, this is extremely helpful
  - phwak 3y ago
    Or you could just add "cache:" right before a link.
- takoid 3y ago
  Where did Google move the cached page feature? I can’t find it in the three dot menu for search results anymore.
  - jmholla 3y ago
    There's an expansion to the three dots that has a cache option. Still don't know how to do it with the secondary results for a domain.
  - aezart 3y ago
    Not all pages are cached. If a cached copy exists, it'll be in the 3-dots menu.
  - professorsnep 3y ago
    If you click on the three-dot menu, there's a small caret button you have to click to show more of the pill buttons at the top, and one of them is "Cached". It feels like every time I need to use that button it's moved somewhere new.
vbezhenar 3y ago
Google should be more pro-active in checking its results health and present cached versions if underlying sources are gone. It's not only about reddit, I also have plenty of websites which don't open in my computer (either because my country banned them or because they banned my country) and Google still presents those pages in my search results, wasting my time.
- jameson71 3y ago
  Google used to offer this functionality, but it seems to have disappeared over the past year. It was never automatic, but there were 3 vertical dots to the right of the list with a "more info" menu. There is also the wayback archive.
mentos 3y ago
Doesn’t this illuminate an opportunity for Reddit? Close the doors and invest in Reddit search monetized with ad placement like google has?
- dylan604 3y ago
  the realistic opp for Reddit is to charge Google access to the API which would more than cover all of the other API users. If Googs can afford to pay Apple and others to have their search be the default, they can afford to pay to crawl Reddit too
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    Reddit claims that is their goal, they're just doing it terribly making it hard to trust that it's actually their goal.
    - dplgk 3y ago
      Source?
      - boomboomsubban 3y ago
        Like everything they've said about the change is "we can't deal with tech mega companies making billions off of our api." A quick search gave https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/14/reddit-moderators-vow-to-continue-blackout-in-api-access-fees-row https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/14/reddit-mo...
- adventured 3y ago
  I think it does. They're busy self-sabotating at the moment. They have never properly figured out search though, that aspect of Reddit has been mediocre since the beginning. There is reason to be skeptical that they could figure it out now, given their other product/feature development; they appear incapable of doing it effectively.
- tester457 3y ago
SpacePortKnight 3y ago
I noticed this too when I was trying to search for local opinions like affordable clothing in netherlands and for general recommendations like cloud storage with execellent file management. Without reddit, outdated generic blogs with affliate links show up. They are just advertisement in disguise and not the genuine opinions which I'm looking for. In a way this shows the value of Reddit. Even with their awful UI and app, their users seems to provide the most value to search queries.
- moi2388 3y ago
  I think affiliate deals should be banned. I hate it that much. Whilst you’re at it, van advertisement without consent. You can use the kids argument if necessary.
  - uLogMicheal 3y ago
    So you want to live in a world where only companies with massive ad budgets breakthrough to end users? The ad empire only strengthens media/big app lock in.
    - plonk 3y ago
      I want the ads to be clearly labelled and only accessible when I've asked for them. Wasn't that the idea of Google AdWords? Show people results ranked by relevance, and insert a few related sponsored products at the beginning with a different presentation.
    - juve1996 3y ago
      Let's be honest, that's already happening anyway.
  - Brybry 3y ago
    A lot of these sites are probably already breaking FTC rules. If one runs an affiliate link blog they're supposed to disclose that relationship when they show the links (and in a way that the reader won't easily miss it). [1] It was a big thing in video game streaming that even stuff like free game codes given to content creators can require something like #ad or #sponsored put in the stream title. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking#affiliateornetwork https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...
Simulacra 3y ago
I've really gotten frustrated with google over the years and I've switched to Bing. Is Microsoft better? Probably not, but I'm a researcher, and I search fast and significantly. Google is constantly asking me to verify if I'm a human, Bing doesn't do that. I recognize that may be an individual issue, but on a broader spectrum, Bing works well.
- davidktr 3y ago
  Same search pattern as you. I have the verification problem only if I do it from the net of my research organization, never if I do it privately. Not sure why, just a pattern I observed.
- arcbyte 3y ago
  And Bing pays you! I've gotten a few hundred dollars in rewards just for searching which is nice.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  This is me, google is pretty much useless due to the all the captchas I get. But I ended up with duckduckgo and https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
More like smoke dissipating and skies clearing now that the burning garbage dump that is reddit is just a smoldering heap
BashiBazouk 3y ago
If it's this important to google, couldn't they just buy Reddit with what amounts to pocket change? That would be an interesting plot twist...
- throw9away6 3y ago
  Bing should buy Reddit and kill Google. This blackout has really revealed how bad Google Is and give reliant it is on Reddit working. Buy Reddit for peanuts, sell Google api access or block them entirely from indexing
- biziclop 3y ago
  I really wouldn't see Reddit on killedbygoogle.com.
  - BashiBazouk 3y ago
    I would think they would treat it like youtube and allow it to lose money, at least at first, in order to support their core business.
- balder1991 3y ago
  I just had this thought. Seems like user generated content is gonna be very valuable from now on, so wouldn’t it be good for companies like Microsoft to foster new websites like Reddit?
  - BashiBazouk 3y ago
    If it's perceived as profitable or core to the business, the latter more likely, I would not be surprised if quite a few companies try their hand at a reddit like endeavor. I hold out hope that who ever owns slashdot would add user generated categories and integrate the meta moderation system to keep check on the volunteer mods that it would require...
ZeWaka 3y ago
This really rings true - I was trying to do some semi-niche hardware/software research (wiimote on steam deck) and the only real sources for that information was on closed subreddits. I ended up having to just view the cached pages and go on the Discord for help. It really highlighted how dependent I've become on getting pretty good results from niche subreddits.
globular-toast 3y ago
I happened to notice this on Sunday evening. Was searching for some info on an Intel chip and some stuff from r/intel came up. I didn't even know there was an r/intel. The sub had already gone private at that point and even though I knew about the upcoming "blackouts" it still confused me.
ipkpjersi 3y ago
I feel like the blackout isn't gonna be effective only because Reddit is just gonna forcibly unprivate the large communities and assign new mods. Pretty disappointing but not surprising. I know I don't have any interest going back there.
tommica 3y ago
It's surprising how this blackout has shown how important reddit is in general, and that is what reddit should consider in regards of their financial future
hourago 3y ago
The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last standing service that is way more open that the rest. But the raise of Whatsapp and equivalents are challenging that. One day all our communication will depend on a monopoly. We are starting to know what would have happened if AT&T have never been split.
- Danathar 3y ago
  As long as TCP/IP exists there will always be a way for people to communicate, it just won’t be at the scale of what we see right now. As an example, use that news groups still exist. It’s a shadow of itself but it’s still there and it still works despite the fact that Reddit and all sorts of other form based communications, took over.
- rafark 3y ago
  The trend that I hate the most is blogs without comments. I don’t know when it started, but a few years ago I suddenly noticed most blogs started to turn off their comments section one by one. I don’t know why they’d do that. Interacting with the author or other people was half the fun. Now there’s just silence. It’s what made me stop visiting blogs altogether. I used to browse a bunch of the same blogs everyday and now I don’t. I don’t even remember most of them. Even when googling, I usually just stick to the sites that allow interaction like reddit, stack over flow or this site. A few weeks ago I remembered the names of a couple of blogs I used to browse and it’s sad to see them become spam and/or low-content farms.
  - krapp 3y ago
    It isn't the 1990s anymore. The vast majority of comments on blogs will be spam, bots or, in the extreme rare case of an actual human reader, raving lunatics. The chance of an actual human being reading your blog and leaving a sincere comment in good faith is so low that you can safely assume it will never happen.
aurareturn 3y ago
We're going to get more Quora results, huh? Please come back Reddit and save us. Quora results are the worst. I can't believe how much management ruined Quora.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  Was there a time when Quora was good? I've been thinking of it as "Stack Exchange for arrogant, tedious bores" for as long as I've been aware of it.
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    I think 5-6 years ago, it was good. I enjoyed using it and experts wrote some amazing, no filter, content you can't get anywhere else. From my experience, Quora failed because: 1. Quora decided to automatically mass generate fake questions. Someone genius at Quora saw that the number of questions correlated with engagement/traffic so he/she thought let's just mass generate questions for people to answer. Inevitably, this led to just pure spam. It's like Quora decided to spam itself. 2. Overtime, users figured out cookie cutter, feel-good, often fake news answers received many upvotes and Quora boosted those answers up. This led to an insane amount of garbage from users in India. 3. Quora decided to use every dirty tactic to get people to login/register and download their apps such as hiding content behind prompts, using unkillable popups, etc. Just like Reddit now.
    - spprashant 3y ago
      I remember receiving an invitation to some Quora program to post questions for the website, in exchange for monetary compensation. Never took them up on it. But this seems like the kind of thing, that will lead to low quality content on any platform.
mkl95 3y ago
Google is mostly a data mining operation. Reddit is an organic content mine. Google is a behemoth, while Reddit are struggling to go public. It speaks volumes about how the internet has evolved in the last 25 years or so.
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
dirtyid 3y ago
Losing access to personal comments from subreddit that's gone dark has also been PIA. I'll occasionally refer to past comments for links/citations.
f0e4c2f7 3y ago
Have been running into this the last few days and have realized just how much I use reddit in search results even though I don't visit the frontpage anymore. Lot of pasting links into archive.org. I've also been using Bing Chat to ask it what reddit thinks since it has most of reddit indexed. Concerning though because it makes me feel like quite a lot of important information is rather fragile. You can imagine various ways this data might be lost forever, I wish it felt more durable.
pradn 3y ago
Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist. The open web is truly dying. I believe in the open web, but it seems like an ideological position, not something most people want to participate in. (Just like decentralization!) There's a few reasons: 1. Putting things on the web means your words are public, so they can be archived forever, and anyone can look at them. Do I want employers looking at my high school blog? (Hell, mine is still up, go look it up and you'll find things I no longer believe are appropriate!) Recall that keeping posts private was an important innovation w/ Facebook, over MySpace, which was largely all-public. 2. Most people don't want to bother with hosting their own website. It costs money and requires expertise to run. And it can easily go awry (DDOS attacks! getting hacked! losing your domain!). 3. If you don't want to bother with hosting your own site, you are at the mercy of platforms that always (always!) devolve into bloat, over-commercialization, and perhaps censorship. Medium, Reddit, Wordpress.com, Tumblr - you name it! 4. Most people don't want to put the effort into writing/posting anything beyond basic food/vacation photos or whatnot. Even the people hyper-engaged in politics online are a minority. How often did people write a diary, even, before the internet. Putting in this sort of effort is not something most people want to do. I don't blame them - life's busy and work/school takes the lion's share of everyone's energy. Look at me - all I do is post comments on HN! I haven't updated my two-page static website in years! 5. It's lonely running a website! There's no guaranteed engagement, as there is with posting an Insta story or a Facebook profile picture. It really is like shouting into the void. Yes, one can join a web-ring, but you could also make your own butter...
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist. Then it should index the internet that does, and stop trying to convince me that there are only 10 pages of results for any possible query. > The open web is truly dying. Of starvation, because the search indexes don't index it, preferring to index the part of the web that is aggressively marketing itself (and buying and showing ads.)
  - pradn 3y ago
    We have a sort of meta-stable failure here. Even if it's possible to win the battle against SEO and junk sites (and I don't think it is), this is the best that commercial search engines will do, given their resources and incentives. No one else has been able to break in, for lack of quality, for lack of resources (it's expensive to index the web!), and b/c search engine brands are so sticky (that's why Google pays Apple ~$10 billion to be the default on Apple devices.) If the junk web problem was so easy to solve, wouldn't another search engine be able to do so - like Bing with Microsoft's resources, or DDG with their unique outlook/guarantees? So given the current economic system, the current governance regime, and the current culture, this is the best our civilization can do. Unless there's some sharp rift, the internet will stay the course. I feel like this line of criticism feels a bit like screaming at the clouds.
treprinum 3y ago
DuckDuckGo was also giving me shaky results in the past few days.
bravoetch 3y ago
It would be too funny if Google now announced they will no longer index reddit because the API is too expensive. Maybe that would spur reddit to improve search, or their own app and web offerings.
- strus 3y ago
  I think Google is scrapping websites, not using the APIs?
symlinkk 3y ago
Oh my gosh a multi billion dollar company can no longer make money off of free content online oh no :(
veave 3y ago
I knew that someday reddit executives would close old.reddit.com and that that day I would have to stop visiting because of how shitty the new interface is. What I never could have imagined is that it would be the actions of mods that would drag me to not being able to use reddit. It came as a surprise to me.
raverbashing 3y ago
If Google had a modicum of vision they would be looking at possibly "adopting" it But alas, no. And if they did they would probably force a "login with G+ on it" regardless
paulpauper 3y ago
Google + Reddit should form some sort of partnership to monetize results. Maybe instead of Reddit.com , users are redirected to a sort of landing page that incorporates Reddit answers but is not Reddit, and also has google ads on it. the landing page, using AI, incorporates the answers in a more readable format.
hoofhearted 3y ago
Currently struggling with searching for the usual developer queries, but not getting the answers I need :( “Something something random package name is suddenly broken Reddit” The backup is using the same query with “stack overflow”, but that knowledge has become dated. Around the rise of Slack, and then Discord and Teams, knowledge started becoming transferred between open source devs within their corresponding chat. People would get their answer on a VueJs issue and move on… The end result was that Google never picked that up, and the next dev popped in the chat the next day with the exact same question. In the last couple years, Reddit has become the place for devs to do q&a as well. It’s also making it difficult for me to communicate with prospective users online for simple market research and feedback.
shswkna 3y ago
Humans built this wonderful common structure, where we can all communicate boundlessly. The huge benefits only last briefly for humanity, until our inherent nature causes it to degenerate into a mess. Everybody goes back to doing their own thing. Sounds like the Tower of Babylon from the bible.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Google, Facebook, Reddit etc are the tower though. Not the WWW.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    No, Google, Facebook, and Reddit are the languages spoken on the WWW that annihilated all the others. Then God comes down and breaks them up. The Tower of Babel was the original silo.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Google et al. are God's punishment of our hubris? I would rather say Google is the hubris.
vonseel 3y ago
I’ve been viewing the cached result constantly
DrThunder 3y ago
I'm fine with Reddit AND Google disappearing. I'd much rather be on old forums that actually provided useful information. Reddit is just an echo chamber for people to complain for the most part. I rarely find useful info there. I quite using Google search quite awhile ago and don't miss it at all.
CyrsBel 3y ago
Create forums and message boards again. Give them topicality. Support RSS and open data transfer protocols. Manually append these places to the Google and Brave indexes.
shreyshnaccount 3y ago
The internet is getting worse. Every comment on here is proof of that. We as tech-people MUST change this, because well, no one else will/cares/wants to. Let's try to make it easier to make these communities without relying on monopolies. Long live the open internet.
mintplant 3y ago
I've been bumping into this a bunch trying to research different neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., for an upcoming three-month stay. A lot of useful info is locked up in r/washingtondc right now, with much of it missing from Google's cache and the Wayback Machine. I still support the blackouts—I used to mod a default subreddit—but I wasn't expecting this particular effect! (Tangentially, anyone know how the Mount Vernon Triangle area is these days?)
- kpaoneios 3y ago
  Where in Vernon Triangle? There's a big gradient between its eastern and western half. The western part, closer to downtown, has lots of restaurants and shopping, but it can feel a little dead further east. In general, an office-y vibe, not much green space.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mattlondon 3y ago
Do people really find Reddit useful? I usually find lots of "hey guys has anyone got <same problem as I am searching about>" from 2018 with no solution but a few token "Me too!" Responses, or worse a response but "Never mind - I solved it. <No explanation>" I skip over most Reddit links in the search because of that sort of thing being 95% of results. I genuinely have not ever found that much useful on it - I can probably count on one hand a time where it has been useful. Is it just me that thinks Reddit is deeply overrated? Or is there some magic part of Reddit with people who know what they are talking about and who properly answer questions in a timely manner? I've never found it if so. Perhaps I need to have an account to access the best bits? But if so how would Google find it?
- alok99 3y ago
  Maybe you're just unlucky. I usually find an answer, or at least something that points me in the right direction. The "me too" problem was prevalent with forums too.
- forbiddenlake 3y ago
  Yes, all the time, but quality varies heavily based on subreddit, and in my experience the more popular and/or less strictly moderated subreddits have lower quality. The <no explanation> part isn't unique to reddit. See: XKCD 979
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
This is an easy thing for spez to fix. Simply allow for external links to be followed to their destinations but block the view-all view of the subreddit when a sub goes private.
Guest9081239812 3y ago
Reddit should have leveraged their content to compete with Google. 1. Improve old.reddit.com instead of creating this terrible Reddit v2 that encourages replacing real content with memes. 2. Build a dedicated Reddit search engine on a short trendy domain. 3. Remove all Reddit content from Google. 4. Carefully curate other quality sites into the search engine. 5. Leave Google to rot with SEO and Amazon referral spam.
- winkwinkwink 3y ago
  This would have been a crazy idea that I (would have) like to see happen. The fact that we're talking about Reddit content in Google searches is an indicator that Reddit should have improved search on their own site.
  - Guest9081239812 3y ago
    In a different universe, I think the idea could be a valid attempt at dethroning Google. However, after seeing the changes to Reddit the past decade in our current universe, I wouldn't trust those same people to handle search for the world.
weaksauce 3y ago
maybe google should fund some of the api use then... they are benefiting directly.
kertoip_1 3y ago
If the lack of Reddit is such a problem, imagine what would happen if YouTube was down...

476 points by pg_1234 3y ago

I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google to try to start to prioritize non reddit user content on the internet again. Web forums have been suppressed by their results for ages now and Google's choice to do that has been a big part of what killed the internet.

delfinom 3y ago
They didn't suppress web forums, they instead went to prioritize SEO factors that of course SEO spammers maximized to abuse. Of course the Google solution was to prioritize reddit because people were searching for "<topic> reddit" due to said SEO spam.
- bioemerl 3y ago
  They definitely suppress web forums. There are a few I frequent that are prevalent on bing but nowhere to be seen on Google. Maybe it's just a difference in phrasing. Promoting clean SEO companies is suppressing web forums.
  - NineStarPoint 3y ago
    I think the primary issue is that no matter what Google prioritizes for, the SEO "blogs" will always switch over to attempting to look like it. Forums, whose goal is just people talking to each other, are never going to end up at the top of the list compared to people actively attempting to game the algorithm. Even if Google started actively promoting things that look like forums, SEO people would just make things that look like forums but are hyper optimized for whatever Google was looking for. The only way around this is for google to start making a white list of known good forums, but people get (understandably) really pissed when a company of google's size starts actively choosing winners and losers instead of just tuning their algorithm.
  - rfgmendoza 3y ago
    bing accounts for your history in promoting search results. and has a different algorithm to google, inevitable really because google's algorithm is secret and unknowable. the problem is that google WANTs to promote forums because forums are reliable sources of truth, but with automation all they can do is look for subject authority markers (incoming link count, keywords, text references on other highly authoritative pages, etc) SEO as an industry is about optimizing those markers to appear above "organic" results in a search page. changing the markers only means the SEO industry will adjust to target the new priorities, but forum operators are always the last to optimize. it's a fundamentally unwinnable game
  - costco 3y ago
    Maybe another factor is that (almost) no one is optimizing to be at the top of the Bing results.
- samstave 3y ago
  I posted this a few days ago, and in-line with your thoughts ; - I use OLD+RES for MY consumption and data density - if you dont know how to configure these together to create a much faster, and more aesthetically pleasing (to me) UX - then that sucks. https://i.imgur.com/gdDawWz.png https://i.imgur.com/gdDawWz.png https://i.imgur.com/jlTJGaT.png https://i.imgur.com/jlTJGaT.png So much more pleasant and quicker - especially with hover - I dont even need to click links https://i.imgur.com/jDvjQwM.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jDvjQwM.jpg Which of the following do you find pleasing, its personal opinion, so choose what you like - I prefer old. These are the same page, the only diff is old. vs www. https://i.imgur.com/mnl5pCb.png https://i.imgur.com/mnl5pCb.png <-- www https://i.imgur.com/JfFZMQX.png https://i.imgur.com/JfFZMQX.png <-- old --- So I just tested this again ; This is just btwn www.reddit and old.reddit, just now - notice the difference in content placement? https://i.imgur.com/HtJhXqQ.png https://i.imgur.com/HtJhXqQ.png <-- www (notice the first story [ad]) https://i.imgur.com/xm6DAP3.png https://i.imgur.com/xm6DAP3.png <-- old (ads more subtle - but still there) none of that click-puke in the UI though.
skilled 3y ago
They apparently[0] have plans to do this for their next "Helpful" content update. And that update should happen soon if we go by the current update metrics[1]. (I also manage sites myself and they've been doing some heavy A/B testing the last couple of weeks, but we have to wait and see how big of an impact it will actually have.) [0]: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1656362551456993288 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1656362551456993288 [1]: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw... For people who don't want to click the Twitter link: > We're also improving how we rank results in Search overall. Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard-to-find places: a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these “hidden gems” on Search, particularly when we think they’ll improve the results.
jwestbury 3y ago
Many years ago, one of the search options on Google, alongside Images, News, etc., was "Discussions." It would explicitly show results from web forums. I defaulted to this when I was looking for, e.g., product reviews -- because it would bypass the endless SEO spam where someone found some highly-rated products on Amazon and published an article "reviewing" them. Unfortunately, Google killed that search type. There are some browser extensions and bookmarklets that help, mostly by creating a very complicated search query that looks for specific things in the URL, but the discussion search is something I still mourn. For what it's worth, my technique these days is to find a forum which has a large amount of discussion, then add a site filter to my Google query and only search that site. For something like product reviews, I can usually find the lesser-known products that don't show up on the SEO lists, at which point I now have a good keyword to find other enthusiast discussions online, which begins to open a lot of doors. Unfortunately, I haven't quite refined the method for anything other than product reviews. At this point, I've started just using ChatGPT for factual questions before trying Google. :(
- the_pwner224 3y ago
  Simply adding "forum" onto the search query has worked pretty well for me. Of course, when I am aware of a specific forum which exists for that topic, site:... works well too.
  - owlninja 3y ago
    Same, if I am done reading reddit discussions I will just switch to 'forum' and occasionally stumble into some forum threads. Most are dead now though!
    - Gloomily3819 3y ago
      I wonder how much more active would forum websites be today if Google hadn't shut down the discussion search mode.
  - denimnerd42 3y ago
    I used to frequently add vbulletin onto searches about 10 years ago.
dylan604 3y ago
>I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google Google checks it's bank account, hits the snooze button, and goes back to sleep
samstave 3y ago
Similarly with Quora. I ditched Quora when they had a similar policy change as Reddit, which I disagreed with (honestly, I cannot recall what the kerfuffle was about, but I deleted my Quora account and never went back.) I hate when quora pops up in results. But google has engineered themselves, deliberately so, into the "black-box behometh in the corner nobody can poke or question, and it just does its damn thing despite any of your riff-raff's ramblings"
- soundsgoodtome 3y ago
  Quora content is so blatantly useless these days. I haven’t seen a single useful piece of information on that site in years.
stainablesteel 3y ago
i never get reddit results in my google searches, i have to add the word reddit to it if i want that

bufio 3y ago

The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.

aphatankha 3y ago
None of it is due to organic interest anymore. Just gamification of attention to try and spread a viral sales pitch. Paul Graham did some napkin math on Twitter a few months ago highlighting his approach is just try to get ahead of a trending but still not quite super popular idea. It’s Shark Tank; film the show months in advance, get the viable product for sale before it airs, because you know copycats will be right behind you. All to preserve a hallucination reality will collapse without a fiat currency game to play.
- biorach 3y ago
  > Paul Graham did some napkin math on Twitter a few months ago highlighting his approach is just try to get ahead of a trending but still not quite super popular idea. got a link?
noman-land 3y ago
I've been referring to it for years as the corporate web but unfortunately I think these are the same things.
dv_dt 3y ago
The stupid part is that profits are really not optimized by the enshittification profit campaigns - there is so much incompetence in isolated C-suites making these decisions.
- danudey 3y ago
  I've said it before, but why do social media sites try to monetize through methods which provide no tangible benefits? A blue checkmark, some shitty NFT avatars, being able to badge someone's comment or post - I don't care about those things, definitely not enough to pay for them. If Reddit wanted to monetize me, give me something tangible. I'd pay $5/mo for a 'pro' tier or something if it had unlimited third-party app access on top of some other real benefits. Instead, Reddit is making everything worse (like their new, awful, web view, or their official, awful, app) and then getting mad that people don't like the shit sandwich they're being fed. Charge people for pro tiers, charge subreddits for 'pro' moderation tools (and actually build the moderation tools you say you're going to), introduce some kind of subscription service (YouTube Premium, Discord Nitro, that kind of thing) that actually benefits both users and subreddit moderators. Let subreddits provide perks to community members who are willing to contribute, or be able to make them subscription-only (or posts and comments only by subscribers) and the money will roll in. Generally just make the site better and people will appreciate that. Don't isolate us from the apps we like and then tell us "we're doing it because we care", because no one believes that.

MAGZine 3y ago

it's not just google. it's the web. all of the web's useful information--decades of discussion--is stored in reddit's garage. and they've decided to close the door.

mcast 3y ago
It probably would be a more effective campaign for subreddits to have their users wipe all their old comments (older than 1 year) than a temporary blackout for a few days.
- drowsspa 3y ago
  It would be nice if there was somewhere ready to upload the archive, though.
- MiguelX413 3y ago
  That would just be wanton destruction of information. Scorched Earth
  - surgical_fire 3y ago
    Sometimes destruction is the only way forward.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      But usually destruction is just destruction.
      - willis936 3y ago
        It's the right of each user to redact their contributions. If that's the only bargaining tool then it seems entirely reasonable to use it when the other party refuses to negotiate or even be remotely transparent about their motives. If this was really about money then why do we have such little insight into their financials? Could it be that they fleeced the investors and will lie as hard as they can to not be outed for the crooks that they are? It's the most likely explanation from my perspective. There's no reason to prop them up. The information will be rebuilt quickly or it won't.

EscapeFromNY 3y ago

My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.

xnx 3y ago
Expecting Google's code to flawlessly understand the truth and trustworthiness of all possible sources for every conceivable question is a fair/unbiased way for all topics past present and future is a very high bar. This is a really hard problem, and unlike many other hard problems (rocket science, neurosurgery, particle physics, etc.), Google has millions of financially motivated adversaries actively trying to trick them.
diegocg 3y ago
It is more than the spam war...a lot of content is just no longer produced and exposed to the open web (think about how much content goes into tiktok, discord, etc and you will never get that into your search results). Google has less useful content to index, algorithms can't fix that. There is more spam only because that's the only open content that gets added massively. The winners of this battle will be the places where content is generated (or curated) - and reddit is perhaps the most important content hub generator (it's not just an aggregator anymore - comments about some news can be often more interesting than the news itself). Indexers (and language models) are useless without content to scrap.
- eugenekolo 3y ago
  I can't believe that. There's still so many personal blogs by real people. They just don't show up in the first 3 pages unless you query for them very specifically. Seems most queries result in something like 30% SEO spam sites, 30% quora, 30% reddit, 10% other. Edit: I don't disagree that Discord/Youtube/Other closed gardens have taken open searchable data away, but it's not like there's now no authentic searchable data at all. Perhaps Google also needs to learn to search those closed gardens better.

peoplearepeople 3y ago

Most of my google searches the last few days have been ruined by the reddit blackout. Google should really buy reddit so that they have some search results to point to

OptionX 3y ago

Protip: If you really need to see the Reddit page on a private'd sub remember Google has a cached page feature.

no-reply 3y ago
Paste the actual reddit link here and it should fetch from google cache - https://cachedview.com https://cachedview.com
- davidktr 3y ago
  wow, this is extremely helpful
- phwak 3y ago
  Or you could just add "cache:" right before a link.
takoid 3y ago
Where did Google move the cached page feature? I can’t find it in the three dot menu for search results anymore.
- jmholla 3y ago
  There's an expansion to the three dots that has a cache option. Still don't know how to do it with the secondary results for a domain.
- aezart 3y ago
  Not all pages are cached. If a cached copy exists, it'll be in the 3-dots menu.
- professorsnep 3y ago
  If you click on the three-dot menu, there's a small caret button you have to click to show more of the pill buttons at the top, and one of them is "Cached". It feels like every time I need to use that button it's moved somewhere new.

vbezhenar 3y ago

Google should be more pro-active in checking its results health and present cached versions if underlying sources are gone. It's not only about reddit, I also have plenty of websites which don't open in my computer (either because my country banned them or because they banned my country) and Google still presents those pages in my search results, wasting my time.

jameson71 3y ago
Google used to offer this functionality, but it seems to have disappeared over the past year. It was never automatic, but there were 3 vertical dots to the right of the list with a "more info" menu. There is also the wayback archive.

mentos 3y ago

Doesn’t this illuminate an opportunity for Reddit? Close the doors and invest in Reddit search monetized with ad placement like google has?

dylan604 3y ago
the realistic opp for Reddit is to charge Google access to the API which would more than cover all of the other API users. If Googs can afford to pay Apple and others to have their search be the default, they can afford to pay to crawl Reddit too
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  Reddit claims that is their goal, they're just doing it terribly making it hard to trust that it's actually their goal.
  - dplgk 3y ago
    Source?
    - boomboomsubban 3y ago
      Like everything they've said about the change is "we can't deal with tech mega companies making billions off of our api." A quick search gave https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/14/reddit-moderators-vow-to-continue-blackout-in-api-access-fees-row https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/14/reddit-mo...
adventured 3y ago
I think it does. They're busy self-sabotating at the moment. They have never properly figured out search though, that aspect of Reddit has been mediocre since the beginning. There is reason to be skeptical that they could figure it out now, given their other product/feature development; they appear incapable of doing it effectively.
tester457 3y ago

SpacePortKnight 3y ago

I noticed this too when I was trying to search for local opinions like affordable clothing in netherlands and for general recommendations like cloud storage with execellent file management. Without reddit, outdated generic blogs with affliate links show up. They are just advertisement in disguise and not the genuine opinions which I'm looking for. In a way this shows the value of Reddit. Even with their awful UI and app, their users seems to provide the most value to search queries.

moi2388 3y ago
I think affiliate deals should be banned. I hate it that much. Whilst you’re at it, van advertisement without consent. You can use the kids argument if necessary.
- uLogMicheal 3y ago
  So you want to live in a world where only companies with massive ad budgets breakthrough to end users? The ad empire only strengthens media/big app lock in.
  - plonk 3y ago
    I want the ads to be clearly labelled and only accessible when I've asked for them. Wasn't that the idea of Google AdWords? Show people results ranked by relevance, and insert a few related sponsored products at the beginning with a different presentation.
  - juve1996 3y ago
    Let's be honest, that's already happening anyway.
- Brybry 3y ago
  A lot of these sites are probably already breaking FTC rules. If one runs an affiliate link blog they're supposed to disclose that relationship when they show the links (and in a way that the reader won't easily miss it). [1] It was a big thing in video game streaming that even stuff like free game codes given to content creators can require something like #ad or #sponsored put in the stream title. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking#affiliateornetwork https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...

Simulacra 3y ago

I've really gotten frustrated with google over the years and I've switched to Bing. Is Microsoft better? Probably not, but I'm a researcher, and I search fast and significantly. Google is constantly asking me to verify if I'm a human, Bing doesn't do that. I recognize that may be an individual issue, but on a broader spectrum, Bing works well.

davidktr 3y ago
Same search pattern as you. I have the verification problem only if I do it from the net of my research organization, never if I do it privately. Not sure why, just a pattern I observed.
arcbyte 3y ago
And Bing pays you! I've gotten a few hundred dollars in rewards just for searching which is nice.
jmclnx 3y ago
This is me, google is pretty much useless due to the all the captchas I get. But I ended up with duckduckgo and https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

More like smoke dissipating and skies clearing now that the burning garbage dump that is reddit is just a smoldering heap

BashiBazouk 3y ago

If it's this important to google, couldn't they just buy Reddit with what amounts to pocket change? That would be an interesting plot twist...

throw9away6 3y ago
Bing should buy Reddit and kill Google. This blackout has really revealed how bad Google Is and give reliant it is on Reddit working. Buy Reddit for peanuts, sell Google api access or block them entirely from indexing
biziclop 3y ago
I really wouldn't see Reddit on killedbygoogle.com.
- BashiBazouk 3y ago
  I would think they would treat it like youtube and allow it to lose money, at least at first, in order to support their core business.
balder1991 3y ago
I just had this thought. Seems like user generated content is gonna be very valuable from now on, so wouldn’t it be good for companies like Microsoft to foster new websites like Reddit?
- BashiBazouk 3y ago
  If it's perceived as profitable or core to the business, the latter more likely, I would not be surprised if quite a few companies try their hand at a reddit like endeavor. I hold out hope that who ever owns slashdot would add user generated categories and integrate the meta moderation system to keep check on the volunteer mods that it would require...

ZeWaka 3y ago

This really rings true - I was trying to do some semi-niche hardware/software research (wiimote on steam deck) and the only real sources for that information was on closed subreddits. I ended up having to just view the cached pages and go on the Discord for help. It really highlighted how dependent I've become on getting pretty good results from niche subreddits.

globular-toast 3y ago

I happened to notice this on Sunday evening. Was searching for some info on an Intel chip and some stuff from r/intel came up. I didn't even know there was an r/intel. The sub had already gone private at that point and even though I knew about the upcoming "blackouts" it still confused me.

ipkpjersi 3y ago

I feel like the blackout isn't gonna be effective only because Reddit is just gonna forcibly unprivate the large communities and assign new mods. Pretty disappointing but not surprising. I know I don't have any interest going back there.

tommica 3y ago

It's surprising how this blackout has shown how important reddit is in general, and that is what reddit should consider in regards of their financial future

hourago 3y ago

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last standing service that is way more open that the rest. But the raise of Whatsapp and equivalents are challenging that. One day all our communication will depend on a monopoly. We are starting to know what would have happened if AT&T have never been split.

Danathar 3y ago
As long as TCP/IP exists there will always be a way for people to communicate, it just won’t be at the scale of what we see right now. As an example, use that news groups still exist. It’s a shadow of itself but it’s still there and it still works despite the fact that Reddit and all sorts of other form based communications, took over.
rafark 3y ago
The trend that I hate the most is blogs without comments. I don’t know when it started, but a few years ago I suddenly noticed most blogs started to turn off their comments section one by one. I don’t know why they’d do that. Interacting with the author or other people was half the fun. Now there’s just silence. It’s what made me stop visiting blogs altogether. I used to browse a bunch of the same blogs everyday and now I don’t. I don’t even remember most of them. Even when googling, I usually just stick to the sites that allow interaction like reddit, stack over flow or this site. A few weeks ago I remembered the names of a couple of blogs I used to browse and it’s sad to see them become spam and/or low-content farms.
- krapp 3y ago
  It isn't the 1990s anymore. The vast majority of comments on blogs will be spam, bots or, in the extreme rare case of an actual human reader, raving lunatics. The chance of an actual human being reading your blog and leaving a sincere comment in good faith is so low that you can safely assume it will never happen.

aurareturn 3y ago

We're going to get more Quora results, huh? Please come back Reddit and save us. Quora results are the worst. I can't believe how much management ruined Quora.

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
Was there a time when Quora was good? I've been thinking of it as "Stack Exchange for arrogant, tedious bores" for as long as I've been aware of it.
- aurareturn 3y ago
  I think 5-6 years ago, it was good. I enjoyed using it and experts wrote some amazing, no filter, content you can't get anywhere else. From my experience, Quora failed because: 1. Quora decided to automatically mass generate fake questions. Someone genius at Quora saw that the number of questions correlated with engagement/traffic so he/she thought let's just mass generate questions for people to answer. Inevitably, this led to just pure spam. It's like Quora decided to spam itself. 2. Overtime, users figured out cookie cutter, feel-good, often fake news answers received many upvotes and Quora boosted those answers up. This led to an insane amount of garbage from users in India. 3. Quora decided to use every dirty tactic to get people to login/register and download their apps such as hiding content behind prompts, using unkillable popups, etc. Just like Reddit now.
  - spprashant 3y ago
    I remember receiving an invitation to some Quora program to post questions for the website, in exchange for monetary compensation. Never took them up on it. But this seems like the kind of thing, that will lead to low quality content on any platform.

mkl95 3y ago

Google is mostly a data mining operation. Reddit is an organic content mine. Google is a behemoth, while Reddit are struggling to go public. It speaks volumes about how the internet has evolved in the last 25 years or so.

varelse 3y ago

[dead]

dirtyid 3y ago

Losing access to personal comments from subreddit that's gone dark has also been PIA. I'll occasionally refer to past comments for links/citations.

f0e4c2f7 3y ago

Have been running into this the last few days and have realized just how much I use reddit in search results even though I don't visit the frontpage anymore. Lot of pasting links into archive.org. I've also been using Bing Chat to ask it what reddit thinks since it has most of reddit indexed. Concerning though because it makes me feel like quite a lot of important information is rather fragile. You can imagine various ways this data might be lost forever, I wish it felt more durable.

pradn 3y ago

Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist. The open web is truly dying. I believe in the open web, but it seems like an ideological position, not something most people want to participate in. (Just like decentralization!) There's a few reasons: 1. Putting things on the web means your words are public, so they can be archived forever, and anyone can look at them. Do I want employers looking at my high school blog? (Hell, mine is still up, go look it up and you'll find things I no longer believe are appropriate!) Recall that keeping posts private was an important innovation w/ Facebook, over MySpace, which was largely all-public. 2. Most people don't want to bother with hosting their own website. It costs money and requires expertise to run. And it can easily go awry (DDOS attacks! getting hacked! losing your domain!). 3. If you don't want to bother with hosting your own site, you are at the mercy of platforms that always (always!) devolve into bloat, over-commercialization, and perhaps censorship. Medium, Reddit, Wordpress.com, Tumblr - you name it! 4. Most people don't want to put the effort into writing/posting anything beyond basic food/vacation photos or whatnot. Even the people hyper-engaged in politics online are a minority. How often did people write a diary, even, before the internet. Putting in this sort of effort is not something most people want to do. I don't blame them - life's busy and work/school takes the lion's share of everyone's energy. Look at me - all I do is post comments on HN! I haven't updated my two-page static website in years! 5. It's lonely running a website! There's no guaranteed engagement, as there is with posting an Insta story or a Facebook profile picture. It really is like shouting into the void. Yes, one can join a web-ring, but you could also make your own butter...

pessimizer 3y ago
> Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist. Then it should index the internet that does, and stop trying to convince me that there are only 10 pages of results for any possible query. > The open web is truly dying. Of starvation, because the search indexes don't index it, preferring to index the part of the web that is aggressively marketing itself (and buying and showing ads.)
- pradn 3y ago
  We have a sort of meta-stable failure here. Even if it's possible to win the battle against SEO and junk sites (and I don't think it is), this is the best that commercial search engines will do, given their resources and incentives. No one else has been able to break in, for lack of quality, for lack of resources (it's expensive to index the web!), and b/c search engine brands are so sticky (that's why Google pays Apple ~$10 billion to be the default on Apple devices.) If the junk web problem was so easy to solve, wouldn't another search engine be able to do so - like Bing with Microsoft's resources, or DDG with their unique outlook/guarantees? So given the current economic system, the current governance regime, and the current culture, this is the best our civilization can do. Unless there's some sharp rift, the internet will stay the course. I feel like this line of criticism feels a bit like screaming at the clouds.

treprinum 3y ago

DuckDuckGo was also giving me shaky results in the past few days.

bravoetch 3y ago

It would be too funny if Google now announced they will no longer index reddit because the API is too expensive. Maybe that would spur reddit to improve search, or their own app and web offerings.

strus 3y ago
I think Google is scrapping websites, not using the APIs?

symlinkk 3y ago

Oh my gosh a multi billion dollar company can no longer make money off of free content online oh no :(

veave 3y ago

I knew that someday reddit executives would close old.reddit.com and that that day I would have to stop visiting because of how shitty the new interface is. What I never could have imagined is that it would be the actions of mods that would drag me to not being able to use reddit. It came as a surprise to me.

raverbashing 3y ago

If Google had a modicum of vision they would be looking at possibly "adopting" it But alas, no. And if they did they would probably force a "login with G+ on it" regardless

paulpauper 3y ago

Google + Reddit should form some sort of partnership to monetize results. Maybe instead of Reddit.com , users are redirected to a sort of landing page that incorporates Reddit answers but is not Reddit, and also has google ads on it. the landing page, using AI, incorporates the answers in a more readable format.

hoofhearted 3y ago

Currently struggling with searching for the usual developer queries, but not getting the answers I need :( “Something something random package name is suddenly broken Reddit” The backup is using the same query with “stack overflow”, but that knowledge has become dated. Around the rise of Slack, and then Discord and Teams, knowledge started becoming transferred between open source devs within their corresponding chat. People would get their answer on a VueJs issue and move on… The end result was that Google never picked that up, and the next dev popped in the chat the next day with the exact same question. In the last couple years, Reddit has become the place for devs to do q&a as well. It’s also making it difficult for me to communicate with prospective users online for simple market research and feedback.

shswkna 3y ago

Humans built this wonderful common structure, where we can all communicate boundlessly. The huge benefits only last briefly for humanity, until our inherent nature causes it to degenerate into a mess. Everybody goes back to doing their own thing. Sounds like the Tower of Babylon from the bible.

rightbyte 3y ago
Google, Facebook, Reddit etc are the tower though. Not the WWW.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  No, Google, Facebook, and Reddit are the languages spoken on the WWW that annihilated all the others. Then God comes down and breaks them up. The Tower of Babel was the original silo.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Google et al. are God's punishment of our hubris? I would rather say Google is the hubris.

vonseel 3y ago

I’ve been viewing the cached result constantly

DrThunder 3y ago

I'm fine with Reddit AND Google disappearing. I'd much rather be on old forums that actually provided useful information. Reddit is just an echo chamber for people to complain for the most part. I rarely find useful info there. I quite using Google search quite awhile ago and don't miss it at all.

CyrsBel 3y ago

Create forums and message boards again. Give them topicality. Support RSS and open data transfer protocols. Manually append these places to the Google and Brave indexes.

shreyshnaccount 3y ago

The internet is getting worse. Every comment on here is proof of that. We as tech-people MUST change this, because well, no one else will/cares/wants to. Let's try to make it easier to make these communities without relying on monopolies. Long live the open internet.

mintplant 3y ago

I've been bumping into this a bunch trying to research different neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., for an upcoming three-month stay. A lot of useful info is locked up in r/washingtondc right now, with much of it missing from Google's cache and the Wayback Machine. I still support the blackouts—I used to mod a default subreddit—but I wasn't expecting this particular effect! (Tangentially, anyone know how the Mount Vernon Triangle area is these days?)

kpaoneios 3y ago
Where in Vernon Triangle? There's a big gradient between its eastern and western half. The western part, closer to downtown, has lots of restaurants and shopping, but it can feel a little dead further east. In general, an office-y vibe, not much green space.
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mattlondon 3y ago

Do people really find Reddit useful? I usually find lots of "hey guys has anyone got <same problem as I am searching about>" from 2018 with no solution but a few token "Me too!" Responses, or worse a response but "Never mind - I solved it. <No explanation>" I skip over most Reddit links in the search because of that sort of thing being 95% of results. I genuinely have not ever found that much useful on it - I can probably count on one hand a time where it has been useful. Is it just me that thinks Reddit is deeply overrated? Or is there some magic part of Reddit with people who know what they are talking about and who properly answer questions in a timely manner? I've never found it if so. Perhaps I need to have an account to access the best bits? But if so how would Google find it?

alok99 3y ago
Maybe you're just unlucky. I usually find an answer, or at least something that points me in the right direction. The "me too" problem was prevalent with forums too.
forbiddenlake 3y ago
Yes, all the time, but quality varies heavily based on subreddit, and in my experience the more popular and/or less strictly moderated subreddits have lower quality. The <no explanation> part isn't unique to reddit. See: XKCD 979

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

This is an easy thing for spez to fix. Simply allow for external links to be followed to their destinations but block the view-all view of the subreddit when a sub goes private.

Guest9081239812 3y ago

Reddit should have leveraged their content to compete with Google. 1. Improve old.reddit.com instead of creating this terrible Reddit v2 that encourages replacing real content with memes. 2. Build a dedicated Reddit search engine on a short trendy domain. 3. Remove all Reddit content from Google. 4. Carefully curate other quality sites into the search engine. 5. Leave Google to rot with SEO and Amazon referral spam.

winkwinkwink 3y ago
This would have been a crazy idea that I (would have) like to see happen. The fact that we're talking about Reddit content in Google searches is an indicator that Reddit should have improved search on their own site.
- Guest9081239812 3y ago
  In a different universe, I think the idea could be a valid attempt at dethroning Google. However, after seeing the changes to Reddit the past decade in our current universe, I wouldn't trust those same people to handle search for the world.

weaksauce 3y ago

maybe google should fund some of the api use then... they are benefiting directly.

kertoip_1 3y ago

If the lack of Reddit is such a problem, imagine what would happen if YouTube was down...