Last time I’ve been using search on Reddit (ages ago) normal search already produced shitty, useless results. And now he wants to make it even worse by throwing in AI?
what a goddamn shithole. the dark thing about this is that they will continue to retain the critical mass of users and they know it. it’s where the most users and content are. so many communities were completely erased during the mod strike and it didn’t matter. they knew they would be completely fine. the future is an authoritarian world effectively governed by companies like this.
Exactly instead of a bunch of publicly searchable information silos we have a whole bunch of fragmented private ones with absolutely no overlap and far less useful. We need a publicly funded site of some kind.
I meant from people like you and me that are Googling an obscure topic or researching something or troubleshooting information, those things are disappearing behind the walls of Discord
Yah, I don’t get this. So I log into Discord to ask a question, and the only people that will see it are the ones that are currently on at the time. The likelihood of it being seen by the person that can answer it are low, and it’s not like it’s going to be visible for when that person logs back in. This is all besides the fact that I could probably have answered it myself with a search of old questions on some platform that can be indexed. It’s utterly bizarre.
If you’re running a FOSS project or a community that needs support, you have rocks in your goddamn head if you think Discord is how to do it.
The one thing Discord is good at is engagement, aka pinging people on their phones, repeating conversations that have been answered a million times, getting people drawn into rambling discussions…
Right, the few good posters left aren’t worth the flood of the others. Remember the first bit of Facebook, when you had to have an invite or a college email? Wasn’t so bad, then they opened the flood gate and continued making poor decisions and today it’s a wonder that anyone uses it, but if you sign on you’ll see not much but political memes being shared making laughably false claims.
Reddit has that effect. I admit I was a little unhinged when I came here, but either people calm down and start acting like real human beings, or else they realize they can’t have their fun being trolls and they leave. It’s a funny thing that happens when an entire platform is centered around people, not profit. Bots and ragebait are great for stonks - they drive “engagement” and inflate MAU - so they are pervasive on every platform with shareholders.
Maybe the search engines could pass on the cost to the user, so you can pay to search the subreddits you pay again to view, which link to websites you pay to view. Add a sprinkle of tracking and targeted ads and some email offers from trusted partners, and you’ve got yourself a business model.
I left also, the API thing was the nudge I needed; I admit I’ve gone back for niche things: the fan groups of 2-3 bands and two TV shows. Reddit is their defacto fan forum for lots of things
I was desperately waiting for an alternative to show up years before even the API changes. Anything that came up got taken over by Nazis and died shortly after. Lemmy is the only one that managed to actually take off.
I miss some of the more casual subreddits, and somehow Lemmy is even more of an echo chamber than Reddit is, but otherwise yeah, Lemmy is fine. Especially with the Photon frontend.
It makes sense, those that backed off Reddit were more than likely against Corpo greed while conservatives cheer it on. Lemmy was created by leftists supposedly and more left leaning people joined after leaving reddit so it’s no surprise. Reddit kept the bootlickers and the lazy, Lemmy gained the anti-greed political left so we were sort of destined to be an echo chamber unfortunately.
The only problem is the Lemmy creators are also bootlickers, just the boots were made by a different colonial holding. I’m very thankful for instances like lemmy.blahaj.zone, beehaw.org, and slrpnk.net, as well as to a lesser extent lemmy.db0.net, but the fact is there’s a large number of bootlickers here who like a different flavor of boot
Almost joined there. Its a really good instance. Its just the core political philosophy is less directly aligned with me than the ones I listed. Again. Its a really good instance and I DO respect the core political philosophy, its just like… A slightly different kind of libertarian than I am to where its like… I’ll coalition with y’all but it would be disingenuous of me to claim to be part of your movement. Me speaking on what I believe while saying I’m aligned with y’all would hurt your messaging and I don’t want to hurt y’all like that
Lemmy is even more of an echo chamber than Reddit is,
Yeah I really miss the trumpers responding constantly to anything about him with absolute bullshit lies. That really added perspective to my worldview. Now, if we could only get some more people to join Lemmy who despise Linux /s
Yes, valuable perspectives like UnIpArTy!!!1 and bOtH sIdEs!!!1
Edit: I want to agree with your sentiment though, really. I’m just jaded after several years of seeing disingenuous views expressed. Trump isn’t really one I can abide by letting off the hook but I’ve seen that attempted by MANY centrists to the point that I no longer can believe there exists a such thing as a “centrist”.
I mean, it’s our fault as leftists that it is an echo chamber. We have forgotten how to talk about polemic issues among ourselves. I bet we lemmings have big differences (in the details) but we are afraid of bans or talking to walls, so…
The worst part to me is the shadowbanning. It’s easy enough to tell if you’re shadowbanned (check subs or comment threads when signed out and in private mode to see if your stuff shows up), but you can’t see comments from other people who are shadowbanned. I want to see all points of view. And after the API changes, the sites for viewing removed or hidden comments stopped working :|
I tried checking it out recently just for the amount of content. The site is unusable now. Don’t bother to comment anything beyond a useless lol comment or you’ll get banned for every little thing. The mods really went power mad over there
I’m sure in his wet dreams Reddit is no longer a community site but a thinly veiled astroturfing platform that’s paid billions by large corporations to get their adsposts in front of users.
I mean there had been complaining for years that it was becoming just that; it’s just that they were trying to do it without anyone noticing and then all the tech bros got into a hold-my-beer contest
I don’t think there’s really going to be some noticeable influx, but I hope so. Even though Lemmy isn’t nearly intuitive as it could be, but it did improve atleast by some degree.
Reddit isn’t really intuitive either. Most platforms have at least some learning curve. We have a great ecosystem of apps that help. I only wish a YouTuber would make a good explainer.
Well that’s the problem though isn’t it? If to use the website you need a literal tutorial, then something is fucked. I realize the irony of saying this on Lemmy, but the platform just isn’t very user friendly at all. Hell, you could say the same about the whole Fediverse, it’s an interesting idea and technology, but for the average person it’s too much of a hassle compared to normal social media.
I can’t think of a single social media platform that hasn’t required me to search how to use it at some point. Twitter was like, “So I can send a text message to a website about what kind of soup I had for lunch? I don’t get it.” Facebook is regularly full of posts by people who don’t understand the platform. The internet itself had celebrity ads, and morning news show explainers.
The Fediverse in general does require a different way of thinking. More importantly, it requires advertising (or publicity, anyway). That is one big advantage corporate media will always have - ad money. But the Fediverse has us.
Using Boost on both it’s like I never left. Biggest differences are a bit less diversity here, duplicate communities from different instances, and the spoiler tags don’t work.
It’s funny because the demographics here remind me very much of old 2010-era Reddit—very techy and/or progressive types making up 90% of discussion.
I think about 2014ish is about the point where Reddit peaked in quality, so we’re at least replaying from a good save state here. I fully anticipate lemmy will hit the same peak in a few years and hopefully continues on to surpass it
There was some discussion about meta communities. You’d still need some curating because !news and !news really should be about completely different topics
We say registrations go from 1 or 2 a day to 14 (other instances saw similar upswings). Just on this news. If they do implement it we’ll see another Rexxit with similar big numbers.