Like, for example I have a specific issue with a digital audio converter by a popular brand but their customer service is awful. A simple google prompt followed by site:reddit.com would yield solutions almost every time. In fact I would say I did 90% of my googling that way. How do I break this cycle and do you feel this is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing? If anything, Reddit remains the biggest repo of easily accessible solutions for anything. We’re seeing right now what happens if this is being taken away by subs going private. Vanilla Google is a shitshow.
I use a Firefox addon that redirects reddit pages to archive.org versions. I’m considering reposting any thread I visit that way on Lemmy.
ChatGPT
I stopped using Google because of this specific reason.
Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down) without looking for Reddit results all the time.
Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.
And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.
Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.
And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit or archive.org versions), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.
Lastly, I created a so-called “Lens”, which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I’ve defined - see image.
Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.
(copied from another thread I replied to)
A few things come to mind that I don’t think have been mentioned:
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libreddit - a private front-end for Reddit that should avoid your traffic monetizing Reddit
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Old.Reddit + uBlock - should similarly help avoid monetization by blocking ads
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Ask your question on the threadiverse! - probably not as convenient as a google search but gotta start building an alternative knowledge base somewhere
The first two obviously won’t help with private subreddits, more to keep Reddit from making money by hoarding all of our data. It’s going to be a rough transition for many of us.
Teddit.net is also a good option, as it just mirrors reddit but doesn’t give them any money.
I recommend c/techsupport to stop relying on Reddit even in its archived version
I’m not sure if there is a good solution. We’re just in the soup. Part of the mess that’s happening is because Reddit can be so good at giving proper answers. In my experience, at least in smaller communities, you have people that care and are curious.
So your question about a DAC is answered by someone who loves audio and bitrates and was into it for months or years before you even knew you’d have the question.
To fix trash search, AI is just chewing up all those old answers in the hope that it’ll be as “smart” about rowing as the woman on the subreddit who rowed for 10 years and coached for 5 and gave thoughtful answers to some college kid.
We’re in the middle of a… a something. And everything will just be shittier for a minute. The algorithms will feast on what’s buried in Reddit and become “smart” enough to give a passable answer, but then we run into the issue of new “smarts”… I don’t think AI will be able to generate new “smart” of any value. It’ll need to be trained by people and who knows if there will be dedicated people pouring info into a new repository.
Part of the mess that’s happening is because Reddit can be so good at giving proper answers. In my experience, at least in smaller communities, you have people that care and are curious.
I think you struck at the real answer to OP with this, personally. As search engines degrade in pursuit of profits, we’re forced back to the basic model of information exchange, communicating with each other.
The real reason Reddit became such a resource of information was because it was such a central site of information exchange courtesy of its communities. What this means is that to get away from searching a single site and even relying on a single search engine, is that we rely on each other for information as we really always have.
I know that may sound kinda cheesy, but it’s ultimately true. It’s one of the reasons Discord servers are so popular, in some cases almost exceeding wikis.
