I went searching for something today and instinctually clicked on a reddit link. Fortunately the sub was dark for the protest anyway, but it’s crazy how ingrained in me it is to go to reddit for everything.

Unfortunately now we’re going to have to get used to clicking on those clickbait tech articles like “TOP 10 FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVES 2023” to find information, and weed out the crappy blogs.

48 points

The fact is that there is some useful info that only is on Reddit. No shame in looking that stuff up since that’s where it is.

The main thing is to stop using Reddit as your go-to time waster/doom scrolling app

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44 points

Now I will doomscroll on Lemmy. Problem solved

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29 points

Tbh the lack of people and content here has limited my doom scrolling tremendously.

Also helps that everyone here is like a kid on their first day of high school or college. Zero toxicity! 😎

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2 points

Give it time. The toxic trolls will soon realize they’re all just talking to each other and come to the fediverse for fresh meat.

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2 points

Actually for the first time I’m contributing now, on reddit I tried a few times but I never liked it, and never did more than liking.

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12 points

If people stop providing useful information on reddit, it’s usefulness will disappear over time.

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12 points

There are also lots of people using Shreddit to remove their entire log of comments.

I’m debating whether or not to do that with my account… I have several comments with solutions to specific tech issues, documentation on specific things. At the same time, I feel less and less comfortable with Reddit benefiting from information users provided for free.

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5 points

Grab those comments and repost them in a place where you are more comfortable. You can keep that knowledge out there without needing to keep your account if you don’t want to. Some of those apps actually give you your comment history in a file when they’re done.

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5 points

I’ve been on the fence about wiping my account as well. It’s just hard for me - my history, wholesome interaction with users, friends made, how many people I’ve helped, I’ve written a few guides. Man it just sucks. (the largest guide I’ve written, for Vindictus, is partially outdated, but also I put in sooooooo much effort into it and I’m really proud of it. maybe I’ll download and save as a .doc or something)

I think I just need to hear someone’s stance on it, hear their points, and be persuaded

I also need to figure out -when- to do that if I end up doing it. I assume before the 30th, but I’m not sure if some have started doing it already, and why

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2 points

Honestly? ChatGPT (4) is basically a stackoverflow 2.0. It’s my goto when I want help with specific problems. There are alternative options, is what I mean.

I deleted all my comments on Reddit. I do not want them to benefit from my knowledge even if it might inconvenience someone else

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1 point

If you don’t have too many maybe consider posting them on Lemmy as new posts before deleting them? Keeps the information discoverable and helps populate Lemmy with good content, while giving Reddit the middle finger - TRIPLE WIN!

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1 point

We also don’t know if search engines will pay the new fees to index reddit, so that could potentially make it disappear faster.

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1 point

Really? Doesn’t google and similar search engines use web crawlers, outside of the devloper API of reddit? Or is that different for reddit?

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3 points
*

The fact is that there is some useful info that only is on Reddit.

I mean reddit has become a insanely huge knowledge base for all sorts of technical problems and other topics. I’ve searched with site:reddit.com so many times for problem solving.

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1 point

Yeah exactly and me too! It will still have its use (until they decide to remove that too).

Funnily enough, I’ve found that ChatGPT gives really good technical troubleshooting tips (like DIY and programming stuff). Cuts my troubleshoot time down tremendously.

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2 points

I long for a day where my search queries will end in Lemmy instead of Reddit.

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1 point

I think this is exactly right. I plan to use info available on reddit as reference material if needs be, but I will no longer be posting and therefore creating more content for reddit to sell on in the future.

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1 point

Personally it feels like working for free by posting on Reddit. Id rather create content about my hobbies here where no one is making money off of it.

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32 points

Google has been pretty much useless lately because it just spits out this SEO spam (probably all written by LLMs, that’s the only way to explain why it’s never happened before but does happen now), so losing reddit as one of the best sources of non-AI-generated information would set us back a lot.

What we need is the current state of reddit, but frozen in time and just as searchable as reddit is right now. And since reddit won’t want to lose SEO, they will be open to scraping.

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8 points

What does LLM mean?

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7 points

It means “large language model”, software like ChatGPT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model

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4 points

Thank you!

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6 points

Large Language Model. A type of AI such as Chat GPT

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4 points

Large Language Model (like GPT-4)

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1 point

Thank you!

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4 points
*

There are archives of Reddit history, notably the Pushshift archive & current ongoing Archive Team archive. Much of the data can be searched on the Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive.

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5 points

Would it be possible to somehow mirror the archive as a read only lemmy instance? Like… Funny@oldreddit so that it would be still searchable from lemmy?

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4 points

I can look into doing this because it sounds like a genius idea. I’ll have to work with a friend and see what we can pull together

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1 point

I’m sure it’s possible. Someone would either need to transpile the current data format to match Lemmys’, or just build a new front-end for it. Also, it might be considerably difficult to host something like this because there’s just so much data. The Pushshift archive alone is 2TB, which is primarily just text.

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2 points

I think it’s perfectly okay to compromise. I’m gonna hopefully use Lemmy as Reddit, and if I can’t find the desired info on here, then Reddit will help me out. I can already find lemmy posts when searching for infos.

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2 points

Google search has just gotten so incredibly bad. It’s even getting bad at programming searches which used to be a strong suit. Luckily duckduckgo has actually gotten better.

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1 point

I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but don’t forget you can often grab a cached copy of the page if you found it via Google. That’s probably the best way to extract some information without giving Reddit a hit right now.

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32 points

It’ll take time. I think eventually we’ll have enough knowledge on Reddit alternatives like Lemmy where we can add “lemmy” to our search strings instead of “reddit”.

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25 points

The problem with that is, that not all instances use “Lemmy” or even “feddit” in the URL.

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10 points

What do you mean? Who would register at such a place.

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7 points

Hopefully search engines can eventually work around that.

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4 points

Sparks an idea, I briefly remember google or some search engine letting you search for forums, a browser extension which did this for a few different larger forums and then aggregated the results could yield a similar result.

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4 points

I think Brave search goggles can do exactly that

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4 points

We all have to do our part to talk about the products and services we use here on Lemmy. Does anyone know of a good community similar to /r/buyitforlife on the fediverse?

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10 points
5 points

Is there a way I can follow that without having to create a new account? Still trying to figure everything out

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28 points

I spent some time on mastodon, squabbles, kbin and vlemmy today subscribing… it helped seeing many of the same communities in them. I’m 60… so I know younger minds are nimble enough to make themselves comfortable elsewhere.

What I’m interested in seeing is if others are committed and tenacious enough to stand their ground - outside of Reddit. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older… things change, and sometimes fighting over turf leaves the winner a ruined playground with bad memories for everybody.

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17 points

The key is amassing a large enough audience of people who want something new, not just people who want a 1:1 replacement for reddit. There’s no way lemmy will be able to compete in content volume but I think the idea of “non corporate” social media will be attractive to people

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1 point

For what it is worth, I am about your age. The special thing about Reddit is scale. I come from the days of Usenet and it had scale. CompuServe did too. So this can suceed if people want it too. I am not going back for now. Deleted my app. Thinking about deleting my account. For me Tax, Law, and Medical stuff seem like the difficult gaps.

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23 points

I’m using a pi-hole on my network and I added reddit to the ‘blocked list’ to cut down on myself clicking the links. I should find a way to filter out the links from my search results easily, but this works for now.

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Technology

!technology@beehaw.org

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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

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