A Reddit result in Google might take you to a private page now
Yeah I’m in agreement but it’s important to realize that the problem is not the blackout but the issues that it has made even more obvious, that SEO has become a plague and having all info consolidated in one location is a bad. Hopefully the knowledge on reddit can be recovered and we can adapt to the next big way to interact with the internet. I’m not sold on that being chatgpt tho
While I approve of the blackout (wouldn’t be here otherwise) some of that information is potentially important, so… I’ll just point out that there are two “common” ways of dealing with this: Google cache (assuming they haven’t fucked that up yet) and the Internet Wayback Machine (web.archive.org). The latter is a lot more powerful but might not have everything indexed. They’re also in legal issues lately, because of course we can’t have nice things.
I think that instead of the brute-force solution “Reddit alternative” like the fediverse, I think that we need a transitional period for some people to still access highly pertinent information… which can be potentially be done by self-hosting Reddit, a Reddit clone (much like with dead forums), or all that dataset of Reddit archived somewhere where it’s easy for querying and viewing for the end users. Granted, that might take extensive server capacity and violate the TOS of Reddit… (But I can’t query nor know anything more about the topic of self-hosting Reddit with the flag site:reddit.com/r/selfhosted because the subreddit /r/selfhosted is private! Oh the irony!)
Yeah reddit is/was a giant user-generated information vault. A large amount of opinions/info about would suddenly be gone if reddit goes offline and we’re already starting to see that now.
This funnily reminds me of the original rise of reddit. It killed off a lot of independent forum sites that used to dominate search results. There was a period where you might be looking for something, see a forum result, and find that the forum was now gone.
I wonder how much valuable information was lost to the sands of time as a result of that transition. And I wonder if the same thing is going to happen again with dead subreddits.
This is another reason that the entire internet being centralized on a single site is a terrible idea.