What do you guys think about this? (Wasn’t sure which community to post this in)
I’ve been linking this text fairly often, but I think that it’s worth a read. People might be focusing on the blackout but that’s just the “now” - with or without blackouts, Reddit is a ticking bomb bound to eventually explode, and all the information there will be lost when it does.
And the fact that people have been relying on Reddit to look for information shows even deeper issues, not just with Reddit but the internet. Let’s see…
- Google monopoly over the search market. Why would it need to make its product better, if you’re still going to use it?
- Corporations always trying to prevent you from reaching the best result (because it won’t lead you to their product), and engaging on an arms race through search engine optimisation. That’s why people did that “reddit” trick.
- The encroachment of the ad industry into the internet. Oh look, I found the content that I wanted… no wait it’s another ad. Move on…
- Governments more often pandering to corporations than defending the best interests of their taxpayers, and the legislation on what’s allowed or disallowed on the internet suffering in result of that.
- Reddit monopoly over discussions.
- People sharing info in Reddit instead of through more resilient forms of digital media, as shown in the link.
Google monopoly over the search market.
Mostly because it’s better than other options though. For instance, when I use DDG, lots of boolean handles just don’t work. If I look for “cat sweater -dog”, I’m going to get nothing but dog sweaters. I find fewer useful, productive results on DDG than I do on Google. Other search engines are often even worse.
If I look for “cat sweater -dog”, I’m going to get nothing but dog sweaters.
I tested this out, and I consistently got cat sweaters:
so odds are that the boolean handles issue is either messier (triggered under more specific conditions than in your example) or already fixed.
That said, I do agree with you that quality is one of the factors here; since Google search is considerably better than the alternatives, it feels no pressure to improve. But the problem is still there, we’ve been relying on a single search engine to find stuff for us, you get users learning how to work around those issues of that single search engine, and they won’t be solved.
[Completely off-topic]I can’t picture my cats using a sweater like this for more than five seconds. One would go full “cat.exe stopped working” and the other would shred it into pieces.
This was an interesting video on the topic from before the blackout. Its definitely a multi layered problem but the blackout is just showing how bad Google and SEO has gotten:
The irony is that Google is treated as an evil enterprise that only wants your data and yet we all willingly gave Reddit all our data and information while talking about how evil Google is.
I’ve gone looking for a few solutions to issues and the results were Reddit threads. Thanks for the cache trick, I’ll keep that in mind to hopefully continue to avoid Reddit. Ideally we have a better solution in the future that does not result in all our data being held hostage.
I think it would be more accurate to say that Google has gotten a lot worse over time, and removing the crutch of reddit results is making that suddenly more obvious. Google results mostly suck, but you can sometimes find what you’re actually looking for on reddit.
