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To this day, my most public contribution to reddit is that I wrote the code to put the title of the post in the URL. That was done specifically for SEO purposes. It was pretty much the only SEO optimization we ever did (along with a few DOM changes), because shortly after that, Google basically dedicated engineering effort specifically to crawling reddit. So much so that we lost the "crawl rate" button in our SEO admin page on Google, it was just set to "Custom". I had to stand up a fleet of app servers and caches and databases, and change the load balancers so that Google basically had their own infrastructure (although we would shunt all crawlers there). Crawler traffic was very different than regular traffic -- it looked at pages more than two days old, something humans rarely did at the time. It would blow out every cache (memory, database, disk, etc.). So we put them on their own infra to keep them from killing the rest of the site. And now I will hang an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
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Nowadays the reddit engineers perverted the link system for old reddit users. New reddit users link to posts using a syntax that for old reddit users returns the submit a new post page. Also, just to twist the knife further, old reddit users can't open full resolution images hosted on reddit anymore. Click a link and you get thrown to this url: https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/media/nice_hat/?url=...
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I just find it hilarious that old.reddit is one version, new.reddit is another, and www.reddit is yet another.
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Just a few years ago they had i.reddit.com as well, which I loved as a mobile interface to be honest...
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It’s still available if you append /.i to a www.reddit.com URL
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yeah new.reddit is the only one that exposes the notification bell so you can subscribe to post replies, apparently. WTF
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I use RES and haven't had any problems opening images or videos... actually, I've noticed they load really slowly, often times I can watch the image loading like it was 56k days. I wonder if that's because I'm using old reddit+RES.
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I literally have no idea how to open a large image on new reddit. I tried. The least amount od clicks I know to actually see it uncropped is 3 and it does full page redirects on each of them. Maybe it's ad blocker or something... Don't care anymore. I started using both old and new reddit at the same time. Old one also has working notifications... It's such a shitshow. I have no replacement for it, but combined with mobile app I've cut my usage by 95%. Barely post and reply anymore, stopped wiki edits and so on.
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Old.reddit doesn’t work anymore on private browsing without log-in. This was the last staw for me, I deleted 3 15-year old accounts at the beginning of 2024, now I don’t even visit it by mistake.
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> Also, just to twist the knife further, old reddit users can't open full resolution images hosted on reddit anymore. Click a link and you get thrown to this url: Do you use RES? If so, try updating it to the latest version and see if this still happens.
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You can still view the the full sized image by click and open it in a different tab. It's a bit of hassle but at least it works
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They broke that too. Links to image just redirect to the Reddit UI for me Saving it still gets full res though..for now anyway
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At least for me that doesn't work. It still opens Reddit's weird view image page.
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> That was done specifically for SEO purposes. As a human I also like it when I can see what topic a URL points to (eg. when it's being shared on HN, or pasted into source code, etc). URLs that just have an opaque ID or terse filename are not very user-friendly.
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I agree; I wish JIRA did this. I actually asked for this feature in their support forum yers ago and got a chorus of "that's stupid, why would anyone want that?" in reply.
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JIRA is what comes to mind when I think of software that does really stupid things nobody would ever want. Want to middle click this one specific link to open it in a background tab? Instead of respecting default browser behavior the user is expecting, JIRA happily hijacks the mouse down event to open your background link in the foreground instead, which prevents you from opening multiple links in a convenient timely manor. A deployment happened on December 29th. It's January 2th. Suddenly, you need to know if the deployment happened 1 week ago or 1 month ago. You remember the deployments page usually says useful information such as X days ago or X weeks ago. Based on the facts, a rational normal person is expecting something like 4 days ago. JIRA says "last year".
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This is similar to when people create branches with just the Jira ID instead of using the ID and title slug as branch name. I’m often working on 3+ items at a time and need a quick way to know which branch is which; how do people that just use the ID as branch name know what the code changes are?
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And then there's the other side, where some use very verbose branch names rapidly approaching 80 columns.
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I do this and probably never break over 3 words or 32 chars, usually the literal ticket titles are overly verbose and poorly chosen anyways.
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Nowadays reddit hides it, I use this to revert back to full url for (let value of document.querySelectorAll('.first a.bylink.comments')) {
let href = value.closest('.top-matter').querySelector('.title a.title.may-blank').href;
if (href != value.href && (
href.startsWith('https://www.reddit.com/') ||
href.startsWith('https://v.redd.it'))
) {
console.log (href, value.href);
value.closest('.top-matter').querySelector('.title a.title.may-blank').href = value.href;
}
}
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What do you mean the hide it now? I still see it in the URL?
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Saying they hide it might be a bit of a stretch, that URL just 302's to the comment link with the title-in-url as usual. I guess you're referring to being able to right-click and copy the url directly?
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The problem is you can't trust it: people can modify that part of the URL arbitrarily and so you think the URL has meaning, but it doesn't.
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It depends how it is implemented. After extracting the ID and looking up the post you can then check that the "slug" matches. Return a 404 if it doesn't. This may add a bit of complexity (if the slug data is mutable you need to allow any past versions or freeze it in creation) but isn't too hard if this is the approach that you want to take.
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Ok, but we don't have to talk about this "depends" idea: that's not how reddit did it and I thought we were talking about reddit ;P.
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I'd still rather be saved from a bad click 99% of the time, rather than the 0% of the time an unlabeled ID link will give you.
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Oh yeah, it turned out to be great for humans. It just happened to be the one thing that we specifically did for SEO first. Funny enough, it turns out that most "SEO optimizations" are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans".
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>SEO optimizations are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans" I'm gonna embroider that on a throw pillow and use it to hit webdevs.
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Please do! And please send me a picture if you actually do it. :)
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I see. I suppose in a perfect world, devs would just follow general best practices and search engines would reward that, and nobody would be looking for evil voodoo to boost traffic. And I would have a pet unicorn!
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It's mind-boggling to me that Google didn't create a spec to work with special partners whereby they could get syndicated data in a format that was easy to ingest, and easy for their partners to produce. Lighting dollars on fire just to serve up pages to Googlebot, when you could just periodically dump a journal of updates to Google, is just crazy imo. On edit: if only there were some way to do some kind of really simple syndication of your data.
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You’d have to trust that the data being dumped was 100% identical to the actual pages users would eventually see, or you could end up with very weird (including dangerous) behavior Of course, I know that some version of this can and does occur with classic web scraping too, but that is an arms race that a search engine can win
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> I know that some version of this can and does occur with classic web scraping too, but that is an arms race that a search engine can win Cloaked links and cloaked ads still happen on direct requests, too -- a search engine's crawlers come in a widely known IP range (or if they start using unknown or new IPs, they become known soon enough) so even spoofing the user agent of the bot isn't a reliable workaround. I'd say the arms race is still escalating, though I've been out of that game for a little while I'm still rather sure of that.
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You can just spot check a tiny fraction of the data to validate this big it doesn't match the the site gets blocked.
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In the past Google just requested the HTML, and didn't bother with the javascript, so it was a simple document request. People started serving up pages that required Javascript to show content, so they had cope with that. I'm sure it's dramatically more expensive for them as well.
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As long as it’s prohibitively expensive for their competition, I’m sure they don’t mind.
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I don't think Google uses this in a major way. It also probably isn't the best fit for this use case. 1. You can really only subscribe to particular URLs. So this would require millions of subscriptions. It would only make sense if most of your pages are changing every few days. 2. You need to also subscribe to feeds to fine new content.
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Also, isn't this illegal? Either Google respected rate limits (which I doubt) or it was a form of a DDoS attack.
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It's only illegal if you poor people do it. For us rich corporations, we do what we want
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Google is the kingmaker and basically a monopoly on search.
If you're going to light up dollars to share with a bot, let it be with google, who on a lucky day might decide you are king (because you let them index your site)
I would presume and assume google obeys the robots.txt mandate as well. But I would agree it's a very outstanding and real problem that is YC-worthy - sharing structured webpage data with trusted partners in a generic and efficient way. I've heard about various AI companies that perform such data scraping and structuring with AI, forget the name - this is many notches in sophistication above a Selenium-headless type driver. If only html were made into a model-view-controller neatly and users were let to bring their own views & controllers.
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Are there specific laws that deal with rate limits? Honest question - I get that something too fast could be considered DDoS, but so long as it’s below a certain threshold wouldn’t it be okay (not sure how said threshold would be determined)?
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In the US, CFAA prohibits causing "damage", which includes "impairment to the integrity or availability" of data or systems. But as with many other things in law, it boils down to the court trying to assess your intent, whether you could've reasonably anticipated the outcome, and what that outcome ended up being. There's no law that says "you can't send more than n packets per hour".
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I guess they wanted to be crawled because the Google crawler is easy to identify/block/rate limit.
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Google's entire business model is based on behavior that is now illegal.
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Google implemented ARC for their partner sites, Advanced Rsomthing Cache, I believe. It was a way for google to consume popular websites and host them optimized for mobile (android) devices. It was all the rage for a while, because, I think, Google greatly favored ARC sites/pages for a while. Eventually they discontinued it, because, well Google.
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That syndicated data format may or may not be up-to-date.
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If it’s specifically accessible to special partners, Google could just end their partnership if Reddit is serving up false information to them and go back to the old way of scraping.
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Basically we had the same infrastructure back in the day at Trulia - a dedicated “bot cluster” We had two charges from management: let google crawl as fast as it possibly can, and don’t let it disrupt users.
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Indeed. Human activity is cacheable as it respects Zipf's or a power law. Spider activity is not cacheable. Most pages are GETed within a few multiples of each other. Probably a good way to detect bot traffic is put a URL on a sitemap, and have no links to it anywhere else.
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Do you use the new design or stick with old.reddit.com?
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I mostly use old.reddit but sometimes use sh.reddit
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interesting I don't know if it's because I grew up with it but I love simple web designs like hacker News and old Reddit.
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I still prefer reddit most of the time. Front page (default) subs are highly manipulated (especially anything news, politics, current things etc.) but for hobbies, video games, and sports it's still the best site. Video game discusssions especially because unlike Discord every tip, guide, and walkthrough is archived and searchable. And for sports mostly because it's _insane_ how quickly you get highlights and videos. I watch a game on my TV > goal scored > reddit alrady has the highlight posted 30secs ago. And there are countless wholesome little hobby subs which are focusing on one thing only and that what makes them great. Honestly my main problem with reddit was always the moderation, that how one sub can be taken over by certain ideologies. Which is worse when it happens to local (country, city) subs. I can't ready my city's sub because it's always the same tired politics posts instead of "what are some good restaurants" or "here is a photo of a building I've never seen before".
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Yup. Banned from my home countries sub because I dared posting to another sub. Literally bot based autobans by monitoring user for ANY participation in subs the mods don’t approve of. That’s what counts as moderation these days on Reddit. Parts of Reddit are still ok but others are utter trashfires presided over by power tripping lunatics that have taken over the asylum
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Throwaway accounts are the greatest I have an account all about some particular vice and honestly its been well received There are VERY FEW ad hominem attacks. Its like people treat you better when they know they cant hurt you in comparison to people that try to have a post history tip toeing around topics and subs. I think it’s symptomatic of what you see with other extreme personalities, they wind up getting so many followers that either agree with them or amplify them that they keep up that character. But this reddit version actually lets me navigate mainstream subs easier too, and ppl that try to suggest I cant have an intelligent opinion because of my post history get jumped on for being unprogressive or something. It’s amusing, and freeing.
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I wanted to post in a particular parenting sub, having difficulties with being a dad, and wanting to chat about it to others. I didn't want to use my main reddit account, but new accounts are banned from posting to that sub. So throwaways don't really work for all purposes.
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That makes sense. Though at that stage - needing throw always to participate - I do wonder whether it’s worth interacting at all.
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Its definitely worth interacting, the throwaway is more authentic and I do post in local subreddits, I’ve garnered sycophants and unsolicited interest from attractive women that are in to “bad boys” whom I’ve subsequently met in person Its been far better than whatever else I was doing, I kind of feel bad for everyone else
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Niche subreddits are still good, but above a certain size they all seem to become awful. Moderation is a major problem - not just the unpaid nature of it, but because so many of the moderators are terrible at their jobs or just sold out to some other cause. I've found myself drifting away from Reddit in the past year and now actually spend more time on dedicated forums (I was surprised by how many are still out there!)
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The biggest problem with mods is that normal people do not have the interest nor energy to moderate a subreddit past a certain point, so they end up getting muscled out by weirdos as a sub grows.
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This is 1000% the reason. It almost self-selects for the worst type of people. You not only have to have tons of free time, you have to be willing to be "paid" for your work in the small amounts of power you can wield in an online discussion board. In theory if you have a few people they could contribute a bit of time and have it covered... but like you say, the weirdos "out-spend" them on time and muscle their way in.
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Worst of all, we probably have now immortalized this behavior in-the-before-AI-times archive, so that if you want to have an AI moderator, it will probably try to mimic the broken behavior.
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I briefly modded a subreddit (before deleted my account in the blackout). It was neat at fist, but then it basically became people getting uptight about everything. “Your rules don’t say we can’t posted obvious spam”, “you need a transparent process for appealing things”, “mod suck here”. Like, I don’t care enough to provide a service for a multi-billion dollar company. If you don’t like it, start your own sub.
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Yep. Most people don't read the rules, and are then surprised when we remove posts or comments. Some get very angry when we don't allow them to post wildly off topic content, or outright spam. I had to make an alt account after someone started sending death threats.
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It's the last bastion of original content before the AI storm overruns search entirely. And likely puts reddit firmly in the the AI farm crosshairs as well, so reddit will be overrun. I think the only good content will be in archived discord channels, or obscure boards that aren't worth aiming AI farms at, but even then, it will probably get scanned and targeted. The only thing that might work is identifying AI information vacuums by their distinct behavior and serving them counter-fake AI content, while user access patterns (as referenced in the above comments about Google-specific reddit robots infrastruction) get the "real stuff". I almost wonder if intentional misspelling and curse words will start to be used to "scare off" AIs and bots from content, and that will become the new codewords for actual information. Like people online in China these days.
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> intentional misspelling and curse words will start to be used to "scare off" AIs and botsIf they deem the content valuable enough, I suspect they'd instead just correct for it (e.g. auto-correct mispellings; replace and/or omit curse words). It may get to the point wherein the only way to secure content from AI ingestion is to hide it behind a paywall or otherwise make it non-public, then forbid via the TOS. There'd probably need to be court challenges even then. I also wonder if the LinkedIn case involving scraping (wherein the ruling was essentially that public data was fair game), will be re-tested in the age of AI.
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Criminals, SPAMers, foreign governments, PR firms, unethical corporations, etc. are not going to be stopped by a terms of service document. This will ignore it and keep on spreading disinformation. If AI helps them do this, they will use AI to do it.
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I'm referring to protecting content from ingestion for AI model training.
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Good take and I agree totally. I visit reddit daily and avoid the front page like the plague. I'm sure I miss a lot of interesting stuff but the time-killing rabbit holes and concentrated venomous vitriol I don't miss.
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The front page reads to me like a tabloid written by teenagers. Absolute trash.
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I hate reddit because the way close threads for topics that need an update or a follow up. The auto closing seems pointless Further, People keep telling me the communities are great but I've yet to find one of these mythical great communities. Or maybe my definition of great community is different than others. For me a great community was a forum I was on in 2004-5 where people stuck around and actually responded. on reddit I rare find useful responses
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That is a semi recent change (last few years). It was universal before.
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> I can't ready my city's sub because it's always the same tired politics posts instead of "what are some good restaurants" or "here is a photo of a building I've never seen before". I find it funny, that I am completely opposite. I would very much prefer the local news/politics/crime, as this directly affects me and my life - e.g. don't go to the highway today, because protestors block it. Vs. the boring similar photos I've probably already saw like 100 times from a slightly different angle or they are not interesting at all and author highly overestimates their photography skill.
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Usually the local news/politics/crime data slants a certain way you could probably guess. E.g. I used to argue with redditors about how they assume the local metro is nothing but homeless people and you will get mugged, citing my years and years of use with no issue and seeing plenty of seemingly sober and straight arrow people on my commute, but no. It goes against the prevailing narrative that everything is irredeemable and shitty. I lost my energy to engage with these people before long, I wish I lost it even sooner.
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One of the biggest problems with forums, reddit, X (Twitter), etc. is you don’t know which users know what they are talking about. In your case, you knew about the local metro because you used it. People who claimed it was a disaster obviously never used it and yet there was no easy way to determine which person was knowledgable and which person was making things up or repeating what they had read else where.
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> boring similar photos I've probably already saw like 100 times from a slightly different angle I’ve started a blog about my summer house in the Sierra Nevada foothills as a way to stay connected with friends and family. Suddenly, I have around 100 subscribers… from Russia, as the blog is in Russian. Although it may not feature anything particularly extraordinary, such as the sky, plants, and animals, these things remain captivating to me. The ever-changing scenery, including the sky, apricot and lilac trees, raccoons, cats, and deer, seems not boring to my readers too. It’s incredible to think that a hundred people in Russia are concerned alongside me when a stray cat returns after my absence in California… We also laugh together on California politics but not very often. The blog is hosted on Telegram, not Reddit though - for obvious reasons.
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That's probably not the kind of political post OP is talking about. They probably mean ones like "Mayor Quimby continues his war on the unhoused," or "City council are determined to drive out small business."
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Both of those are important to me, as I am the one who would need to remember stuff like this when I vote in my local elections.
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For example, my city's subreddit is awash with political posts related to state-level policies and reactions to Roe vs. Wade. There's very little about the culture of the town. It has a definite mission to persuade people toward outrage.
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every single sub no matter how niche is infested with bots or spam/schill accounts. every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula companies. every fan niche like comicbooks is full of bot accounts in training (building up karma with low effort posts and repeat copy posts from previous days from other posters). everything, everywhere.
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People say things like this, but the subs I frequent largely seem fine. I'm sure there are bad actors somewhere in there, but they don't seem prominent to me. > every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula companies. Okay, if it's every single one, show me all the formula company inundation in r/daddit. Should be easy if they're absolutely everywhere, like you say, right?
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I felt that way until the other day. There was a post that got upvoted, seemed wholesome and innocuous, and then eventually someone pointed out it was borrowing material from an earlier post. So I go to check, and sure enough, the pattern of posts by the parent poster is very inhuman, to put it one way. Strings of reposts of the same thing to many many subs in a short period of time, over and over and over again. I wouldn't go so far as to say reddit has been taken over by bots but I've started to wonder more and more about it. I generally feel like things have subtly but noticably changed for the worse since the exodus but I can't name a replacement in general except for some topic specific forums here and there. On the bright side I do think the new UI has improved noticably. I still revert to the old site often but the new site is better than it used to be.
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This is an irrelevant tangent, but bots reposting content which previously was highly upvoted reminds me of exponential backoff in networking. The reposting serves as an automated way to maximally spread popular content to the widest range of website visitors, until the value of additional reposts diminishes and the bots reduce their reposting frequency on that item because it's no longer hitting the highs. It probably doesn't work out that way in practice since the karma farming bots may not be that sophisticated, but I think it's a cool idea at least.
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Look for reposts of the same topics and comments. Quite often the bots just look like contributors until you realize they've never had an original comment in their posting history. More often it seems they are involved in creating consensus and nudging votes up and down and in general making it more painful karma wise for those that don't toe the line. Not a daddit visitor, but it appears that formula is an uncommon discussion on that sub. Either it's not a popular topic, or it's being banned when it's too obvious.
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Okay, that poster making the claim was completely wrong then. Almost like they pulled their claim entirely out of their ass.
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> every fan niche like comicbooks is full of bot accounts in training (building up karma with low effort posts and repeat copy posts from previous days from other posters) If such things exist in subs I visit, I don't see it. Either the reposts are downvoted so I don't see them, the repost is the first time I'm seeing it making it a good post from my perspective, or they aren't reposts and the bots are making good contributions. I definitely notice the astroturfing accounts in the subs that are marketing profitable (usually lifestyle subs like fitness, fashion, cooking, investing, etc), but not every sub is profitable or even open to product endorsement. At least, I very rarely ever see such things in the video games subs I visit. I'm not even sure how you could mix in such posts into a sub like /r/rimworld.
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People always say this but no one ever proves it.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...Unless you actually have a reason to have good idea of who you're interacting with you should probably assume they are trolls, shills, or children. Those are BY FAR the most common Internet activity. For example - I'm a normal human. I'll post a few comments on HN once in a while. Maybe a few up votes from time-to-time. Sometimes I don't think about HN for days. I don't post on other social media/forums. My father-in-law is a troll, he spends 10+ hours a day every day commenting and voting on various articles with his hundreds of sock puppet accounts. Which one are you more likely to see? Myself or my FIL?
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The founders admitted themselves to start traction on the site with a multitude of fake users. All the "just asking questions" posts pushing certain narratives in every regional subrredit are also quite noticeable. For me that is proof enough, but other people might have different standards.
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that was like, 17 years ago? and imho not an unreasonable thing to get a social site off the ground that had no users. Seems pretty irrelevant to the problems of today.
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It might not be unreasonable to allow more bots before ipo, then. It is not proof, but it is a precedent. In any case, my main proof is the narrative pushing (which imo is obvious)
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At this point especially considering the article we’re commenting on, it would be amazing if there weren’t spam shills and bots - they go where eyeballs go There is an enormous vested interest to not let this become public and should make you question the concept that conspiracy can’t exist somehow
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Nobody is saying bot/shill accounts don't exist. Just that they aren't literally everywhere and in insane numbers. Also, it's about the distribution of the bots between the subs: are they mostly on the huge main subs, or do they also expand to the 10,000 person niche subs? If 1 formula company has 1 reddit bot that posts 1 post every month in every parenting subreddit, is that considered a bot infestation? How many bot posts is necessary to be considered endemic?
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Thank you, this is what I meant. I am well aware they exist but anytime I mention maybe I use reddit to do research before a purchase - everyone acts like not a single human even exists on there.
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If there's a better source for general purpose product recommendations than Reddit, I haven't found it. I'd say the only real weakness is that sometimes the recommendations lean too hard on being for enthusiasts, and don't always fit what a casual user of a thing cares about. But other than that they're pretty great.
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The /r/Netherlands subreddit has been taken over by hostile expats years ago. They ban any discussion in Dutch, forcing everyone to speak English, and will delete everything that doesn't have "international appeal"
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That pattern seems to be repeating for a lot of country subs. I guess for most people from $country, the general topic of $country is so broad it becomes a bit meaningless. You end up with lots of expats whining about that it is hard to find new friends and the tax system is not the same as they are used to.
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You might want to have another look. I don't visit there often, but when I look right now it's all in Dutch.
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Shouldn’t the Dutch language subreddit for the Netherlands be /r/Nederland?
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We have /r/nederlands but it's infested by the alt right that wanted to escape the censorship of /r/TheNetherlands and didn't care for the expat-run /r/netherlands. /r/nederland also exists, but is pretty much dead.
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What strikes me about the popular feed now is how negative it's become. Almost every post is designed to provoke outrage in some way, which I suppose guarantees more participation. It's becoming a poison, so I spend more time on this site where the reactions to events are much more measured.
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State subs are even worse. the /r/california subreddit is an open karma farm. Used to be posted by /u/BlankVerse, now looks like he changed his username to Randomlynumbered but still dominates the subbreddit of supposedly half a million users.
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It’s incredible how the Reddit mod stereotype is not, in fact, a stereotype. I’ve been banned for some very asinine/trivial reasons, you could feel the fedora being tipped through the screen every time. My favourite was when I commented on a post on /r/art of a naked woman, replying to a guy who was complaining that only naked women got on the front page, to which I commented with “it’s very simple, naked woman = upvotes”. I was permabanned immediately after with no reason given, so when I asked what rule I broke, I was replied with - and I quote literally - “the one you didn’t read :)”. I still have no idea what rule I broke, if I even broke one. Now, I could honestly not care any less about it, it was just an interesting interaction because of how unprofessional it was. It is kind of understandable, given that these guys don’t even get paid to moderate a very considerable influx of content, but still, it’s a very mild example of a larger problem that spans across the whole website. You have power tripping moderators that just do whatever they feel, some of them even banning based on what subs you interacted prior, regardless of content, and some of them even moderate hundreds, if not thousands, of subs. It’s insane. And yeah, any sub that has even the slightest hint of anything political is FUBAR. It’s almost like the moderation never evolved past what I would expect from a niche joomla forum from the 2000 with hundreds of users… except now it’s one of the biggest sites on the internet. It’s quite bizarre.
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Who are you proposing pays for content moderation then? Reddit clearly can’t afford it
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Allow each reader to have his own moderation. Basically, I want to be able to enforce 3 rules:
1. There are people I want to read always.
2. There are people I want to read never.
3. I want some random sample from all other people, in proportion from 1:1 to 1:1000, depending on my current mood. The server should keep my list and serve me text according to it.
Also it should allow readers to exchange such lists. If I trust some guy - he could serve as my personal moderator, but a mild one compared to the current regime - my list #1 will never be interfered with.
Cheap?
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I have no idea relative to paying moderators, but I'm pretty sure that destroys caching. Each person having their own server-side settings means basically every request has to be served live. I can't imagine advertisers would be a big fan of that either.
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Reddit has demonstrated that its moderation system is not stable and results in garbage. Try some different systems, for example: 1 -- The moderators pay for the privilege of moderating. 2 -- No moderators at all. Let me decide what I want to see via some kind of interface to an "AI thingie".
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Requiring moderators to pay for the right to moderate would backfire. The groups which would pay the most are political parties, foreign governments, PR firms, and corporate surrogates. All, would pretend they are “neutral” but in fact would slant things in their favor. For example, a cars sub-reddit would talk about how Brand X is “awesome” while Brand Y is “terrible”.
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While the market valuation isn’t what it used to be, let’s not be too quick to brush off the fact that Reddit has a market cap of 6 billion dollars. I’m not sure you’re going to convince many stakeholders that completely uprooting the golden-goose of free moderation for the site is a worthwhile venture.
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> I can't ready my city's sub Interestingly, my (smaller) city's sub has quite a cozy community. There are sometimes lively debates, and we do have a few complete idiots hanging around, but for the most part, it is a pleasant place to be. My county's main sub (r/Canada) on the other hand, is mostly moderated by foreigners with far-right connections. Yesterday's budget announcement was initially greeted by a flurry of positive posts. Less than 24 hours later, most of these had been removed by the mods, and replaced with a barrage of negative posts, obviously originating from Russian misinformation farms.
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Then there is /r/canada_sub who’s sole purpose appears to be to be worse than /r/canada, and /r/onguardforthee which is probably the least bad Canada wide subreddit.
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I don't understand how they still have mods. Reddits boss hates them. Everyone else, too. They have 100% a negative impact. The site would be wonderful without moderation as that's already covered by the voting mechanism.
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> I don't understand how they still have mods. This makes me think that you’ve never been a mod of an active forum or subreddit. Without mods, popular forums will be spammed and/or gamed into oblivion. Most voting mechanisms are trivially easy to manipulate when potential earnings are involved.
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Of course i have never been a mod, everyone hates these people Mods only worsen the manipulation problem
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As a mod of a larger subreddit this comment makes me laugh. Good mods are invisible. In fact I do everything in my power to not use my power for bad, and only to help people out.
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Unfortunately many subs are set up so that if you go against the hivemind, you get instabanned, or close to it. There seem to be many mods on Reddit who have nothing more rewarding going on in their lives, or else just cherish that small bit of power over others.
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I mean, yes and no. At the same time there are power hungry mods, there are limitless hordes of complete asshole users that are only there to cause problems and not engage in legitimate debate. Forums really kind of suck once they get over particular sizes and never ending battles erupt.
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>there are limitless hordes of complete asshole users that are only there to cause problems and not engage in legitimate debate Isn't that what downvotes are for?
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You'd be surprised just how much effort people put into using a message board to cause harm to others. I was a mod on a reasonably large subreddit. One day, someone decides to post links to extreme and shocking images but make them look like regular posts. Delete, ban, move on. They come back with a new account. Delete, ban, move on, implement limits on new accounts. They would then spend months warming up new accounts, using them to write regular posts and messages, before doing the same thing. This was a thankless task and most regular users never realized it was even going on. Then, on the other side, there were people who absolutely lost it when they felt you made a bad decision. I deleted a post asking for cash under the table work in a local sub, combined with multiple people offering what looked like clearly illegal work. Multiple regular members of the community went absolutely crazy, as if I had personally wronged them. I enjoyed running the subreddit but I had to give up. The person who took over after definitely enjoys the power a little bit too much. That's what you get when it's a volunteer gig.
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You're like 20 years behind on forum manipulation if you think so... So, if the admins of the site to a really good job of banning accounts that exist for the purpose of vote manipulation, then voting works ok. If not the votes that generally dictate how well a post/topic does occur within the first few minutes of posting. Post topic -> Upvote -> Post conformation messages of approval of the topic -> bots upvote these posts -> bots downvote anyone that disagree. Moreso, downvotes themselves don't directly address things like raids and sustained attacks by bad actors. These kinds of attacks make the end user feel like they don't want to be in that subforum driving them off elsewhere and lowering participation. It can also embolden others to post more similar content to what the bots are posting.
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>There seem to be many mods on Reddit who have nothing more rewarding going on in their lives, or else just cherish that small bit of power over others. Correct. There are powermods who "moderate" hundreds of subreddits. This is not an exaggeration. Hundreds. At least one has/had thousands. Why do they do this, when they are not paid? When questioned, they invariably say that they "just watch the incoming queue" or something, and the other mods "do all the work". While likely true in the literal sense (again, hundreds), such answers of course completely evade the question. Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology (/r/politics being an obvious example). As you said, losers who crave ruling a petty fiefdom because it's the only thing they can exercise agency over in their lives. And/or are mentally ill. Quoting another: >and for each moderator there are 100 sycophants and narcissists lined up to take their place Most mods know this, which is why so many surrendered and reopened their subreddits during the recent "protest" the moment admins told them that otherwise they would be replaced. /r/formula1's mods forthrightly said as much; those of /r/nba claimed that negotiations had progressed far enough to justify reopening, which the thousands of replies show that the userbase 100% disbelieves. Even worse, a) /r/nba's top mod made more than 150 comments to six other NBA teams' subreddits during the blackout. b) /r/nba mods posted secret threads—including the Game 5 discussion that they denied from their own users—and made comments during the blackout. When users discovered the threads the mods of course scrubbed the comments, but there is no way for mods to actually delete (as opposed to hiding) posts, so evidence of their hypocritical behavior will live on forever. Bonus: The classic post in which a mod thinks what he does is worth $175K a year <https://np.reddit.com/r/35orquit/comments/qw1v3e/what_do_peo...>. Be sure to read to the end, where he explains how he "saves lives".
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May I suggest you sign up for moderator duties on a medium sized subreddit. Then report back in 8 weeks.
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I help moderate a large sub, a country sub. I dare you to just be a mod for one week, the amount of SHIT that gets posted every single fucking day is insane, without mods (good or bad) reddit would be worse than 4chan in its crappier moment. A disclaimer, I'm super against on how reddit is being managed nowadays, I've been a user since 2010, the golden era, no political bias crap, no stupid woke mods, everyone was happy and content was objectively moderated. Having said that, I can assure you moderation is a necessity.
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Is it mostly spam that makes you think moderation is necessary or is it something else? I ask because I have some ideas about how to implement a moderation-less reddit-alike. (I think I know how to eliminate spam)
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Reddit would be an absolute, unmitigated disaster without moderation.
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What are you talking about? The mods are the only thing letting Reddit get away without employing or contracting content teams of their own. Reddit would lose so much more money than it already does if it had no mods
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I would say mods are a little to heavy handed. But I think they handle spam? And also some community stuff like mega threads and weekly stuff? Idk I feel like there's a better middle ground then what we experience now with reddit mods and having it be a total free for all
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> I would say mods are a little to heavy handed. Some mods are, but the only reason people really think this is because the heavy-handed aspects are the visible ones. Nobody really sees mods removing random spam threads and comments, that's the whole point. Good modding is mostly invisible.
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Maybe, I think it seems like that. I felt similar until I had some posts moderated away or banned, which made me realize there is probably a lot more of those going on then I realized. There isn't a big notification when things get removed. There is also trying to post and dealing with automoderator. There's subreddits I don't read or participate in anymore becasue of how annoying it is to get a post through. I get their necessary, at least for now, because of spam. But like I'm said I think there's a better middle ground and we can rely on the community users more.
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You cannot, in fact, rely on the community users more. It does not scale. You'll see situations where most people are nominally opposed to low-effort memes while everyone upvotes the low-effort memes, and then people complain that there are too many low-effort memes cluttering the front page and now the sub is trash and they're leaving. edit: though honestly I don't think volunteer mods scale well either. A tiny niche sub can get by with just a couple mods just fine, but when they get 100x as popular, can they then have 200 mods? Or have 2000 mods for the most popular subs? No, there's just no way to coordinate that many volunteers sensibly, not in an environment like Reddit.
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> The site would be wonderful without moderation as that's already covered by the voting mechanism. Tell me you've never moderated anything popular without telling me you've never moderated anything popular. Even 4chan has some moderation these days.
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4chan mostly does legal moderation and offtopic. I think the latter is already too much. But still, 4chan is by far the best online community out of the big ones - exactly because there is so little censorship ("moderation")
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> The site would be wonderful without moderationIs this tongue in cheek? I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Reddit would be awful without moderation.
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4chan is close to heaven, they do just fine with much less moderation
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1. 4chan has plenty of moderation; "jannies" are regularly derided over there. This is easily debunked, posting on about crypto on /g/ will get your post deleted. /a/ pretty much has the same content as reddit.com/r/anime. 2. I believe you, like many others, conflate 4chan's right-ward overton window, with "less" moderation. moot had a saying "one man's shitpost is another man's board culture". You perceive 4chan as having "less moderation" because your world view aligns with 4chan, not because they do less moderation.
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That's not only not what i said, that's also not true. 4chan has orders of magnitude less "moderation" than reddit. And outside of literally one single part of it, doesn't even have a much different overton window.
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I agree and disagree. Reddit moderators often get very involved into the community and make high-visibility changes and proclamations, and actively try to influence the culture of subreddits. Janitors do delete things and ban users, but in general they are far more hands off in their curation of boards.
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> but in general they are far more hands off in their curation of boards.This is exactly what RapeApe did with /pol/. Because 4chan is less transparent, it feels like there's no curation; especially when what stays on the board feels like "board culture". Would infinity-chan and other boards would exist if they did their current style of moderation of silently deleting posts instead of moot coming out and openly lambasting gamergate? 4chan moderation used to be way more visible, especially under moot, because moderators actually openly interacted with the board. Now that moderators are functionally anonymous, it seems like they don't try to influence the boards, when in actuality, 4chan mods are far less transparent. People once believed 4chan was less moderated because they stopped seeing "(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)", when in actuality they just removed the posts instead.
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The relationship between Google and Reddit goes beyond just improving normal web search for Google - it's actually symbiotic. Because Reddit has horrible search, the best way to search Reddit content is actually using Google's indexing instead. Every time the Google algorithm feeds Reddit, it's feeding itself with more '...reddit' queries. Further, I feel the role subreddits are playing is not too different to the role curated directories used to play in sorting and filtering the web ecosystem for Google when it’s algorithm was considered good. So while there is a lot of user generated content, i feel the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content. So my theory follows: the Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation. The Google algorithm only works well when Reddit is applied to it, because Google supplanted, or ignores the other places it happens on the web. Or worse, they've promoted and paid attention to unauthentic content curation through their SEO and 'trusted' sources initiatives.
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> the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content.I think it's 100% this. But, maybe worse. While Google is claiming they are simply giving users what they want (e.g. observing that users were adding reddit to search terms), I believe they were also getting their asses handed to them by SEO spam / gaming and their search quality nose-dived. In the last year or so I have noticed a very sharp degradation in quality, including non-user language obvious content spam taking top results. It's almost like their algo was finally broken for good and they had no response or didn't want to invest in the continued SEO cat-and-mouse while they pivot their search to AI. So, hardcoding to Reddit et. al. was the quick fix. >Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation But, it does seem that at one time it was much better, and reliably provided reasonably useful results to non-explictly moderated results.
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> Because Reddit has horrible search Sorry, but I've heard this so often, and I just don't know what people mean. I use the search whenever I need to get something from a specific subreddit, and it just seems fine. Also, why would a major website like Reddit have such a bad search? Aren't mostly fine search algorithms freely available?
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One of the big mysteries of the software industry. Not specifically singling out reddit here, since I don't even search on reddit: Why can we not simply have search functions, that at least optionally do a substring search? If I had a $currency-unit for every search that fails at this basic thing, I wouldn't need to work any longer.
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Off the top if my head I can think of two reasons. 1. Doing stemming is hard with substring search. 2. Substring search is more expensive. (Bigger indexed and more joins/merges)
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"Users don't know what they want" is absolutely pervasive in the tech world.
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Search the same thing rephrased slightly differently 5 times to find the right result, and I can show you 5 sets of ads related closely to the topic of your search.
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Because you can't implement that with efficient data structures like posting lists.
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Perhaps a bit hyperbolic on my part, it is fine, but it’s poor for the velocity of content it produces. Up until 2 years ago it lacked comment search… [1] which afaik can only search only so far back as well. It also doesn’t search it’s full corpus. There are third party tools which which allow for search a specific time period for this reason [2]. Although google works better here too. With better listing. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_wit... 2. https://www.redditsearchtool.com
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Reddit search is good if you know what you're looking for -- specific words, preferably a time period. It is terrible as a semantic search. If you go to r/travel and search for "France", it will not turn up posts about Paris unless the post specifically includes "france".
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Google does a better job of taking your exact search and returning fuzzy results that are pretty relevant (usually extremely relevant), whereas reddit search just pulls up results that have your terms in them as they are written. Google might also do some ranking based on other users searching for similar things, while afaik reddit is pretty "dumb" search.
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The only problem is bad advice that can come up quite often on Reddit. There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche community communication.
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The way I describe Reddit to people is that you have zero clue if you’re arguing with a 13 year old who discovered $x concept this week. (Or a bot) If you move through the site with that understanding - and personally, using the old interface - it can still be bearable. I’m not the biggest fan of the company itself these days and I hold out hope that something else can take off, but I’ve not been impressed so far.
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I have a theory that reddit was pretty decent when it first started because the majority of the site users were at least university or college students/age. Nowadays the average age is high school, and probably trending to grade school These are the people who are influencing the Google search user at large now. We’re fucked
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Bang on. I deleted my account when I started to notice that I would grow older (and wiser) while the average Redditor always stayed the same age. When I created my account more than a decade ago, I felt most people knew more than I did about the world. Now almost in my 40s, and there is the definite feeling that the average redditor you're replying to is a white, 16 year old American boy. The apex of civilisation indeed.
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There was a long period where the internet was intimidating and unattractive to regular people. It acted as a strong filter for determining who the people that frequented early sites where.
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I remember "Eternal September" being used to describe this behaviour on 4chan about 10 years ago (when 4chan's own userbase likely was more high schoolers). Though the original definition seems to be about ISPs giving unfettered Usenet access in 1993, causing a similar flood of newbies everywhere.
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> Nowadays the average age is high school, and probably trending to grade school Have you ever seen one of the site surveys that subreddits typically do? The median age is almost always above college graduation (22 years old), at least for the subs I frequent. I could see the front page subs having a median in college age (18-22), but I'd be really surprised if it was below 18.
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> There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. I've yet to see a relationships advice thread where the top comment isn't "get divorced immediately" Which is scary, because these people are taking OP's comment at face value and only hearing one side of the story.
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It's actually good advice. If you're the sort of person who's seeking out those narcissistic writing excersise subs for relationship advice you probably should get divorced.
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The real indictment here isn't that Reddit serves bad advice, it's that Google is just bad at providing you with relevant information. This is a symptom of people trying to find real humans talking about stuff by slapping "reddit" on the front of every search, because the SEO garbage that rises to the top isn't worth a read.
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I’d love to see two types of upvotes on the site. One for “thanks for answering/engaging” and another for “this answer is correct and high quality”. Not sure how you’d restrict or verify the votes, but I think the issue you’re pointing out is a result of only having one metric of engagement.
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Slashdot solved it more than twenty years ago.
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Slashdot also had the concept of meta-moderation, where the site's users could vote on whether a particular mod's actions were appropriate/fair or not. Presumably mods that were voted as problematic stopped getting the ability to mod. Slashdot was in many ways way ahead of their time. I think Reddit (and even HN) could benefit from this kind of check/balance.
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If there's one thing I learned from reddit, it's how not to build a wooden deck lol.
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>Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche community communication. I used to believe this but its becoming clear to me that for just about every subbreddit for my different niche interests, a common theme emerges of a dogma endorsed by the community. This might be a concept, an idea, a tool, something sold, something not sold, but whatever it is, the community latches on it hard and doesn't let go. If you offer different experiences to the contrary of the dogma of the day people either ignore you at best or downvote and get combative.
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Another huge problem is the extreme left wing political bias almost everything has on the front page. I'm a centrist but the violently left views of everything on the front page is really offputting and I used to love reddit.
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It's a shame that the CEO started reddits downward spiral. I used to be a heavy use and definitely contributed a lot of technical comments. However, their choice to cut off people accessing content via the API so that they could both sell access to user data, and kill third party clients to force you to view their ads caused me to delete all my comments and stop using the site. I actually have no problems with anyone using my public comments for training AI or other purposes, that's why I make them public. But changing the contract on me and denying access to my data and instead crow about selling it, while ALSO forcing me to view ads unless I pay a very steep fee? No freaking way. By making reddit "closed" in this way I suspect it will very quickly degrade. Already many communities are gone or vastly less useful due to the better and more knowledgable posters leaving for the same reasons.
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> By making reddit "closed" in this way I suspect it will very quickly degrade. It already has. The time around the protests about the API closure saw many new subreddits rise drastically in popularity and many of these new subreddits are entirely rage-bait. The "fun and funny" front page has been replaced by "enraging and infuriating" content. You can feel the tone of comments has shifted, similar to the shift that happened in 2016 when Bernie lost. Additionally, the amount of "viral advertising" has drastically increased. There are multiple posts, daily, with 5 figure vote totals that are simply ads disguised as posts. Reddit's space is ripe for disruption. The next time money is free, I expect some big pockets to challenge reddit.
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Do not worry, Reddit just had a IPO (or is having?), so soon enough it will be just as useless as Google. Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too. Not to mention google has a head start with dejanews. Reddit is just an over-glorified USENET. When google purchased dejanews all the did wzs ruin it instead of using it for decent information. FWIW I am seeing more posts on USENET these days and many providers are blocking all posts from google groups. Google threw away a good opportunity by breaking dejanews.
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Can someone explain to me why the reddit leaders want the new interface? Is it because the old one can't track users as well or what? Why don't they just add trackers to the old interface? Or what's the reason?
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There are three interfaces now: old.reddit new.reddit www.reddit
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Actually there's a "secret" one called sh.reddit. It looks like similar to new reddit but much more "optimized" for big screen.
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they need to get you to use the mobile app for better ad targeting
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Care to be more specific? You use Google on any browser, a specific app isnt necessary.
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From the outside it looks like only the new interface is actually in development anymore. When hitting the new interface on mobile you get often stuck on a page forcing you to use the app. The whole new interface feels like a big sales page for their app. Can't imagine that the bugs in old reddit are unknown or unfixable and I have the impression they are deliberately there to annoy users. I guess the goal of maximizing app usage is related to ads and tracking and also adblocking and probably fraud prevention. Pure speculation on my side but it's what everyone else seems to be doing. Lock your users into your walled garden and avoid bots, scrapers, click-fraud while improving some metrics regarding ads, as ads on mobile are probably easier to target and reddit earns more on them. No idea if you can advertise specifically on mobile. Additionally the new interface seems to require more clicks = impressions. If someone has any real info and not only wild guesses for their reasons please share :)
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> Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too. Please don't remove old
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Google’s AI results show “According to a Reddit user…” now, including for things like health / wellness searches. It’s horrifying. Reddit is a cesspool of the commons. It’s an information garbage dump where uninformed people are upvoted by uninformed people. It’s the Yahoo Answers of our day.
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This is absolutely horrifying, that is the correct word to use here. I've experienced it firsthand. Reading about a topic that I have very little knowledge about, nodding along thinking that this makes sense. Then doing some research and finding that the comment wasn't entirely wrong, but just wrong enough to cause harm to a users understanding. It is very easy to see when it is a topic with which you are intimately familiar. Seeing people on video game subreddits confidently discuss game development and being not just wrong about game dev, but wrong about any software development practices. If Google is really promoting Reddit comments as answers to real search topics... as cliche as it sounds, Idiocracy is upon us.
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My experience is that the quality of answers is mixed, but uniformly vastly better than Yahoo Answers.
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To be fair, so is augury. Reddit often contains misinformation or useless information, but yahoo answers and quora thrive on it.
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That’s true, and it’s still more reliable for useful information than the top results on Google.
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Always disliked Quora. Full of dark patterns to draw people in, scores far to well in search results and often felt like very low quality results. Felt not much better than a bot driven SEO farm. Reddit was only as good as the subreddit mods and community but at its best the better subs felt more like a genuine community than an attention farm. All of these businesses seem like a terrible foundation to build real communities and I despair at the loss of independently run forums, mailing lists, news groups, blogs, rss feeds, web rings etc. Over easy access to capital ruined the web IMO. Too many companies had access to funds to build unsustainable businesses based on half arsed ideas. They over ran the more organic/amateurish/complicated alternatives reducing diversity and then either folded, got absorbed or turned to nasty practices to become sustainable. In relative terms the ratio of genuine organic content on independent platforms to content in closed platforms and generated content seems to have declined precipitously. It is possible there won't be enough content to sustain an ad driven search business. Search turning to machine learning allows them to synthesize results in the absence of indexed primary sources which can be impressive and perhaps useful in some situations but isn't what a lot of searchers want. When it comes to connecting with real people and communities I don't know how an LLM is going to entirely make up for a dying independent web.
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Every so often I look up Lord of the Rings trivia on Quora and the answers there are incredibly helpful and detailed, way easier to find than reddit which is just randos spouting off, flamewars about the new amazon show and if it's cannon or posting memes about harfoot feet. Quora gives you like legit Tolkien professors giving in-depth answers to questions.
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I'm not sure why you would promote Quora in search results. They lock non-members out after viewing just one or two answers, and the content on Quora is generally viewed as worse than Reddit (not that Reddit is particularly great...).
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Quora used to be decent years ago. But at some point (My speculation), answering on Quora became a thing in India. Something that looks good on your resume or something. After that it went to shit pretty quickly.
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What killed Quora for me was that they decided to prioritize quantity of questions over quality of questions, and as I recall, they even set up incentive programs to reward people for asking as many questions as possible. The site was inundated with repetitive low-effort questions, often with false premises that seemed intentionally crafted to provoke people. The crappy questions drowned out the interesting ones that had previously made me a regular visitor.
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Quora's top answer is always an AI chatbot IIRC. It is very annoying compared to what it used to be...I still miss Yahoo Answers
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I can't figure out why Quora does that.
sticking in obvious AI summaries, to me, seems to devalue their brand.
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I think it's on brand for Adam D'Angelo, just not good tho
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Obligatory recommendation to use Kagi. You can block sites from appearing in search results. Or you can just reduce the importance of them so they show up less.
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I already use Brave search, so I'm not too worried personally. In fact, I haven't used Google as a default search engine for many years.
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For your amusement, a relevant music-video titled "The current state of search engines" [0] Yes, I know about the quotes
I know about the dash and OR
It's all ass
Google doesn't work... Anymore
I have to add the word "Reddit"
To every goddamn search to read
Content made by humans
Google doesn't work... Anymore
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
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> Responding to a post on X, Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said users not only like seeing "forum content" but that they "proactively seek it out." Nothing cures my imposter syndrome more than seeing so many Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening here. People aren’t tacking Reddit to queries because they particularly like Reddit or because they want to see user generated content, it’s because it is literally the only way to get a result from Google that is not spam listicles or affiliates grifts. They’re applying a bandaid to their rapidly deteriorating search, but championing it as giving the people what they want.
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And of course, this is only because the spammers filling the web with shit were focused on the greater web. If Google makes Reddit a major search result for regular searches, that shit hose will naturally begin to focus on Reddit as well, until eventually Reddit's quality content is equally hard to find, and then presumably the cycle will repeat with a new platform.
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Yes, that is why I would much rather Google promote Reddit than forums in general. If they did the latter, it would just encourage SEO spam to move from generating fake blogs to generating fake forums full of AI discussions, and cause product spam to focus even more on posting in forums (which is already a problem). The current arrangement requires a two-step search to find good forums on a subject, then search those forums for my question rather than have Google directly surface content from the forums when I search for my question. But the extra effort is worth it to keep forums from becoming SEO targets.
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Yep. Google is mostly useless these days aside from a Reddit search because everything is fake.
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It's fine for things that people don't have a commercial interest in manipulating. But yeah for buying mainstream products (laptops, TVs, hoovers etc.) it's completely useless. Even Amazon reviews are better (at least in the UK; I understand they may be worse in America). Tbh I would not be surprised if spammers start posting LLM generated comments with affiliate links on Reddit. Maybe they already do.
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These days I see mostly SEO spam articles for any topic that has even a modest amount of search traffic, commercial or not. Like if I search for how to do some random DIY home fix, or lookup information about a sort of niche topic, the front page will be 10 terribly written (likely automated) articles that all summarize the exact same points as each other. Clearly they have all copied from the same source. It's crazy how hard it has become to get Google search results from a human that put a bit of original thought into something.
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Not, it's because Google is promoting fake stuff.
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That's presumably because very few people will make new websites on subjects when they can make a youtube channel instead. The web has been hollowing out for a while, AI has just massively increased the speed of that process recently.
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I don't get how people have so much time to watch amateur YouTube.
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To be honest, I’d rather spend my limited free time watching amateur YouTube than watching a show on Netflix. No value judgement on either from my part, just my preference.
As the parent of a special needs toddler with a busy work life, my personal free time is extremely limited, but when I do have it, it’s YouTube for me.
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Spot on. I seek out the Reddit result because it is the only valuable one left.
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> so many Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening here.Oh, I think they know. Their assertion that they're "just giving people what they want" in pointing to Reddit is likely PR for "we know our search is awful so we're hardcoding some cheats".
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>They’re applying a bandaid to their rapidly deteriorating search, but championing it as giving the people what they want. You can't expect them to come out and say what you expect them to say here. Of course they are going to sell it like this.
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> People aren’t tacking Reddit to queries because they particularly like Reddit or because they want to see user generated content, it’s because it is literally the only way to get a result from Google that is not spam listicles or affiliates grifts. They’re applying a bandaid to their rapidly deteriorating search, but championing it as giving the people what they want. Google knows what they're doing. A long time ago they needed your internet searches to learn about you and what you were thinking. Today, they have an endless stream of data from your android phone, from chrome, from every website using google analytics, from their DNS servers, etc. They don't need their search engine to spy on you anymore so they aren't going to waste money making it not suck. Search is basically dead to them. They just have to keep up appearances so that they can keep selling ads and preferential placement to the very same companies/spammers that are pushing relevant content out of sight. Enjoy it while it lasts because Reddit will quickly fill with AI and ads and Google search will become entirely useless again.
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> It's not just Reddit. Q&A forum Quora is getting a huge visibility bump in Google search results, Why? Landing on a quora page has to be the most confusing web experience in existence right now. Quora just reminds of yahoo answers but rebranded. I can't be the only one with that association and find it hard to take seriously. Assuming you can even find the content your looking for on a quora page.
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I would love if I could blacklist quora from search results. I have no idea why it's ranked so highly. It's a garbage site with worthless answers.
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You can do this using uBlacklist extension or Kagi search engine
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When doing such searches I don't actually want Reddit specifically, my real goal is just to find information that is (supposedly) from a human discussion between individuals, as opposed to conclusory "articles" or "best of 20XX" or "top 10" etc. In other words, I don't want Google to elevate Reddit, I want them to classify site-types and allow me to filter results for "forums", which would include the long-tail of less-known smaller places.
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Just putting "forum" at the end of your query does a reasonable job of that. I've been doing a lot of searching on niche air rifle stuff on forums recently and it worked well for me.
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IIRC Google used to do that and have a search option to specifically look for discussion type results only
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I just want a little plonk button under each result so I can blacklist sites that I am not interested in.
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I recently switched to Kagi, and this feature ensures that I can never go back to Google or DDG. Not having pinterest show up for every search I do is incredible (but should really be a basic feature of any search engine...).
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No wonder. I was reading a about historical battles the other day and wanted to research the armour that the knights whore. When I searched for "knight armour" (I didn't know "plate armour" is the generic term), ONE result was wikipedia. ALL the others were trying to sell me knight armour. Really Google?
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I hate how it's translating words or when you highlight something on mobile and select search web, it prefixes "define" or replaces the word entirely with a more generalized term. Just this week, I searched for Clătite. The first result is a giant full page (on mobile) information box about Crêpes. Which, yes, the same, but also not the same. If I wanted to read about crêpes, I would have searched for crêpes. When I'm searching for Clătite, it's because I'm interested in the specifics of what is different. Giving information about the French variety is missing the point entirely. If you're on Android, try it yourself. Highlight the word Clătite and see what it puts in the search box when you click "web search".
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Wow, just tried it and you're right. So much clutter and BS to get to an actual result.
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Funny, just to be a contrarian I'm blocking Reddit by default because the site is infested with dark patterns and the overconfident. It's been a long time since the average person on Reddit knew more than me about the things I'm interested in. I find myself reading more Wordpress blogs nowadays of all things, and while I read through a lot of self-promoters and blogspam, the friction of running your own site tends to select for people who demonstrate a minimum of thoughtfulness and effort and maturity. Only big social media I'm still on is YouTube. People look at Reddit search results on Google in no small part because Google is not a good search engine. It honestly has regressed to Altavista quality. Reddit is better than looking at Pinterest and Quora and AI generated SEO spam but that doesn't mean it's good, it's getting worse every year and its crossed a threshold for me where I feel using the site makes me stupider.
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Just last night I was looking to jailbreak an old phone. I did a few googles and everything I found seemed really dodgy. Added reddit to the query. Got exactly the info I needed. Moved on with my life. Google has become useless. (Jail break to use frida to mitm some cert pinned apps. That tool chain is amazing these days)
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> Google has become useless Yet you found it through ..... Google (I get your drift, but it's got a little "What have the Romans ever done for us" vibe. )
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Right, this is exactly the feedback that google is trying addressing by elevating Reddit posts. People complained so much about needing to add 'Reddit'; now those posts are surfaced, and people here are complaining again. Truly can't please everyone.
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But how will Reddit fend off the increase of fake content from bots?
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What do you mean "fend off" ? Reddit is the one generating fake content to prop up their engagement numbers and make it look like they didn't take a giant hit from last year.
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True. But it's guaranteed to get worse. With genAI on the rise it'll get harder and harder to spot real from fake. It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse. But it will definitely be composed of more synthetic data than it is now.
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> It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse. It will be worse. If you want endless streams of synthetic text from an AI, you can already get that, today. What you can't get is a conversation with a human who has first-hand experience... Except via forums like reddit. Given how trivial it would be for me, an amateur AI tinkerer to make a reddit bot that nobody can tell from a human - with an agenda subversively hidden in contextual responses - I can't imagine that even reddit knows the full scale of its bot problem today.
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Not the best link, but this largely sums up an effort by reddit to hire "International Ambassadors" that would create a low-effort alternate language version of subreddits about 2 years ago. A dead comment below yours has somebody's personal-ish experience with the program. https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/n8g2om/redd... Personally, it's pretty easy to find posts on reddit that pair a vague question with an image. I imagine that there are normal people that could be posting these, but it's such easy engagement bait that's both trivial to create as well as use as cover to recycle old comment threads for karma.
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Look for usernames that look like 2 words from a dictionary, then hyphen, then 4 digits. Almost always, it's a ragebait post that looks like it could be written by a specialized AI. Or some low-brow high-upvote take.
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That’s what Reddit autogenerated usernames look like
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That is correct. Now, what would be more interesting to know, but Reddit isn't going to tell us is "How many accounts banned for bot behavior use a custom username versus using the default generated username".
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The reddit front page has been an absolute dumpster fire of repetitive, ai-generated (or at least content farm generated) rage bait posts since the mod revolt a while back. I wish there were a way to quantify it, but basically all the "generation" subreddits, personal finance subreddits and "am i the asshole"-type subreddits absolutely dominate the front page and /r/popular with rage bait posts.
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