this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.
Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.
But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can't link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren't a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it's not just Facebook.
This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you're searching for.
And it's another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.
You really need to add Discord to this list as it is soaking up gigantic amounts of information about video games as a forum replacement. One could argue for actual community games like MMO's it is perhaps slightly different, but for the majority it is a huge problem.
In 10 years, when we move off discord for "the next big thing" all that info will be gone yet again. It happened to slack and it will most likely happen to discord. None of it will be indexed too. Fun times.
Where are the data hoarders when you need them?
Tools for backing up servers already exist: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter But unfortunately discord can't be easily scraped in one coordinated attempt unlike reddit due to the massive number of private servers and existing verification/anti-bot mechanisms. As a result, only the communities that have data hoarders will be actually archived.
But u can login to discord and if the room is public you can see the content. Even if ur logged into FB if ur not in the private group u can't see the content.
Well yes, that's entirely the point of the comment above: unlike old school forums, discord is just as useless as Facebook in helping search engines deliver useful content.
I think the point is you can't put a search term into a search engine and get results from some random Discord. No body is going to go trawling through Discords to then use the search function to potentially find information from it. Now, if chats were somehow archived and could then be searchable, different story, but I don't think that's what people using Discord want from Discord.
yeah, this is a problem. But in practice i found that if your searching for one niche problem and your only lead is discord, the people there are going to be kind and help.
I know the pain on having to join something's discord to get info, but it's usually fast after I join.
But the bigger issue appears when you don't have a clear place to go. It's like we've gone back to before written records were common. Once that server goes and the people scatter, that information might as well never have existed. 5 years after Discord disappears, the only knowledge people will be able to find of it will be a handful of old messages complaining about ~~some dude who scammed a bunch of people with low quality iron~~ Doge coin.
I get it, it is a problem. But I just wanted to up the mood by saying that "you can get the info". ig I just made ppl mad :/
I can't see downvotes, but I imagine that people just took it as you disagreeing and saying that it's not a problem.
I was thinking of stuff that's super niche anyways, like if you're trying to keep a program running that your company's database relies on that hasn't been supported since Windows 95 or something absurd like that. For most stuff, it's still possible to find at least somebody with an answer, even if you have to go to a Discord server for it. But when nobody has documented stuff that's super obscure? Good luck!
You can see the content, but it isn't categorized, tagged or organized in any way. If you're looking for some specific information but you don't know which server/channel it was discussed on, you'll never find it.
Yeah I can't stand discord. Impossible to find anything, constantly feel like I've joined a conversation that has been in progress for months so have to scroll up ages to get any sort of context.
I don't engage socially in random Discord servers, I'm almost certainly just there for an FAQ, to ask a question, or to use Discord's- pretty decent- search function to find someone who's had whatever issue I'm having before.
Aren't you comparing apples and oranges:
If the server is private, then you can't search it. If the group is private, then you can't search it.
If it is public you can on either platform but must participate on the platform. That's what made Reddit unique: lurking was real easy and didn't require an account.
Sidebar from someone who is probrbly just to old to know: How would I go about finding discords that are relevant to my intrests? I am a member on a few servers, but the discovery was always the other way around: I found the invite-link on a website/community that dealt with the topic I was intrested in.
Reddit keeps asking me to use their app and they are very clearly making the mobile browser version worse and worse.
Just last week I couldn't view a thread I found on Google without signing in. It wasn't adult content and didn't require verifying my age. The reason given was very vague and had something to do with the content not being vetted (despite being old).
The Reddit garden wall is already here and is currently being rolled out. For your own good, of course.
I use a browser extension to redirect to old reddit, which doesn't have all this crap yet
Which extension?
There are some extensions you can try - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=old+reddit+extension+firefox&t=fpas&ia=web
But I'm using LibRedirect - https://libredirect.github.io/
If you're using Firefox mobile (Android), you could try this https://github.com/octonezd/oldlander
You're a goddamn life saver
Probably this:
“Unreviewed Content
This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.”
Knew I could find it by searching for an in-theaters film followed by “DVD rip reddit”. Behold / old reddit link.
The sub exists to funnel people to a single TinyUrl. Checking the preview instead, I expect it (123movieshd dot club) is a malware distributor.
While reddit’s tactic is coercive, it also functions as a lazy way to fight the reach/effectiveness of spammers.
Yeah it’s true. Too bad. Bye reddit.
Use Firefox and there are extensions that block the app request popup. Or you could use tampermonkey or something similar to do it.
I bet that doesn't work with the login requirements.
The page still loads behind it, usually, there's just a popup keeping you from accessing it. So I don't see how they could stop you from just.. removing the popup.
Sure, to see a few top-level replies. That's another part of it, you've got to click "see more" several times in order to see every branch of the conversation. None of that is hidden behind the overlay element.
Also, starting in 2018 Google no longer actually searches for the words you entered. Instead, it tries to figure out "what you really mean" and shows results for that. See BERT
"... Google can no longer spider a significant amount..."
What?
"A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing."
Wikipedia
But I think that's letting Google off the hook because when I search for things I do get hits, it's just weird and I get terrible hits. Last week I was looking for something specific and I found five pages in the top 10 that were all variations on each other, to the point that I assume some of them were automatically generated but have no idea which is the actual original source, if any.
And then if I'm searching for something like song lyrics, the top five hits are all sites that require JavaScript to be enabled and AdBlock to be disabled. Of course Google could filter its rankings to bring sites like this out of the top 10.
So I agree with you that capitalism is a huge issue but one specific issue here is that the Google developers don't care about things that we care about. And other companies such as Apple and Facebook are worse of course.
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