Reddit is taking over Google
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
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.
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.
I'm gonna embroider that on a throw pillow and use it to hit webdevs.
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;
}
}First one is also dynamic, so next ~day its different breaking one of the fundamental features of HTML - :visited link color.
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".
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/admin/comments/1c6lp0z/link_slug_po...
On edit: if only there were some way to do some kind of really simple syndication of your data.
There's no law that says "you can't send more than n packets per hour".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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=...
Saving it still gets full res though..for now anyway
Do you use RES? If so, try updating it to the latest version and see if this still happens.
It's not due to RES, as I understand it. Rather, redirection to "old.reddit...". Maybe RES does that too, but often it is a separate extension.
EDIT: One fix is to change the request headers, to not accept HTML (only images). More info here: https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/138xrw4/ireddit_links...
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.i
? Didn't work for me.
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.
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.
We had two charges from management: let google crawl as fast as it possibly can, and don’t let it disrupt users.
Probably a good way to detect bot traffic is put a URL on a sitemap, and have no links to it anywhere else.
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".
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
In any case, my main proof is the narrative pushing (which imo is obvious)
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Is this tongue in cheek? I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Reddit would be awful without moderation.
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.
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.
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.
Mods only worsen the manipulation problem
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".
Forums really kind of suck once they get over particular sizes and never ending battles erupt.
Isn't that what downvotes are for?
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.
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.
Tell me you've never moderated anything popular without telling me you've never moderated anything popular.
Even 4chan has some moderation these days.
Then report back in 8 weeks.
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.
I ask because I have some ideas about how to implement a moderation-less reddit-alike. (I think I know how to eliminate spam)
1 -- The moderators pay for the privilege of moderating.
or
2 -- No moderators at all. Let me decide what I want to see via some kind of interface to an "AI thingie".
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.
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?
I can't imagine advertisers would be a big fan of that either.
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.
If 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
What strange creatures people are.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/ is all foreigners.
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.
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.
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
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.
Its been far better than whatever else I was doing, I kind of feel bad for everyone else
So throwaways don't really work for all purposes.
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.
What's become intolerable to me about Reddit is even if you use old.reddit, the entire site is last I checked in the moderation stats of one top 1000 sub I still have mod access to, is about 99% people on new reddit and it shows. People are linked to ragebait on the regular and you see chronically online but consistently misanthropic takes from people of all political afflictions on the regular. This is especially on the city subs but it's diffused to the entire website.
The moderation got worse because in Reddit's latest move to kill 3rd party apps they alienated many users who had been there for more than a decade and I still think people underestimate how much those people served as glue and unpaid labour, who just got alienated by contributing to a website for free and for no real reward other than being able to power trip that fundamentally abuses its user base. So as bad as the moderation has always been it has gotten even worse.
It's also clear that people have been brainwashed by one of the original sins of Reddit, the Karma system, where being fast and popular counts for more than being deliberate and correct. I know that I'm on a site that uses the same system but there is still a sense of what used to be called "reddiquette" and social stigma against abusing the system. It's not just that the worst posts are promoted, and they are, it's that people are so interested in playing the game just so their posts get seen that the average post quality is in the toilet.
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.
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?
1. Doing stemming is hard with substring search.
2. Substring search is more expensive. (Bigger indexed and more joins/merges)
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_wit...
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".
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot was in many ways way ahead of their time. I think Reddit (and even HN) could benefit from this kind of check/balance.
(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.
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
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.
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.
Though the original definition seems to be about ISPs giving unfettered Usenet access in 1993, causing a similar flood of newbies everywhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Please don't remove old
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 :)
You use Google on any browser, a specific app isnt necessary.
old.reddit
new.reddit
www.reddit
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.
Reddit often contains misinformation or useless information, but yahoo answers and quora thrive on it.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Tbh I would not be surprised if spammers start posting LLM generated comments with affiliate links on Reddit. Maybe they already do.
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.
The web has been hollowing out for a while, AI has just massively increased the speed of that process recently.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Not having pinterest show up for every search I do is incredible (but should really be a basic feature of any search engine...).
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
It's VERY convenient.
(usable via greasemonkey / tampermonkey / violentmonkey)
Really Google?
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.
This article[2] also highlights Google defending the stance, even though this LinkedIn post[3] shows that there are issues with this. Google literally made Reddit the number one site for _all_ queries with no regard for other creators.
They might as well delete their entire search engine and simply act as the front-end of Reddit's search, which everyone knows is completely dogshit.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co...
[1]: https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1780563588756676890
[2]: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-defends-statements-searc...
[3]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:71838511...
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)
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. )
I guess my frustration is that I didn’t find it on google.
I had to find a Reddit post, which had a discussion about the topic, and the link(s) I was after.
DDG lists checkra1n as the top result. It’s not the one I used, but at least it’s an actual jailbreak…
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
The thing is Reddit will most probably face a lot more spam because of this, eventually going down the same road of SEO-optimized garbage as the rest. Or maybe not, hopefully.
Wasn't this Google's policy in the "don't be evil" stage, until they started encouraging SEO in 2018?
I'm building a photo booth and an example from today: if I search Google for the best budget PC with discrete graphics cards, everything other than the Reddit link is garbage/affiliate spam. But a few clicks on the Reddit links and voila, real options.
Google itself seems either unable to stop their site from being full of garbage, or they just don't care because what are you going to do, switch to Bing?
That’s why I still type the search in Google rather than Reddit. That seems like something Reddit could and should fix.
It costs very little (to hire a firm) to embed the exact same garbage ad link in a "real human" reddit comment.
Reddit is absolutely overrun with guerilla advertisement.
CNN now a days has better info than social media, which is way more likely to be fakes.
Reddit will also need a way to prevent bots as AI will find a way past checks. Likely they will charge if Twitter is successful in charging
It's largely the same traffic (people discussing things openly on the Internet), there's just much less diversity in the domains where that discussion takes place.
Celebrating reddit for this "achievement" is odd and has little to do with Google specifically.
But I understand $RDDT needs to get pumped, etc.
Whenever I land on Reddit for a topic where I have specialised technical knowledge, the comments are at best incomplete but more often plain wrong or uninformed. Yet always written with a tone of authority.
Reddit is definitely not the answer for accurate LLM fact training.
It’s been gamed to such a degree that good SEO is actually an anti signal.
Even then, I loathe quora and ignore it entirely.
i more or less stopped actively using the site directly after their third-party app crackdown.
you may see reddit as an alternative to the ai-written or paid-for opinion on the internet, but the opinion itself has not been very balanced in most subreddits i've seen for many years now. the quality of discourse there for polarizing topics is what i fear the most for this site.
although with discord servers now you got an even worse environment because of its more exclusive nature and the relative power the moderators/admins yield. so i can see why it might be the happy medium until reddit entirely switches to the twitter/quora model.
...now it's all US bizarro world politics and weird interpersonal sexual TMI stuff.
The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise. Quality of discussion is on par with YouTube comments (ie abyssmal)
A lot of the individual, smaller, focused subreddits are extremely valuable. But, nobody would know it at first glance.
I have a really, really, really hard time believing that the ultra-uselessness of the default subreddits is anything other than a _deliberate_ attempt on the part of the reddit admins to make them that way.
Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ that the political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.
Like, it might be, but it honestly takes effort to not have something like that form into a big political pile.
The day after election day 2016 in the US, it was actually possible to post non-leftist comments/articles in /r/politics. Basically, the mods and bot owners hadn't been given their new marching orders, and didn't know what to do.
I think this one is pretty Occam's Razor-friendly. Any high volume free-for-all discussion (meatspace or online) is guaranteed to devolve into a useless cacophony.
Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_
that the political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.
Pretty new, but now 80% of reddit goes to reddit to vent all relationship problems. I think it was less of a problem 10-20 years ago, but ~5 years back we started to see more and more.
We can probably blame /r/relationshipadvice, /r/aitah, etc., etc., etc. It really makes me want to never be in a relationship again.
It's still pretty good for niche products and hobbies, but as a recommendation machine, is pretty garbage.
edit: also because Reddit search is so abysmal
Reddit comments are genuinely better, but not by much! One significant problem I find with Reddit users is that they tend to be unable to see past their purchase. Hordes of fanboyism. Even more Stockholm syndrome.
One significant problem I find with Reddit users
is that they tend to be unable to see past their
purchase. Hordes of fanboyism.
Given the freedom to create something unique and beautiful together what did reddit ultimately come up with? Mostly a collection of corporate logos and copyrighted characters along with memes and flags. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY)
"Hordes of fanboyism" seems fair.
Have any subreddit mods been exposed as paid corporate shills?
Please don't misunderstand. The challenges and problems with content and moderation at both of those places are very real. But, relative to the most of rest of the internet, (a low bar to clear) they have coped very well.
Some of the headphone and electronics subs seem to have promotional accounts.
There are frequent issues in gaming subs with youtubers bribing mods to promote their content.
Sometimes there will also be discussion posts "hey anyone know a good x for z?" written by a shill account where other shill accounts come in with product recommendations, supported by upvotes from other bots over any other evidence.
Kind of an interesting thread on the subject in the marketing subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/vf5wmv/do_brands...
Basically people are saying yes, marketing on reddit is very effective, especially if you aren't obvious and using /u/mybrandname but /u/randomuser123.
This user is talking about starting a B2B company for this sort of subtle organic reddit posting, after having apparently a lot of success and thinking they can handle more clients than they currently do:
https://old.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/1c05w7c/thoughts...
It's already for a long time that when I search for something, I don't get articles from experts, I get SEO optimized crappy articles.
Page rank was a very important algorithm to see which pages are more trustworthy than others. But at this point with all the SEO, it's clear that the best pages don't rise to the top anymore, but SEO optimized bullshit.
So why are forums like Reddit, StackOverflow and Quora becoming more dominant? Because they are moderated by humans. It's harder to manipulate, since they have an incentive to keep their board clear.
At least that's my view on the whole thing :D.
An ordinary ("having a single motivation") person wants information about something.
Similarly, a search-engine having a single motivation to provide quality search results will seek to provide quality search results.
The GOOG of 2024 is a Dorothy gone very far from Kansas. It has many lucrative goals and Quality Search is not at the top of the list.
"Training an LLM on Reddit" is about as far from quality as one can derail without venturing into the outright dysfunctional nastiness of the worst corners of the Deranged Web.
The solution is federated search, federated forums.