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Comment by ipv6ipv4 | Hacker News Reader

I think a large part of it is the balkanization of the internet into multiple opaque walled gardens. You can’t find anything, or freely join communities to exchange information anymore because everything is locked away behind some search engine blocking login.

Discussion moved from public, open bulletin boards, forums, and similar to Facebook groups, discord, etc. It’s locked away, unindexable, and unfindable. Even Twitter clammed up recently. So the only thing left searchable is auto-generated clickbait. While FB, and friends are optimizing engagement by nursing misery behind their login walls.

The only growing public forum left is Reddit which is why more of us keep adding “site:Reddit.com” to our search queries to surface quality results. And even Reddit has threatened to close off.

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Reddit has closed off, Google is licensing their public records now. Recent content doesn’t show up when searching on e.g. DuckDuckGo and their robots.txt denies all traffic. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26410290525...

Reddit hasn't just closed off, it's become a hollow shell of fascism.

I don't find reddit to be that great most of the time TBH. It's a lot of unvetted, un-sourced verbal excrement for the most part. Maybe I haven't found the subs that are good.

It's just another data point when researching. Like if you want to buy some thing, it's like another review site. On its own it's unreliable but if comments are consistent with other reviews sites or soemthing, it's stronger signal.

I will add to this, locked down Cell Phones, the w** dream of commercial entities. Now consumer Operating Systems are following this model.

In the early days, anyone with a PC could throw something on the internet. It is very hard to do that these days for most people.

Most people here I assume probably run some Linux or a BSD, avoiding this lockdown mode. But, I wonder when ISPs will start locking things down. That is why I think we need Net Neutrally codified before that starts happening.

FWIW, Gopher, USENET and IRC still exists, but seems the masses want bling instead of just "cold hard" text information. Plus "the real" Gemini was created, which where I have moved my WEB site to over the last couple of years. People should look into it.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

gemini://geminiprotocol.net/

Be a pirate with https://opennic.org/ and have a look at

https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/dot there...

I wonder if this could be solved with standardized embeddings. There are reasons to hide exact content but giving a peak at the content with an embedding could allow meaningful search while still hiding the exact content.

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