Like it or not, years of insight, experience and expertise live in Reddit threads. But accessing some of them just got harder.
This is how protests work. You inconvenience other people so that they pressure the target of the protests to give in to the protesters. Never understand why people from that country do not get this
Yup, I’ve already been really frustrated by this… Google’s search results are so useless, full of advertisements, blogspam, astroturfing, etc, the only way to read about genuine reviews and experiences about stuff is to add " reddit" to the end of my search queries.
I figured out yesterday that if you go to the Google cached version, you can still see old posts. If I try it on mobile, the cached option isn’t there, but on my PC I can click the (…) next to the search result, and click the cached option. Trying to figure out how to do that with mobile.
I fully support the blackout and I am trying to keep my Reddit traffic to a minimum, but I was trying to figure out a technical problem yesterday and it was a huge pain to find anything useful. Way too much SEO crap to wade through.
This has already been affecting me a bit. Now I’m not complaining because I fully support it. But I’ve recently been looking up product suggestions, tech help, etc and many of the reddit links in the search results were private communities. I was like “oh so this is actually having an impact at least.”
I actually wish more subs would stay dark, especially since the CEO was basically like “they’ll get over it soon”
Well that’s our fault for letting information get congregated in a centralized service to be fair. Any information that is stored without redundancy on a single service should be considered already lost.
The Fediverse doesn’t fix this by the way, as far as I know. The data can be accessed from other instances, but as I understand it the data still lives on the instance. The day an instance does, poof, all the information it contains goes away.
But! It makes it easier to make information redundant, by having an instance that automatically archives information for example.
We had a problem, many people knew that we had a problem but we did nothing to fix it. We have the same issue on StackOverflow or even GitHub, by the way (although the latter is a bit mitigated by people having local copies of the repositories for example). It will come bite us in the arse one day.
RIP to everything lost on Geocities.
It will never be possible to preserve all information forever, nor do we need to, but we could certainly do better than the usual thus far.
Hopefully those communities that choose to stay dark indefinitely will migrate at least some of their information to external platforms for non-reddit access.
I doubt they’d be able/go so far as to export all the threads, but I’m thinking that it’d be nice if the communities with robust and informative wikis would at least make those available elsewhere. Same with the Fediverse too; I feel like any compilation of information like a wiki ought to be hosted elsewhere for some form of redundancy if possible.
It is unfortunate for sure. I’ve come across this issue already.
But that experience hasn’t been great for a while amyway. Reading through comment chains is a nightmare on new desktop reddit. Looking forward to hopefully replacing ‘reddit’ with ‘lemmy’ in my search queries, hopefully sooner rather than later.Yep, this just demonstrates how we shouldn’t rely on one entity to be the arbiter of community information. It should get better over time.
Good. That is the whole point.
Kagi can filter out reddit automatically with it’s lenses. You can do something sort of similar manually with
-site:reddit.comin your query.Another alternative is just using wayback machine to access reddit. That way they don’t get your traffic!
Create a read only lemmy instance populated with the data from the Reddit data dump. Make sure Google indexes it. Comply with DMCA requests made by users who want their content removed.
that’s why I hope that some subs go read-only. keeps the information that has been gathered over the last few years, while making it so people mostly don’t interact with it in their feeds anymore
Funnily enough, this would make my move to Lemmy/KBin easier.
I’ve been trying to compile a list of the subreddits I followed so I can find their Lemmy/KBin equivalents. But if a sub goes private (instead of read-only), it disappears from your subscribed list until it’s re-opened.
And since I both subscribed to a ton of subs and had a terrible memory, I’m constantly worried that my list is incomplete.
It is the techical help that hurts the most. Raspberry Pi, Linx and Steam Deck are the big ones I find help for on Reddit.
But to be fair it just encourages me to search harder elsewhere, or better yet forces me to tinker more myself to find the solutions.
Regardless, it is a wealth of users that the users have given for free for so long.
Yea this is definitely going to be a thing for tech questions especially. But to be fair we were always going to reckon with the issue sooner or later as long as a single private company is the sole owner of a site that ate all the specialized forums which would have previously housed such information. The best time to rip this bandaid off would have been before reddit was big, but there will be no better time then now.
Anything regarding pc building is f-u-c-k fucked rn. Trying to gets some finer info on bios settings yesterday was fucked lol
Investing time and effort sharing know how and knowledge on a corporate social media was a mistake.
The Internet is intrinsically ephemeral. Data is always a few pulled wires away from going offline. Digital support lifespan is surprisingly short. Those aren’t stone slabs. Even paper lasts longer. The Internet’s strength is the distribution. For the data to endure, you need dedicated resources and individuals. Enthusiasts. Guardians. Professionals. If the responsible organization’s goal is profit, it’s doomed from the start.
I’ve taken my (quite small) subreddit dark and don’t plan on opening it again any time soon, if ever.
To be fair, it’s very niche, and i don’t think there is actually any useful information there other than links to articles.
It’s a protest, and since Reddit seems internet on killing itself, the protest goes on. I guess they’ll just kick me out eventually if they feel like it’s important enough. shrugs
Reddit will open them back up with new moderators if they were pretty active, there is already precedent from when the kotakuinaction creator intentionally closed that subreddit several years ago. It may take a little more time if a lot of subreddits decide to stay closed, but it’ll happen sooner or later.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/13/17568556/kotakuinaction-reddit-mod-shut-down-administrator
