Finding things on the internet can be really hard without reddit. SEO spam has gotten really good at making Google searches useless unless you add “reddit” on the end. Then it’s exactly what you need.
Yeah, it's gotten so bad that I'm starting to seriously contemplate rolling my own web crawler and indexer.
The logical side of me says that's going to be way too much work to manage on my own. But it's hard to shut down the nagging feeling that pops up every time Google chooses to disregard a "+" or double-quotes around a word. That feeling of "would it really be that hard to toss a bunch of site data into an ELK stack and implement a primitive PageRank-ish score on sites? Hmmmm..."
Maybe just a YouTube indexer (whose search has also gone to complete garbage these last few years). Though, that would have the disadvantage of not being justifiable via eventually helping to make me more productive.
Crawl the internet archive Wayback machine slowly. Once you have built your index, you can fill your corpus gaps with public crawls. Patron services can advise to be helpful without causing stress on their infra.
I've never needed to add "reddit" to my searches to find the things I'm seeking. Maybe the difference is in the sorts of things we search for? Or maybe the difference is that I don't use Google?
Today will be the last day for me on Reddit (since I use it exclusively through Apollo); I mean, I may stumble upon it through Google searches on desktop every now and then, but I have no intention of installing their app on my phone.
I hope Reddit dies, they deserve to - also hope the communities find a consensus on an alternative to move to.
I've been using Boost for a while now and decided that I'd give the actual client a shot. I mean I've been using Reddit since 2006 and old habits die hard.
I did not expect it to be so awful. Scrolling is actually sluggish for some reason, even when just reading comments, not to mention I keep getting garbage like posts from recommended subreddits and constant prompts to enable notifications. There's also NFTs?!?!
I definitely spent too much time scrolling through Reddit before a couple weeks ago, but I stopped cold when the protest started. Honestly, I think it's better for my mood generally and I wouldn't go back.
About 6 months ago I made the decision to stop browsing r/All and only go to specific Reddit communities that match my interest. The protest has been a excellent opportunity to just completely cut Reddit out of my life.
I don't miss it, which is good and slightly sad considering the time I spent there. Maybe it's a sign I should give some more critical consideration of what I spend my time on.
I realized a while back I basically used it as a fidget toy: open it, scroll, realize I’m not reading anything, close it.
Breaking that passive hand habit has been the hardest part but my use will drop to 1% of what it was. I’m not going to quit completely because I don’t use other social media and sometimes I have questions related to a specific thing that I’m not sure where else to ask, but those instances are quite rare.
I was probably worse: open it, scroll, open link and briefly read it, spend 10 minutes scrolling through the comments until I see something that makes me angry/sad/depressed, repeat. Now that I've stopped using it I'll just open up 2048 or Cribbage if I need a quick distraction, otherwise I start reading from a novel.
I have been looking for appropriate replacements to it but I haven't managed yet. Niche internet forums were my favorite place on the web when I was a kid and they were infinitely better than modern social media, but pretty much all of them are gone nowadays...
What was that one that had something about “church of the screaming electron.” Wish I could remember the name.
Many are clamoring for a Reddit killer. Maybe just need a Reddit model killer. Return to multiple forums, smaller and more specialized.
Maybe part of the reason why people are increasingly at each other’s throats is because, online, everyone is subjected to everyone’s opinions. This leads to “Nancy “seeing “Bob” write an opinion about sexuality/religion/politics which infuriates her and she sends off a tweet storm to avenge herself, directing attacks onto Bob and his like. “charlene” sees her compatriot being attacked and launches a tweet storm at Nancy and all her followers which then “Charlie” sees and can’t believe the level of stupidity and hate and intolerance in the world so he sets out to make it right… by launching a tweet storm which then is seen by etc etc.
Also, I think they’re used to an idea that the internet was like Las Vegas. What happens there stays there. Not so, now you have a bunch of angry people slinging electrons at each other, many of the just absolutely floored at how stupid and hateful other people are, their eyes are opened, they go into work or their family function with this knowledge and launch a tweet storm, or a brick, but in the “real world.”
Like squabbling children or hen pecking, a little is necessary but sometimes you have to separate them before they destroy each.
> What was that one that had something about “church of the screaming electron.”
Temple of The Screaming Electron
(In original BBS incarnation, “& the Temple of the Screaming Electron”, only looking it up because of your comment did I find out that the BBS I spent a while with outlived the BBS era as an internet forum.)
The only way is a truly decentralized system, but that’ll never happen. As long as someone has to pay to host someone else’s content, we run into problems.
There are still lots of them. Unfortunately, many of them are overrun with ads. I don't mind advertising (on these sites it's at least pretty well targeted), but it does slow them down.
I've long known that reddit isn't good for my mood. Even though I unsubbed from all default subs and joined niche hobby subs, reddit is still frequently poison, especially with politics (and more importantly, low-effort political "takes") just infecting the least-relevant places.
This whole debacle has been the impetus I needed. I'll let myself read reddit links surfaced by my search engine (because that's ostensibly useful, not mindless scrolling), but I haven't felt any urge to casually browse at all.
same. i also did this with twitter when elon took over. i haven’t been tempted at all to log in to either despite spending probably the majority of my time online between the two for years. and it’s weirdly fine.
Keep in mind that half of America can’t participate in politics and news (and others). Their views are deemed wrong think and their accounts are banned.
This is effectively the type of censorship employed by communist regimes like China.
This is all facilitated by the Apollo app and the 3rd party api. The amount of censorship is really depressing. Anything that disrupts this at least a little is a huge win.
This is a gross mischaracterization of what actually happened. That “half” is actually a small amount of users that spewed hate and threatened people left and right if they didn’t share their views. They got banned for their actions. This had nothing to do with Apps or APIs.
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