The top search results from Google always being reddit links is a fairly recent phenomenon(I would say in the last year or so?), in no small part due to Google’s targeted advertisements and SEO ruining the Internet, and LLMs has made blogspam much easier than ever before.
Despite its multiple flaws(the biggest one would have to be the inability to search for comments), reddit is one of the only places on the English speaking Internet where you can find genuine, relatively high quality dialogue between real people, good or bad, without any paywalls, which is also why I think reddit has always had an disproportionate influence on Internet discourse relative to its size.
I would say if reddit was competent, they would be trying to foster this aspect of its community that would take the function from Google and make it the best place to search for answer to everything, because in the end, all search on the Internet boils down to finding real people to willingly help other people in public, and there is no better marketing than genuine word-of-mouth. But, reddit seemed to be keen on rereading the steps to what ruined Google in the first place, the priority of targeted advertisment over people.
Yeah this is something that too few people get about the Fediverse. Because it’s decentralised and sends your data to many independent servers by default, it’s in fact even harder to scrub what you post off the internet than a centralised platform. Even if your current instance goes down, other federated instances will still have a lot of the original posts and comments. You can never be certain that all instances have deleted your post or comment because they can simply not comply with the signal from your home instance asking them to delete it, or have defederated between you making the post and you deleting it so it never gets the deletion signal. Plus, you have zero way of knowing if any instance still stores the original content on their servers or in backups even after you’ve both edited a post blank to remove the text and deleted it.
This is certainly a double edged sword. On one hand, it makes information that was intended to be public more accessible by the public. On the other hand, it does run up against the “right to be forgotten” doctrine, and does have very real privacy implications. Lemmy is better for privacy in terms of not tracking your browser and not having ads, but worse for privacy in that anything you post can’t really be deleted.
But more than anything, it’s a reason to think before you post because you likely won’t be able to take it back.
For instance, there’s a bug in the sync and boost lemmy client that lets you copy any post that says deleted by creator, and you when you paste the original comment is pasted.
I’m honestly surprised Discord hasn’t stepped up to do something like this. So many forums and communities have moved to discord that, if it had a powerful search, it could probably eat some of Big G’s lunch
Google started doing the reddit thing because there google search is such shit that people started typing out in search “reddit what oil should I use for a 2009 Ford focus?” Because Google results give convoluted and shit results, but commentary in reddit already likely have a post about your exact question in their mechanicadvice sub that says you should use X oil in that vehicle.
The top search results from Google always being reddit links is a fairly recent phenomenon(I would say in the last year or so?), in no small part due to Google’s targeted advertisements and SEO ruining the Internet, and LLMs has made blogspam much easier than ever before.
Despite its multiple flaws(the biggest one would have to be the inability to search for comments), reddit is one of the only places on the English speaking Internet where you can find genuine, relatively high quality dialogue between real people, good or bad, without any paywalls, which is also why I think reddit has always had an disproportionate influence on Internet discourse relative to its size.
I would say if reddit was competent, they would be trying to foster this aspect of its community that would take the function from Google and make it the best place to search for answer to everything, because in the end, all search on the Internet boils down to finding real people to willingly help other people in public, and there is no better marketing than genuine word-of-mouth. But, reddit seemed to be keen on rereading the steps to what ruined Google in the first place, the priority of targeted advertisment over people.
On a mobile browser, Reddit isn’t very usable. Tons of nagging about using the app. I guess you could say it’s app-walled or spyware-walled.
Can posts and comment here in Lemmy be found in Google (or generally any search engine)? That would be a massive downside.
Of course they can, as a public forum, Lemmy is search engine crawlable as any other webpage on the public Internet.
I’m not sure why that would be a downside though.
Yeah this is something that too few people get about the Fediverse. Because it’s decentralised and sends your data to many independent servers by default, it’s in fact even harder to scrub what you post off the internet than a centralised platform. Even if your current instance goes down, other federated instances will still have a lot of the original posts and comments. You can never be certain that all instances have deleted your post or comment because they can simply not comply with the signal from your home instance asking them to delete it, or have defederated between you making the post and you deleting it so it never gets the deletion signal. Plus, you have zero way of knowing if any instance still stores the original content on their servers or in backups even after you’ve both edited a post blank to remove the text and deleted it.
This is certainly a double edged sword. On one hand, it makes information that was intended to be public more accessible by the public. On the other hand, it does run up against the “right to be forgotten” doctrine, and does have very real privacy implications. Lemmy is better for privacy in terms of not tracking your browser and not having ads, but worse for privacy in that anything you post can’t really be deleted.
But more than anything, it’s a reason to think before you post because you likely won’t be able to take it back.
For instance, there’s a bug in the sync and boost lemmy client that lets you copy any post that says deleted by creator, and you when you paste the original comment is pasted.
I meant it would be bad if the content can not be found.
Of course they can. Lemmy is a clearnet site as are all Fediverse platforms.
I’m honestly surprised Discord hasn’t stepped up to do something like this. So many forums and communities have moved to discord that, if it had a powerful search, it could probably eat some of Big G’s lunch
Spoken like a true insider
Google started doing the reddit thing because there google search is such shit that people started typing out in search “reddit what oil should I use for a 2009 Ford focus?” Because Google results give convoluted and shit results, but commentary in reddit already likely have a post about your exact question in their mechanicadvice sub that says you should use X oil in that vehicle.
It’s very difficult to find reliable recommendations for things outside of reddit.
Reddit’s fetish for constantly banning its users over nothing is the main reason why I hate it.