> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.
Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses, which is largely the issue with Google ads outlined by author.
The biggest form of this advertising isn't actually done with the knowledge of Reddit. Organizations use Reddit accounts to astroturf narratives together, since Reddit is pseudonymous. Companies who need better PR, or just a good controversy, can do this much more cheaply on Reddit than any other internet forum.
Still, the high-quality advice on Reddit that is authentic can be the most useful stuff on the internet.
True but, for example, I still find that restaurants and travel advice is far superior on Reddit than Google.
Reddit is often my starting point for beginning research on purchasing decisions.
Although when buying a digital piano, I ended up finding dedicated boards like pianoworld to be better
EDIT
Ironically, I also find YouTube to be a great source of research, mostly because the cost to produce content is higher and I think it's somewhat harder to produce inauthentic content (at least to me so far for the things I am researching)
I never understood how Reddit isn’t an advertising powerhouse. Their users literally voluntarily segregate by interest, but the proper tech never got built out. Last I checked they integrated a 3rd party solution for that.
Especially that places like Reddit attract more "tech-savvy" people who have a high amount of ad block users. Naive web ads on places like that or e.g. Ars Technica is tricky most probably.
I think that was the case a few years back, but these days a lot of casual users are accessing it through the official app and getting served tons of ads.
It was a weird moment seeing a reddit comment where someone referred to the site as "this app." Made me feel old.
Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.
There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.
For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.
I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore.
Channels with higher quality selection (Financial Times) now have more of my time because I trust them more based on previous decisions they have made (to show me fewer low quality articles under click bait headlines).
> I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore.
YOU MUTED is the key here.
"Majority of subreddit didn't like it so it got downvoted" is somewhat democratic will of community.
You muted a user coz you don't want their content is personal choice.
Moderator choosing to do so on a whim is neither of those. You do need moderators coz some people won't behave but many times rules of subreddit are basically there so moderator can point to excuse on banning or removing whatever they don't like, not to ban something people don't want there.
There's absolutely something wrong. They're not banning people for not adhering to posting rules in a sub, they're literally banning wrongthink, they're often banning political opinions they dislike or don't align with US democrat party hegemony.
They suppress subs or influence mods to suppress them for them.
There's a myriad of ways in which censorship to shape a narrative happens, and that narrative is as true as the narrative a few twitter users can set, if highlighted as "the majority opinion/the people have spoken" by mainstream media.
There's intervention via subterfuge, not an open contract you either adhere or not.
High bar is subjective, you're only filtering by the most superficial aspects: are there swear words? Do they have citations? Do they "sound" smart? Are they saying something "problematic"? Same here. There's no cadence. (I'm not talking about /r/AskHistorians though)
I've found hidden gems in free for all, no-karma, no-upvote forums such as 4chan. And you pay attention there, because people are not trying to sound smart.
> That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.
That's implying that there is a single one-dimensional quality metric. The problem is when moderators of popular subreddits (for a particular niche) or those with the most obvious names for a particular topic start to enforcing their own personal biases in the discussion rather than sticking to keeping the discussion on-topic.
I completely agree with the point that banning/censoring people is necessary in order to operate any internet forum. But I know from firsthand experience that bans are used to stifle valuable discussion both on major subreddits and niche ones. I've seen it happen to me and to others.
For example, on an r/news post a few years ago about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I replied to another comment where my content was basically the following: "If someone threatened to bomb your house, and they had a history of bombing houses, would you respond? What about after they destroyed your house?". That's almost exactly the wording I used (wish the comment hadn't been deleted so I could repost it exactly). This not only got me permanently banned from r/news, but also reported to the admins who censored the account. I suspect I pissed off a reddit admin or power user who followed me around reporting me, as shortly afterwards in a niche sub, I made another post discussing the continuum of force when it came to violent crime, quickly received several reports, and my account was permabanned from reddit. Note that both the content and tone of my posts there were similar to how I post on HN, which I think is generally appropriate.
This sequence of events bothered me a lot, because I think discussion of the use of force continuum and the ethics of preemptive or retributive force are highly relevant to today's world, and that the places where I continued (didn't start) discussion of them were the appropriate places for them. If this conversation can't happen on reddit, which it appears it can't, then we need another forum. It is clear to me today that reddit has hit it's eternal september. I can't bring myself to respond to the multitude of low effort posts that typically bombard you when you post something other than memeing.
> Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink
I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political disagreement is not nearly enough.
And if you disagree, please post some examples.
As an aside, I was curious about the use of the word "wrongthink". It sounds like something Orwell would have come up with, but a search suggests that it's actually a neologism that is used mainly by the alt-right.
The poster child for vote manipulation? Where front page articles would have 5000 upvotes 10 minutes after posting? The sub that fetishized persecution despite receiving warning by after warning?
Orwell's term is crimethink of course. I can only think of one party that recently passed laws making it a felony to say certain things to certain people. Thankfully you're still allowed to actually hold the thoughts in your head.
They banned a large Covid sub r/NoNewNormal where the bulk of the content would be accepted as common sense today.
Themes in that sub were that “the cure is worse than the disease” (it was) and that “we shouldn’t throw away our way of life for Covid” (we chose not to in hindsight).
If you are a member of subs like r/lockdownskepticism even today then you frequently get banned from other subs.
"Common sense" indeed. That subreddit was a hotbed of unscientific anti-vaccine lies. However, it was actually banned for breaking Reddit rules on brigading.
Claims of “brigading” are common and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior continued even after a warning was issued from our team to the Mods.
no, this is BS. pretty much every big political sub does "brigading" against other subs, it's impossible to stop. a handful of bad actors can ruin it for everyone. reddit admins apply the anti-brigading rules selectively. there are big subs that have gotten away with it forever.
That’s some revisionist history. That sun was a cesspool of bad behavior. It wasn’t banned for believing the wrong thing, it was banned for organized attacks on anyone who dared to believe differently from them.
This point is always brought up and it has no relevance in terms of what we're discussing which boils down to opinions on products and services from people who have some expertise in the matter.
You're not going to get banned from a hobby sub for asking a question on something related to a product in that hobby.
Try asking why Aragorn is a black man in the future LotR set on /r/magicTCG and see how long you can ask a question on something related to a product in that hobby after that. There are other swift ways to get ban, like noting that the body shape of some characters were changed drastically in-between old and newer cards. Basically anything going against the pandering of WotC to some twitter users.
I got banned out of /r/games for asking "what rights trans people don't have that other humans do?" under post about someone yelling "trans rights are human rights" about Hogwart's legacy. Not being snarky at all, just curious (as I'm not from US and don't really get what the fuss is about).
Still haven't got a coherent answer out of anyone I asked, just insults
How is that well-deserved? His comment was literally about the topic of the post, and the post was apparently allowed. "We allow politics but sorry, you're only allowed to have the Right Opinion here. Take all other opinions to Twitter!"
It's a good question, and one that their activists don't like answering because "the right to impose oneself on spaces designated solely for the opposite sex" isn't what most people would accept as a human right. So they ignore or block or ban or attack instead of engaging reasonably.
I don’t think anyone would take you seriously enough to give a coherent answer if you’re echoing the language of the bigots, even just unintentionally. It’s like asking “why should black people be able to use the same restrooms?” during the civil rights movement. Even as a totally honest and not at all disingenuous question, it blends into the rhetoric of the reactionaries.
The whole story related to Rowling supposedly being transphobe is crazy. All that canceling because she stated in a twit that "person who menstruate" is a stupid circumlocution around the word woman. Then, like religious taboo, it extended to whatever was linked to it. The irony is that all these cancelers are acting very 10-100 worst against whoever is the target of the anger than what happened to the people they are supposedly defending.
I mean but really who cares right? A fictional character is black, are the people worked up about this just children? Or just privileged? I struggle to understand why the intensity of people's feelings about this
Maybe re-read your post and consider whether it is really so inexplicable that a community focused on a trading card game doesn’t want that kind of outrage and vitriol.
It's getting a lot worse I agree. It seems like anything that might be offensive to anyone having any emotions under any circumstance is now blurred and labeled "NSFW".
Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30.
> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
But in the context of TFA - searching Reddit to get factual answers - what appears on the reddit.com front page from day to day is largely irrelevant, surely?
By extension, high-karma accounts that are run by marketing companies can post in a niche subreddit to subtly promote their product or disparage their competition, and they'll end up on the front page of that subreddit. They'll get a lot of views and a lot more engagement than the average unsophisticated user's post would -- and those astroturfed posts would, on average, rank higher in searches.
This is analogous to SEO, but rather more insidious and sneaky. You can spot SEO blogspam from a mile away. You don't know if a Reddit user is a real person, a bot, or a company's representative.
Reddit bots are used for upvote manipulation of legitimate posts by brand ambassadors/etc. The post histories are just to make the bot look legitimate.
I always assumed the botted accounts on Reddit were in the hands of marketing companies, ready to upvote posts saying "My Brand X headphones sound great" or "I changed from Brand Y to Brand Z cigarettes because the smooth taste never leaves me feeling over-smoked" or "I made big gains by putting my life savings into this sketchy investment" or whatever they're being paid to promote at the time.
I'd wager you could do a lot to influence public opinion with just an upvote ring, without the botted accounts actually needing to post messages.
They also have an okay s:n ratio in my experience, as the mod team can work the experience. Like for example, q&a type threads tend to be useful. There are folks promoting things but it’s obvious when they are.
Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective marketing group? Advertisers want to maximize their reach and well, it's not like they know these groups even exist.
I'm sure it happens a lot regardless, but the vast majority of content in those is still just from regular people. You can tell by the information posted as it tends to be more or less truthful and useful. Once it stops being that it'll be obvious enough. Like when Russian bots invade your average Ukraine related r/worldnews post.
1) That's a whack-a-mole exercise when the astrorufer buys accounts in bulk.
2) You can tune these systems to be indistinguishable from a flesh and blood product fanboy at first glance. Not all spammers drop the same comments mentioning their product everywhere. You can dilute it with meaningless AI generated banter so the mod has to scroll through a couple pages and connect the dots before deciding whether you're a bot or just an idiot who happens to like some product.
Except that there is a culture of looking for and outing shills in a lot of subs, and since you can see someone's entire post history it's usually not hard to confirm or at least provide solid evidence for it once you suspect it. I had someone out an astroturfer who posted a banal non-response to one of my comments just the other day.
You don't need to be the size of Coca Cola to successfully astroturf, there are enough companies specialized in social media marketing.
Take r/mechanicalkeyboards for example, arguably a niche community. The enthusiasts there are very motivated to buy new things and are willing to pay quite a lot of money for them. Place a few of your bots there to promote your artisan keycaps and watch people pay top bucks for them.
Spoken like someone in a bubble. "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
Well, if "nobody" goes there, how are the bots able to farm karma? Who's giving them the views and upvotes?
I guarantee you anything that's the "default" is being visited by many, many casual visitors, people not "in the know", and people who don't recognize karma farming bots for what they are.
I said nobody goes there for advice because there usually isn't any there, we mainly go to those for arguing nonsense and laughing at memes. And I'm not saying that there aren't many advertisements on those, but they are usually painfully obvious.
> Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.
User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms. Post score is, and that influences karma, but not the other way around.
edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In that case, the misunderstanding was mine.
It’s not part of the ranking algorithm, it’s part of the anti spam system. If you make a new account and comment, it’s almost never visible to anyone else.
You have to warm up accounts with a few comments over a week before they start showing up.
That's often true. Individual subreddits may filter new accounts or low-karma thresholds to prevent spam. The better subreddits will simply flag it for manual review rather than remove it outright.
An alternative: create an account, don't use it for a while, use it.
Mods essentially have two variables to work with: account age and karma. Some subs do set minimum karma (I've stumbled upon some that wouldn't accept below 2k karma), but most just go by account age to prevent banned users from going around the ban.
And a tip for spotting karma farmers: just go to one of those big subs that accept screenshots of tweets. If the screenshot has engagements/timestamp cropped, click on a profile. Like 8 times out of 10 it's gonna be an older account that never posted before reposting one of the older popular submissions.
I think what they're trying to say is some subreddits auto-collapse comments from users with low karma and recent date of creation to combat bots. If reddit gives any more weight to high karma users I can tell you as one that it definitely doesn't seem noticeable at all. Right time and right place comments are always the ones that end up on top.
As a reddit-addict this really depends on the subreddit you're using. In /r/askreddit you don't stand a chance that your question will attract serious attention, but there are so many subreddits with small usergroups and enough reactions. In /r/askreddit or other popular subreddits, my answers get reasonable attention, even if I'm not on the reddit timeschedule.
When two people say ´reddit´ they might be referencing two completely different worlds.
The prime reason I created a reddit account many moons ago was to get rid of all the default and behemoth subreddits from my feed, as they all looked like incredibly toxic and I´d have jumped through a window if I had to stay in them for more than 5 min. But these subreddits are all of reddit for many other people. And some user might only ever be looking at porn. And some others live in a diy bubbles.
That is to me the beauty of it, but also why it´s difficult to generalize trends. Low karma accounts getting shadowbanned ring nothing in my mind, but as there´s subs where you can only submit post titles ´cat´, there sure must be others were karma is everything.
> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
It's used more as protection from SEO spammers and this is just unfortunate side effect for new users.
Other problem is that karma is global which basically means user on popular subreddits will gain it quickly so any karma-based filtering is doomed to fail anyway
And it's not a great protection system at all. Just like how content generators are gaming Google search, there is a problem now with bots that find what is popular and repost it later (with a wording change) for karma farming.
> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.
Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.
0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.
1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.
> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
Reddit does have promoted content, but it's only at the toplevel, if you use new.reddit (possibly the official client as well) and you don't have an adblocker you'll see them interspersed in feeds (on subreddits anyway, not sure e.g. /r/all has ads as I don't use it, and usually use the old theme anyway).
It also suffers quite a bit from astroturfing / content farms, but it's not always clear how the accounts are monetised, they're mostly visible as repost bots farming karma.
Google held control of who they reward using AdWords, they decided who lives and who dies, who goes bancrupt and who prosper
It is their system that rewards SEO spam
If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam.
Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with none of that shit
You can submit your site to Google and they will index it. If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you! Even if you don't pay Google a dime.
Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad service.
> If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you!
I m sorry, this is like news from a different universe.
There is an absolutely world-shattering report on how children have lost all freedom ovet the past 40 years. They used to roam the neighbourhood, then they were allowed to stay in one street, and today we dont let them out of backyard.
I have it on my PC, but can't find it in Google. Its impossible now
I can only talk from my own experience, I've launched several websites that became high ranking on Google solely because of content and speed. Without anybody linking to them. Hell, there's still nobody linking to them years later, and Google still keeps them highly ranked. In niches with well established competitors.
Without Google, I doubt I would have had any chance to reach a public, because nobody except search engines will give you the time of day when you're not already established.
There's many bad things about Google, but they truly allow many people a chance to get their voice out and many small businesses a chance to exist. That is brilliant.
You seem to be providing a brilliant explanation why Google has failed -> I don't need to be found, I need to find a specific piece of information. It's a report by a major university about children. It's basically impossible to find. The university probably has crap website, maybe it's slow, it doesn't follow google guidelines - but so what? As a consumer, I don't care if the website is fast, if it's providing wrong information.
Alternatively, if I search for something related to registering a company in UK, the top 3 results are scams. Does Google rate scammers higher because their website is fast? Is it too difficult for Google to identify the .gov domain and rank the result appropriately?
I am not claiming Google is evil, I am claiming Google is incompetent.
They have destroyed their own food supply or they failed to protect it, and that's why now their search results have gone to shit.
It seems the average Joe that used to run their own website or forum has gone bankrupt or is berried under SEO spam. Joe was replaced by Average Tom.
Average Tom doesn't even know how to make a website, instead he registers on 5 different platforms - Instagram, Ticktok, Etsy, whatever else is popular, and pushes their content there. No SEO spam, they get results. Yes, they lose freedom, have to deal with arbitrary rules, moderation, etc. They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.
Users have voted with their feet, and most of the world's content is no longer accessible to Google. Today's teenagers don't even search on Google to find a barber, they search on Instagram, and make a booking right there.
Google search is already dead inside, they just don't know it yet.
Google has seen a massive decline in quality and they are a company of very questionable morals. I think it's fair to say they are evil.
Still, Google is the reason millions of people can make a living, who would have been locked out of their industry by gate keepers if search engines didn't exist.
The standard static HTML website that can be found by Google is vastly superior to social media offerings. Creators and businesses can not sell their products through social media like Instagram, because you can not even put a link unless you purchase their spy ads. With crusty old WordPress you can create great online publications and articles as long as you want - no popular social media offers that.
The general public use the internet exclusively for social media, and at most a couple of web sites for work or other functions. That is because the general public has an insatiable appetite for mindless entertainment. That doesn't mean the traditional web has failed, it's still there and Google is still king on that hill. The social media hordes are the same people who would be glued in front of the TV in the past. Social media attention and likes are close to worthless in the end for creators and businesses. I'd rather have 100 customers brought by Google and a traditional web site, than 1 000 000 Instagram likes from people looking at my post for 0.03 seconds while scrolling. When people are looking for important information or want to make a purchase online, they go by Google almost all of the time, and almost never by social media.
> They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.
Google is not taking anything from anybody. You can index your content with them for free, and they will send visitors to your site. Social media will just use your content to get eyeballs for their own ads.
The average business owner treats their traditional website as an annoying hassle, when it could be a window into the world and massively increase their sales and customer service. They love social media, because Facebook and Instagram feeds them like and heart icons.
It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in Reddit to fake good user experience. For example, who the hell knows who mr fart32snap is on this reddit discussion thread talking about good cheap microphone? I don't doubt there's already some of these out there.
IMO, the only way this can ever be truly fixed is to have a 1 to 1 mapping between a person and their online personality. An account and their posts need to actually have a weight. It need to actually matter what an account's history is across the web.
I think this is what blockchain is supposed to solve. It is not fast and efficient enough for all the small monetary transactions. But surely is good enough for blogs or things like that?
Another option is a trust network. We already have that within the social networks but not across them. I also don't mind trusting a bot that has a cohesive brand across the networks - there's no need for it to be human as long as I can untrust it.
Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for a long time. Try looking for a backpack, wallet, watch etc.. all top posts have a very "sponsored content" smell.
Corporations already do this. Same with NGOs and political organizations. They have done this for a long time.
I have a Reddit account that is old with a few thousand of the old "link karma," and received several 4-figure offers for the account for this purpose.
No, the pseudonymous nature of the platform, combined with the voting mechanism surfacing content (rather than a mechanism like "following" surfacing the relevant posts to you) makes the platform uniquely manipulable. That makes running these kinds of consensus-manufacturing campaigns easy.
If you get rid of either of those mechanisms, you make it a lot harder to astroturf.
Instead of making astroturfing harder you could also increase consequences for being caught and reward whistleblowers.
No company is going to risk posting without revealing that they are behind the post if doing so would result in - to make it extreme - jail time for the poster AND company leadership.
Ultimately, this is not really a technical problem but a social or legal one. As long as we let people get away with fraud - and let's be honest, astroturfing is fraud - then enterprising individuals will find ways around whatever technical means we put in place.
I've had friends at companies ask me to make positive posts to both reddit and news.ycombinator -- there are definately news.ycombinator upvote/post groups, who help push articles to the front page (I'm not sure how successful they are, but I know they exist).
> It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in Reddit to fake good user experience.
Uh, it has been like this for years. I personally know a friend who was hired to post fake comments on reddit 5 years ago. It could have been longer and I just don't know.
I guess the whole thing works very well because people still have "doubt" if it happened today.
Buzz marketing, shilling, astroturfing... were already things at almost the very start of dotcoms, and before. (Microsoft actually pioneered some of it in online services before the Web, but I recall some early Web startups in this space.)
Maybe starting a decade ago, when I'd tell people about Reddit, I'd switched to telling them that the front page already appeared dominated by marketers and manipulators, but that most of the random subreddits were more genuine. Though even some subs at the time, such as for groups of interest, were run by marketers or in service of marketers. (Many subs seemed moderated by the eclectic mix of kinds of people you could find to do that thankless task for free. But some were obviously effectively working for brands, especially when groups of interest were built around buying stuff.)
I remember when the first piece of advice I was given was to unsub from the default reddit subs. Prior to that I never quite got it as a site, it seemed like a worse HN to me with less topic overlap with what I found interesting.
The worst is the SEO pages, especially for popular how-to topics. Every single first page result will be a page that has expanded what used to be said in bullet point form, into a 1500 word essay that you must now slog through in order to get the information you need. And this is by necessity, because Google values prose over bullet points.
The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.
Yeah this, if I want to know how many chapters are there in a game, I have to real an entire article telling me useless stuff before I can get the info I want. Witj ChatGPT I can avoid this. I would say most of my Google searches were for answering questions, not to find articles related to a topic.
Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet. If they valued shortness then everything would be trimmed to bullet points removing useful info.
The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
That sounds like it makes sense - but if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't, why would Google not be able to optimize their algo accordingly? If the results for a query don't match the "nature of the query", it's a bad result. If the algo can be gamed, it isn't aiming for the actual goal, i.e. it fundamentally fails at information retrieval.
Because anything google can detect, the spammers can generate to match. We will soon enter an era of GPT generated spam which not even humans can tell if it's real info or just garbage that looks real.
Luckily on Kagi I can just block sites the moment I realize it is nonsense.
Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable.
Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search.
After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.
if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't
That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like. I imagine that's dependent on a lot of factors, from the context of why the user is searching, their demographic, and their biases. When I search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" I want straight facts - ingredients and bullet point steps and nothing else. My mother would want some background about the recipe, where it's from, and what makes it different. You can't get that from the search term alone. You need a lot more context.
It's exactly what the promise of 'personalized search' based on tracking everyone around the internet told us it would give us but it doesn't seem to work very well.
> That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like
Maybe we can't agree on what people want, but what I'm sure we can agree on is what people don't want. I don't recall anyone ever saying "I wish there were more ads in the content I'm consuming".
Yes, and now turn that sentiment into a metric that can be measured as input to the model.
At first it was click-through rate, but that turned SEO into sites into clickbait to get high click scores. Then they switched to time spent on the site, and as a consequence we get recipes that are filled with 2h of prose above them just so people stay longer on the site.
Recipes are a pain in general, even without google, doubly so for baking.
Baking is a science, not art... so recipes calling for a cup of flour and two teaspoons of butter are useless to me, while recipes with ingredients in grams are useless to many american grandmas.
On the other hand, a pinterest page with a photo and a large overlay asking me to register is useless to both of us.
Nowadays a cup and a tablespoon are standard unities of volume. They are not any worse than milliliters. There are a few people that insist on ignoring the standards, but those also tend to not publish their recipes.
The issue is that for a lot of ingredients -- flour notably among them -- you can't measure accurately by volume. If you're looking for reproducibility, you have to measure by weight.
And once you start measuring some things by weight, you quickly realize that most things are easier to measure out by weight than volume (particularly sticky ingredients like honey), so you start wanting to measure everything that isn't a tiny amount by weight.
I convert all of the recipes I collect to gram measurements for this reason.
I disagree that whatever ranking system google uses will just be gamed to the same extent. If google downgraded the rank of pages with lots of ads and trackers it would substantially reduce the incentive to game the system, the reason it won’t is because most of those pages are running Adsense so there’s every incentive for google to keep the status quo.
You could reward the type of monetization that is correlated to high-quality content and penalize the type that is associated with spam.
Site offers extra paid content or services, or takes donations? Rank up. Ads? Neutral or rank down based on type of ads. Affiliate links? Rank way down.
> If you provide less monetisation for content creators
But I don't want to "consume content", I want to "get information". Most "content creators" don't provide any info. Or at best there is some info there but you have to watch an hour worth of video for the 20 useful seconds.
I don't want "content", some generic attention grabbing placeholder around which they spam ads. I don't want some professionally made lowest common denominator product designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. I want creations with heart and soul. I want to read the opinions and writings of real human beings, not corporate PR articles with cleverly disguised pitches at the end.
People who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to create regardless of financial reward probably aren't producing anything of value. That basically excludes every for profit website out there that would be "killed" by less monetization. Killing them off is a good thing.
Agreed. If content creators are more interested in getting something back (money) then they are creating something of value to society and disseminating it in a simple and clean way then I'm forced to think twice about their motives.
If you put the cart (making money) before the horse (creating value) then you are not really a productive member of society. Takers are like irresponsible children, they take without any awareness of the ramifications their behavior has on society.
This kind of attitude is similar to colonialism, an attitude representative of most of commercial enterprises today. Givers give value knowing that when they give, they receive, without any need to unnaturally focus on the end result.
Page publishers would still have the same incentive to game the system, only putting a smaller numer of ads, perhaps then more expensive and more carefully selected.
If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker. All major browsers enable you to use one. Even on mobile, vast majority of ads are easily defeated with a simple DNS-based blocking. I only see a handful of ads on Tik Tok and mobile Twitter. They're still mostly bad.
> If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker.
That misses the entire point: Google search results will still be manipulated to push those low quality results higher because even if you don't see the ads enough people do that investing in SEO is worth for those sites.
That was my point: if Google rewarded sites with fewer ads, you would get all the same manipulation and low-quality content but with fewer (but perhaps more expensive and carefully selected) ad blocks. You can have that today.
No, the reason they won't is that trackers and ads have little to do with the value of the content.
As long as there are any ads, the incentives stay the same. You're saying an internet completely free of monetary incentives would be better. I doubt that's true but it really doesn't matter, because it won't be happening.
You misunderstand, if you penalize excessive advertising then the revenue generated per page view decreases. This will reduce but not eliminate the amount of effort spent on these projects resulting in fewer such webpages.
So ‘How to unclog a toilet’ is always going to get SEO optimized spam. However, most topics don’t get that many views making them less viable for this business model.
That assumption is worth reconsidering. It may be that fewer ads would just be more expensive to run and would work out similarly revenue-wise in the long run. The value of lots of ads may be diversification and smoothing out revenue, not increasing net.
If every single website on the planet had fewer ads then the new equilibrium might be roughly equivalent revenue, but many websites only have a single banner advertisement. So much of the redistribution of revenue would end up on those websites.
The first point is best served by sources that I like and trust, often authoritative to some degree. If they already have a good search (like MDN or Wikipedia) I will often use that directly or go via DDG: !mdn keyords..., !wiki keywords... If not, I type the name of the website as a keyword in front (like reddit...)
The second is really more about finding specific types of websites. For example John Smith's blog that I don't remember etc.
What I'm saying is that to fix the web, we need more sites that can act as the first point above. Whether they are wikis or not is more of a practical consideration. The point is that they don't suck and that there's not enough of them IMO.
Those sites will demand a % of sales to let anybody into their garden, while search engines demand nothing. That can work for digital products that are of unlimited supply.
The real problem is that Google holds an effective monopoly in search, so any digital marketer worth a salt will optimize the crap out of their blogs and pages to get higher and higher rank within Google alone. This will, in turn, lead to what we see today: a race to the bottom in terms of quality to get the best SEO results.
I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.
Why do people even care about views? Because of advertising. It is the root cause of all problems on the web today. All Google has to do to fix the web is put itself out of business by delisting pages with ads including its own. Search and the web at large would be fixed in days.
> Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet.
That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.
But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.
> But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page
That'd be nice, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that where Google has already applied AI, it has seemed to make things worse, not better.
I simply cannot imagine being willing to provide identity documents to any of the social media/advertising companies. They would have to somehow demonstrate they're trustworthy first.
The bit of social media people use to talk to their IRL friends and family will be fine.
But the bit of social media where people are listening to celebrities, getting their news, sharing memes, discussing common interests? It might get flooded with bots so convincing as to be indistinguishable from normal users.
It's as soon as it learns that X celebrity is dead generates clicks.
Then folks will learn not to trust it just because it is a computer once everyone is announced dead, and everyone will have to make claims that they aren't.
Why do you believe that users will start using this "AI AdBlock"? Regular ad blockers are enough to cover current ads. Google also controls the main browser in the biggest mobile OS (Chrome on Android), and it doesn't support ad blockers. There are options (Firefox, Brave, Kiwi, etc.), but most users don't bother.
And the worst of SEO pages are cooking recipes, where you have to scroll down screens of badly written meaningless text before you actually get to ingredients list. At least Google still keeps indexing recipe microformats.
I haven’t noticed, but I usually hang around King Arthur’s website for bread recipes and they use mass and bakers’ percentages, so do other baker blogs that I may find. Maybe it’s different for things other than bread, but I can’t say. Hail Eris!
Hi guys! Last month I was visiting my grandma... (3 minutes of this) ...so don't forget to like and subscribe this! Now, i usually use this kind of flour, but I decided to replace it with this special kind from my local farmers market, which is great, because it's sold by this old lady who works... (5 more minutes of that) ... so if you like putting ginger into your cookies, write it down in a comment (3 more minutes of this) ... now you have to fold in the cheese... i have a separate video (15 minutes) just explaining how to fold it in, so I won't show that here, but click the link in the description to see that ...
Yeah... i prefer text. It's even wors with tech stuff.... do they expect me to retype the commands/code from the video?!
For recipes I've had good results with YouTube. Short videos, to the point, with a leaflet in the beginning showing ingredients needed. YouTube for tech stuff is the worst, I agree.
If you're already adept or not looking into things that are challenging to you, then you might just need a list of ingredients. If somebody who has never cooked needs to dice onions for the dish and doesn't know how to do that, YouTube will help much more than any text. There are so many things and aspects that we don't have vocabulary for and is just faster showing.
Not at all! It depends greatly on the content and the person. For recipes it is actually useful to see with your own eyes how to do something. The same thing with many other things, such as for example carpentry and mechanics. I agree that text is better for tech content and for a lot of other things that are mostly text based, or more abstract.
We've been conditioned into thinking text is better because we've all been through schooling, which consists of text books and a person yelling in front of a blackboard. If you let kids watch high quality YouTube videos instead, they would get a much better education.
Well, I should have said "text is better for me". Especially for recipes, which are a list of instructions. I just need to see the list, not have someone tell it to me.
Videos aren't dense enough, information-wise. I can't just put them up on a screen as a reference, and they require too much interaction as I have to back up, play, back up, play, back up, etc. in order to use the information being relayed.
If I only have a video telling me something, it's better than nothing, but it's going to slow me down, reduce my understanding, and will inevitably leave out detail that is important to me.
You're getting downvoted because those of us who have tried for ourselves often find videos vastly less useful, efficient or relevant than a bit of text. Especially in the world of the 'influencer'. Now you have half a video pimping their dozens of YouRedTwitTok accounts you just have to click on, the other influencers they're mutually shoveling traffic to, the products they're being paid to pimp...and if you're lucky you might get some information tacked onto the end.
We all have to sift. No matter if the content is text, video or audio. If I'm undertaking a project of some magnitude - like cooking a new dish or changing my brakes - then I don't mind spending a little time to find the highest quality information. And for many things, that will be inside a YouTube video. Even if you have 100 million low quality content creators, you have at least a million high quality content creators.
I can look at a blob of text and have an idea if it's worth looking deeper at in a glance, especially something structured like a recipe. I have to watch the video. That doesn't scale, and I frankly have better things to do than vet content creators via several or many minutes of inane video at a time, much less 'millions' of creators. In fact, the most efficient way I've found to find a new recipe that isn't a waste of time is to start with "ignore video sites" and "ignore influencer infested sites" (e.g. Instagram).
Not that everything on YouTube is crap, just most things. Sometimes seeing a video of someone doing something is the only way I can figure it out. There are many particularly useful videos of how to use complicated test and measurement gear. And tying knots. But the video isn't efficient enough for me to start there.
This is what I'm trying to say: Sometimes you don't have better things to do, because you need the knowledge that is in the video. If you're doing something important and somebody comes up to offer to show you a much better way of doing the task, does this have to be the response? "I have better things to do".
Some YouTube videos are worth the time to watch, and I would argue that for recipes you'll spend your time better starting with videos vs search engines. Unless it's something you already know how to make and just need a reminder of the measurements of the recipe.
Talking about cooking, you have the BBQ channels on YouTube, with people showing you how to best cut and prepare different cuts of meat. If you don't personally know somebody to show you these techniques you'd be lost with only text content and no video.
I think it's easier for people to rage at an annoying YouTube video when trying to find information, than to rage at worthless SEO spam. But the solution is the same: close the tab and go back. It doesn't take many seconds to notice if a YouTube presenter is an idiot.
Even worse, I've found myself directed to long recipe pages with a huge amount of prose about the history of the recipe, how the author developer it etc, BUT THEN THERE IS NO ACTUAL RECIPE! This has happened multiple times in the past year. And this was often the first or second result when Googling the recipe. wtf?
The computer generated essay and the fake stackoverflow clones are the worst thing ever. It's harder to code now than just a few years ago because of all the BS people put on the internet.
I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers, but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy for juniors to do either.
Maybe I am wrong about this, and maybe the SEO junk sites would find a way to evolve, but what I really want from google is a plonk button so I can have a personal kill file for sites that I never want to see again.
As a bonus, Google would have access to the list of who had blacklisted what sites -- surely that would be useful to them as a signal to detect "SEO spam sites".
It would be possible to do that at browser level through extensions, for example there is one to filter out Pinterest results from search results. I wouldn't however expect that potentially great feature to be natively available in Google search anytime soon, unless they made it as a analytics filled paid service and in a way that gave their advertisers and investors the power of circumventing it, that is, both plonk and unplonk as a service.
Google used to support this[0], and I used it happily for blocking low-quality domains such as Experts Exchange, certain Wikia subdomains, and Pintrest. The feature was later removed[1] in favor of a browser extension, but the extension was less functional because it could only filter out results from the current page, so heavily-spammed keywords had result pages with only one or two links.
Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get page after page of blank SERPs.
Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.
Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US based and there was problems using every credit or debit card. The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google Adwords.
We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads were not approved because they were in the crypto space where indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and also work for Web3 projects.
Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.
BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google back in 2013 in the same vein [1].
So, assuming that this "mismanagement" is not just happening in the crypto space, but across the board in other spaces too, they are missing out on short-term money, but are more valuable for the searches that users are now doing (including me). So.. is it actually bad execution?
The mismanagement is not between quotes since all compliance was filled and acknowledged.
Could you please elaborate on your question? Since our issue was supposely solved filling all the requirements there is no difference about the different spaces. This is bad execution by the book.
To me all signs point to Reddit never having been a commercial venture, but rather an influence and propaganda machine for United States government agencies. So they already have their budget paid.
I don't see Chinese communist party buying Reddit stocks as proof against US government agencies using Reddit to influence the population, that's what I mean.
Maybe this is giving reddit too much credit, but I do see people say "append reddit to searches" literally every time the topic of search is brought up, so what if reddit is aware people do that but doesn't want to be a search engine?
Imagine you're one of the few remaining sources of human content on the Internet, and you look at the terrible cat and mouse game google plays forever with spam, you don't really envy it. So imagine telling the world hey, reddit is the new google, everyone come do your searches (and spam) here, gl mods.
This doesn't ring true to me. Reddit has clearly demonstrated a desire/mandate to monetize, even at the expense of its users. If they thought they had a viable Google competitor they wouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth.
The fact that unpaid volunteers (mods) are handling the spam problem is an upside.
I disagree with that. It doesn't matter if Reddit doesn't want to be a search engine. People are already using it a search engine and they simply will never stop no matter what those ppl in Reddit are thinking. Better to embrace the search use case and make it search friendly.
>>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues.
Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.
When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I need to go manually into each review set and compare the quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically avoid shopping there for entire categories.
Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".
People have been astroturfing on reddit for a long time, the only reason it's not a cesspool is that reddit has a hardcore anti-marketing bent in a lot of subs and they'll aggressively out shills. I expect that GPT powered reddit bots will make the shills a lot harder to identify though.
It has always been a cesspool for a long time though. Only fit for consuming memes, cat pics, and financially motivated stunts like when Keanu Reeves was there the other day, using the social media account of the company for his upcoming film in a few weeks.
Each subreddit is controlled by a few essentially random people that likely have personal gain as one of their motivations.
If you think you aren't being advertised to on reddit just because the spam isn't as obvious as elsewhere, think again. The advertising there is more sophisticated than bots dropping links in comments.
There was a leak a while ago showed one of the moderators of wallstreetbets that was posting fake options gains, and it still gave him a massive following which he used to sell them a newsletter or something.
There are many subreddits where there will be a link in the sidebar to a monetized website affiliated with one of the mods.
And even 10 years ago, I remember at least 1 moderator of the programming subreddit somehow always had his blog posts highly voted and ending up on the front page, while any other submissions, especially ones that might counter his claims, would end up being stuck in the "spam filter". And if you messaged to have it unblocked, they'd only respond 1 day later, which means it would never show up on the front page due to the age factor of the ranking algorithm.
> "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit"
It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.
It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.
Because of a recent HN article on the subject, I was searching for "correlation of ACT scores and IQ", and the first 5 hits were the _same_ crappy 1500 word essay, where various section headers were programmatically changed to include exactly what I searched for.
How challenging would it be to just check common searches and generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including those words right in the page.
I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.
This is a major reason I think LLMs could help with SERPs - presumably it will be a lot harder to do SEO effectively because now it involves the model training barrier.
Model training is already trivial, just expensive. As LLM optimized HW appears the expense will drop. By 2030, I’d expect decent consumer hardware to be both faster and two orders of magnitude cheaper than what’s in use today for model training.
The industry term for it is "made for advertising". It is a constant battle because some people in adtech want to increase impressions at all costs, and some people want to block these sites from their systems. Guess which one wins out when executives see how much money it makes?
I used to think this too, until I tried Bing, with and without its new GPT chat, and if you think Google is rubbish, wait until you need to search MS dev documentation (very factual!) using Bing.
Truth is, it's all astroturfing all the way, all the web. Even reddit.
Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on search. My views are my own, etc.
I use Bing GPT and think it's better than Google for answering simple questions. Bing's search results may not be as good as Google's, but the information I need is usually buried inside SEO text. Bing's use of GPT to extract precise answers makes me feel impressed compared to Google.
Edit: Bing GPT is getting better, but it still makes mistakes sometimes. If anyone wants to stay updated on its development, you can follow the team on Twitter https://twitter.com/MParakhin.
I mean, no. It’s not just a rounding error, it’s literally ignoring the real numbers and pulling something out of your ass to try and sound snarky.
Very few people upvote stories around here so that number is actually very large. Considering the current top thing on the news feed is a magnitude lower points, that actually means a lot.
The two biggest problems I’ve seen develop with Google are that:
1. The quality of the search algorithm’s ability to sift through nonsense to find “the good stuff” seems to have gotten progressively worse, and that’s largely fueled by:
2. Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage where all the “good stuff” is now behind walled off gardens that Goggle doesn’t report on. For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense. Sure there are exceptions to that, but it’s clear what direction the tide is going.
The “good old days of the internet” where the best stuff was just a Google search away seem long gone.
I would add a "3." that Google has less incentive than they used to to fix it.
If they can supply enough relevant ads,"rich snippets", shopping widgets, or links to content they pulled from wikipedia (that keeps you surfing google-owned properties)...the organic search results don't matter.
Actually, if the organic results are low quality, then maybe you're more likely to use the content above. So the organic content optimal quality is just "better than Bing", but worse than the ads.
It's very different content though, isn't it? I've never used Discord, but it's mostly chat as far as I understand, and I always found chat somewhat difficult to use for referencing later. You'll have topics shifting, multiple topics going on at once, everything being more informal (and people spending less time on finding the solution instead of jumping on Discord).
I imagine it's harder to get useful content out of that vs forums where topics are pretty contained in threads and it's more formal so there's less noise and pretty much all posts are relevant to the topic.
Maybe if forums had fancy apps for local display and reply etc, and you could sync them between servers, and it could be kind of decentralized. Someone should build something like that and come up with a good name. It would be a useful net of news. Just a thought!
How would you even index something like Discord? It's mostly a chat app, where discussions are casual and often mixed togheter with others... It's not like a forum where each post is at least a somewhat coherent thought written out properly.
I would dislike that. Imagine if every single thing you say to your friends while being in a public space was recorded for everyone to see in the future... The point of a chat is to be ephemeral. Otherwise it would just be a forum with really bad and chaotic content.
Why not? The microphones wouldn't be everywhere, just in specific places where people like to go to socialize. Say a study room at Uni for example... imagine all the "good knowledge" we are missing by not recording every single word students say at Uni and making it publicly searchable. Right?
Even if you could always go to another Uni, it's still annoying and bad.
> For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense.
That's not my experience. I appreciate the rant as much as the amazing article by "experts". What bothers me is in case of anything which make money for someone and who pays Google addwords fees is presented prominently while the rant is buried.
Can you tell us what value you get out of rants from unqualified people? What actionable thing comes out of consuming such information? Because I can’t imagine why anyone would do that, since “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd and disagree even among themselves. Why not just look at another side but one that is still made by a qualified expert?
Someone "unqualified" may have a viewpoint that the "experts" have not considered or are unwilling to state publicly for various reasons. Of course what value you can derive from such an article depends on the value of "unqualified" here for which we only have gp's labels in this example. The only other mentioned difference is the format - a blog "rant" vs. something published in an established publication and I don't think that is enough to go on to discard the former.
> “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd
Except when they are. The community of so-called experts discarding what eventually turned out to be the truth because it goes against their thinking is hardly unheard of.
What value do you get? You're here reading and commenting on things from anonymous people on a web site that hasn't existed for a hundred years.
> still made by a qualified expert?
It is pretty common that an expert who disagrees with the consensus will not be qualified, because the principal requirement for getting qualified is that you agree with the consensus.
> Still, it is a bit interesting that this short and simple post is now one of the most upvoted things of all time on Hacker News
Is that some kind of easter egg, just expressing hope, or is this pointing to some other post, or am I missing something? This post has 33 points at the time I'm writing this and doesn't seem to be a repost (according to https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dkb.blog)?
From the example image half way through this article...
> "retool slack integration"
I've just googled this and the top hit was literally the instructions to set up the slack integration. Not a link to it, the actual instructions, although the link to the source page in the Retool docs was there. The rest of the hits were all hits in the Retool docs, except for the last result, which was someone making an HN comment making exactly my point on the last time this was discussed.
Google Search is broken for subjective searches. If you search "best xxx", Google will only return crap. "best xxx reddit" still gives relevant information.
Because the top results are complete crap, and obvious SEO spams in most cases. If Google just allowed me to blacklist some sites from my search results I could actually get good results.
Also maybe they shouldn't not rewrite my queries for me, I don't need them to helpfully remove 3 words out of 5 from my search.
Because it's not that the sites it finds just has a bad or wrong opinion. Instead the whole site itself is usually a complete fraud or generated nonsense and it should be Googles job to kinda filter those out or rank them down. It would even help a lot if they just added a button to allow me to ban certain domains from my results.
Here's what I get (with content blockers disabled) - similar to TFA. Three large ads, interestingly now labelled "Sponsored" rather than "Ad", and then the actual instructions.
... suggest the poster is, for some reason, not using an ad-blocker. Strange.
> What it actually means is that the amount of people using Reddit as a search engine is growing.
I don't understand this claim. If reddit search is Google search + the keyword reddit, then either people are finding non-reddit results that way, which seems reallyt weird and unlikely; or they're finding reddit results that way - meaning that they really are using reddit.
Didn’t anyone consider that google was extremely good at indexing websites, i mean normal websites (webs of interlinked hypertexts) but nowadays few people publish their content on regular websites but do so in the form of posts on reddit/instagram/youtube etc?
The article overlooks that "ads" goes beyond just ads on the search results page. Ads is the main problem, in the form of Google's business model which dissuades them from actually improving search result quality.
Spam/SEO/etc sites are very easy to detect - use the presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links, newsletter signup forms, etc as a negative ranking signal, and the problem will be resolved quickly. This can't be evaded, because the same techniques used to evade search engine detection would be abused by ad fraudsters.
The reason they don't do that is that those spam sites help Google in multiple ways - not only do they increase engagement with the search result page ads (the ads might actually be better than the "organic" but spammy results), but the ads/analytics on the spam sites are likely to be Google's which helps them too.
This would not be a problem with any search engine whose incentives are aligned with the users' (Kagi has a "non-commercial" feature for example that I suspect roughly implements the above).
In the German market for any product related query where you want a product comparison or test, you get results from 2 companies, which are in the business to place multiple very well SEO optimized pages on popular high quality websites (mostly newspapers).
These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines. And are constantly updated.
And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".
They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution. Well, it does not work.
And Product search for popular every day technical products has become unusable for years now.
Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let this go on for so long.
I'm totally with you on that, but who, besides us, knows about this and understands the inner workings?
Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations and tests.
They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in "the old times" (or still have today).
Google knows, has commented on it that it's fine "but you should be careful who you let publish on your domain" and they won't do anything about it. It was a somewhat big topic two or so years ago, and since then everyone has understood that you just need to buy in on media company sites to get ranked.
Hey, maybe it's Google's gift to media companies to allow them to monetize, because they surely are making money with it.
And the number of ordinary people that try to gas light me for stating that Google has failed in their most basic mission. It's been years, and unless you work in tech or marketing, you're apparently obvious to the situation, and still think of Google as one may have during the 90's.
A lot of people are using this term incorrectly lately. Gaslighting isn't simply telling someone that they are wrong about something. It's a specific, sustained, and intentional form of psychological abuse, most often found in a domestic setting. The origin is the play Gas Light and the plot revolves around a man trying to steal from his wife by making her think she is going insane.
I know what gaslighting is, and I am using the term correctly. When I tell people Google Search is not just bad, it is overt manipulation of your search to waste one's time sifting through prose nonsense because Google promote prose over facts, they often don't just disagree, they overtly over time try to change my mind, they can't let it lie, they have to change my thinking. And they use shallow, obvious insulting language, as they is all they know. It is the duration of time they spend on this mind changing aggression. That's gaslighting
For this to be gaslighting the person would have to believe google search is terrible, but be engaging in a concerted effort to convince you otherwise. That doesn't seem like the case?
How's about the person's personality is such that whatever it is they use to gaslight does not matter, they take the opposite stance just to be aggressive, as that is their personality. They probably have no opinion on the matter at all, just like to ride me with aggression. That is gaslighting too.
> Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".
Wouldn't this be expected for product comparison sites? How many winning vacuum cleaners can there possibly be? Is the expected state that the best white goods in any category are experiencing constant churn?
I mean, your criticism seems to be that this content is "very well created" but spam because you don't believe the recommendations are the result of some genuine comparison process. How could Google or really anyone know that, or decide if you're right/wrong? The data is all there, it seems useful, and on stern.de they even have a page that explains how they select products and rank them. In fact the Stern carousel doesn't even appear to be from the same source. The first two use the same icons and such but the third doesn't.
I think it is time to stop being nice and treating the entire search results page as ads for every single query. Even if you have an adblocker, the more nefarious ads are still there, the ones masquerading as useful articles that have been SEOed to the top.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadReddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses, which is largely the issue with Google ads outlined by author.
Still, the high-quality advice on Reddit that is authentic can be the most useful stuff on the internet.
Reddit is often my starting point for beginning research on purchasing decisions.
Although when buying a digital piano, I ended up finding dedicated boards like pianoworld to be better
EDIT
Ironically, I also find YouTube to be a great source of research, mostly because the cost to produce content is higher and I think it's somewhat harder to produce inauthentic content (at least to me so far for the things I am researching)
It was a weird moment seeing a reddit comment where someone referred to the site as "this app." Made me feel old.
They had great product-market fit early on, were boosted by YN, and inertia is a huge thing.
Which was kinda cool from user side but advertisers didn't like people taking piss on them in the comments so they undoed it
Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.
For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.
I would not characterise a community moulded according to the whims of a few anonymous individuals as high in trust.
Channels with higher quality selection (Financial Times) now have more of my time because I trust them more based on previous decisions they have made (to show me fewer low quality articles under click bait headlines).
YOU MUTED is the key here.
"Majority of subreddit didn't like it so it got downvoted" is somewhat democratic will of community.
You muted a user coz you don't want their content is personal choice.
Moderator choosing to do so on a whim is neither of those. You do need moderators coz some people won't behave but many times rules of subreddit are basically there so moderator can point to excuse on banning or removing whatever they don't like, not to ban something people don't want there.
They suppress subs or influence mods to suppress them for them.
There's a myriad of ways in which censorship to shape a narrative happens, and that narrative is as true as the narrative a few twitter users can set, if highlighted as "the majority opinion/the people have spoken" by mainstream media.
There's intervention via subterfuge, not an open contract you either adhere or not.
I've found hidden gems in free for all, no-karma, no-upvote forums such as 4chan. And you pay attention there, because people are not trying to sound smart.
That's implying that there is a single one-dimensional quality metric. The problem is when moderators of popular subreddits (for a particular niche) or those with the most obvious names for a particular topic start to enforcing their own personal biases in the discussion rather than sticking to keeping the discussion on-topic.
For example, on an r/news post a few years ago about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I replied to another comment where my content was basically the following: "If someone threatened to bomb your house, and they had a history of bombing houses, would you respond? What about after they destroyed your house?". That's almost exactly the wording I used (wish the comment hadn't been deleted so I could repost it exactly). This not only got me permanently banned from r/news, but also reported to the admins who censored the account. I suspect I pissed off a reddit admin or power user who followed me around reporting me, as shortly afterwards in a niche sub, I made another post discussing the continuum of force when it came to violent crime, quickly received several reports, and my account was permabanned from reddit. Note that both the content and tone of my posts there were similar to how I post on HN, which I think is generally appropriate.
This sequence of events bothered me a lot, because I think discussion of the use of force continuum and the ethics of preemptive or retributive force are highly relevant to today's world, and that the places where I continued (didn't start) discussion of them were the appropriate places for them. If this conversation can't happen on reddit, which it appears it can't, then we need another forum. It is clear to me today that reddit has hit it's eternal september. I can't bring myself to respond to the multitude of low effort posts that typically bombard you when you post something other than memeing.
I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political disagreement is not nearly enough.
And if you disagree, please post some examples.
As an aside, I was curious about the use of the word "wrongthink". It sounds like something Orwell would have come up with, but a search suggests that it's actually a neologism that is used mainly by the alt-right.
The Donald
It really didn't fetishise persecuting anyone. The warnings were arbitrary and capricious
No idea as to what you're referring to, but you must know many more examples throughout the world and history, no?
Which certain people are you being unfairly restrained from saying what certain things to?
Themes in that sub were that “the cure is worse than the disease” (it was) and that “we shouldn’t throw away our way of life for Covid” (we chose not to in hindsight).
If you are a member of subs like r/lockdownskepticism even today then you frequently get banned from other subs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covi...
Quote:
You're not going to get banned from a hobby sub for asking a question on something related to a product in that hobby.
Still haven't got a coherent answer out of anyone I asked, just insults
As a moderator of online communities I'd do the same in a heartbeat. Take that to Twitter or somewhere.
> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
Basically, Reddit's system is terrible.
This doesn’t match my experience of reading Reddit
I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits and randomly picked an account that posted a top meme
https://www.reddit.com/user/esberat/submitted/
The account has 8 million post karma and every single post it submits to a subreddit ends up on the front page of Reddit... without fail.
The account isn't a mod of any of those subs, but they're clearly using upvote manipulation to get every single one of their posts to the front page.
This is analogous to SEO, but rather more insidious and sneaky. You can spot SEO blogspam from a mile away. You don't know if a Reddit user is a real person, a bot, or a company's representative.
I'd wager you could do a lot to influence public opinion with just an upvote ring, without the botted accounts actually needing to post messages.
That was your first mistake, the defaults are cesspools full of karma farming bots. Nobody goes to those for advice.
I'm sure it happens a lot regardless, but the vast majority of content in those is still just from regular people. You can tell by the information posted as it tends to be more or less truthful and useful. Once it stops being that it'll be obvious enough. Like when Russian bots invade your average Ukraine related r/worldnews post.
That's the magic of Reddit, 4Chan and every other cesspool where any niche is only a slight URL change away from any other niche.
It's trivially easy to add niche subs 2, 3 and 4 to the list of places that you target.
2) You can tune these systems to be indistinguishable from a flesh and blood product fanboy at first glance. Not all spammers drop the same comments mentioning their product everywhere. You can dilute it with meaningless AI generated banter so the mod has to scroll through a couple pages and connect the dots before deciding whether you're a bot or just an idiot who happens to like some product.
Take r/mechanicalkeyboards for example, arguably a niche community. The enthusiasts there are very motivated to buy new things and are willing to pay quite a lot of money for them. Place a few of your bots there to promote your artisan keycaps and watch people pay top bucks for them.
Well, if "nobody" goes there, how are the bots able to farm karma? Who's giving them the views and upvotes?
I guarantee you anything that's the "default" is being visited by many, many casual visitors, people not "in the know", and people who don't recognize karma farming bots for what they are.
Also how the fuck "Building a hobby-shelter while camping in Kelowna" or some random funny pictures is "astroturfing"?
User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms. Post score is, and that influences karma, but not the other way around.
edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In that case, the misunderstanding was mine.
You have to warm up accounts with a few comments over a week before they start showing up.
Mods essentially have two variables to work with: account age and karma. Some subs do set minimum karma (I've stumbled upon some that wouldn't accept below 2k karma), but most just go by account age to prevent banned users from going around the ban.
And a tip for spotting karma farmers: just go to one of those big subs that accept screenshots of tweets. If the screenshot has engagements/timestamp cropped, click on a profile. Like 8 times out of 10 it's gonna be an older account that never posted before reposting one of the older popular submissions.
EDIT: Here's an example that took me like 20s to find: https://www.reddit.com/user/DepartureSimples/
Are you sure? How do you know this?
Source: Don't have a persistent reddit account, just made a new one for the few times I wanted to post something.
The prime reason I created a reddit account many moons ago was to get rid of all the default and behemoth subreddits from my feed, as they all looked like incredibly toxic and I´d have jumped through a window if I had to stay in them for more than 5 min. But these subreddits are all of reddit for many other people. And some user might only ever be looking at porn. And some others live in a diy bubbles.
That is to me the beauty of it, but also why it´s difficult to generalize trends. Low karma accounts getting shadowbanned ring nothing in my mind, but as there´s subs where you can only submit post titles ´cat´, there sure must be others were karma is everything.
> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
It's used more as protection from SEO spammers and this is just unfortunate side effect for new users.
Other problem is that karma is global which basically means user on popular subreddits will gain it quickly so any karma-based filtering is doomed to fail anyway
User karma has no impact on the default sort ranking[0]. The source code is available here (as of ~2018): https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/l...
> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.
Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.
0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.
1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.
Reddit does have promoted content, but it's only at the toplevel, if you use new.reddit (possibly the official client as well) and you don't have an adblocker you'll see them interspersed in feeds (on subreddits anyway, not sure e.g. /r/all has ads as I don't use it, and usually use the old theme anyway).
It also suffers quite a bit from astroturfing / content farms, but it's not always clear how the accounts are monetised, they're mostly visible as repost bots farming karma.
If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam.
Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with none of that shit
Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad service.
I m sorry, this is like news from a different universe.
There is an absolutely world-shattering report on how children have lost all freedom ovet the past 40 years. They used to roam the neighbourhood, then they were allowed to stay in one street, and today we dont let them out of backyard.
I have it on my PC, but can't find it in Google. Its impossible now
Without Google, I doubt I would have had any chance to reach a public, because nobody except search engines will give you the time of day when you're not already established.
There's many bad things about Google, but they truly allow many people a chance to get their voice out and many small businesses a chance to exist. That is brilliant.
Alternatively, if I search for something related to registering a company in UK, the top 3 results are scams. Does Google rate scammers higher because their website is fast? Is it too difficult for Google to identify the .gov domain and rank the result appropriately?
I am not claiming Google is evil, I am claiming Google is incompetent.
They have destroyed their own food supply or they failed to protect it, and that's why now their search results have gone to shit.
It seems the average Joe that used to run their own website or forum has gone bankrupt or is berried under SEO spam. Joe was replaced by Average Tom.
Average Tom doesn't even know how to make a website, instead he registers on 5 different platforms - Instagram, Ticktok, Etsy, whatever else is popular, and pushes their content there. No SEO spam, they get results. Yes, they lose freedom, have to deal with arbitrary rules, moderation, etc. They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.
Users have voted with their feet, and most of the world's content is no longer accessible to Google. Today's teenagers don't even search on Google to find a barber, they search on Instagram, and make a booking right there.
Google search is already dead inside, they just don't know it yet.
Still, Google is the reason millions of people can make a living, who would have been locked out of their industry by gate keepers if search engines didn't exist.
The standard static HTML website that can be found by Google is vastly superior to social media offerings. Creators and businesses can not sell their products through social media like Instagram, because you can not even put a link unless you purchase their spy ads. With crusty old WordPress you can create great online publications and articles as long as you want - no popular social media offers that.
The general public use the internet exclusively for social media, and at most a couple of web sites for work or other functions. That is because the general public has an insatiable appetite for mindless entertainment. That doesn't mean the traditional web has failed, it's still there and Google is still king on that hill. The social media hordes are the same people who would be glued in front of the TV in the past. Social media attention and likes are close to worthless in the end for creators and businesses. I'd rather have 100 customers brought by Google and a traditional web site, than 1 000 000 Instagram likes from people looking at my post for 0.03 seconds while scrolling. When people are looking for important information or want to make a purchase online, they go by Google almost all of the time, and almost never by social media.
> They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.
Google is not taking anything from anybody. You can index your content with them for free, and they will send visitors to your site. Social media will just use your content to get eyeballs for their own ads.
The average business owner treats their traditional website as an annoying hassle, when it could be a window into the world and massively increase their sales and customer service. They love social media, because Facebook and Instagram feeds them like and heart icons.
IMO, the only way this can ever be truly fixed is to have a 1 to 1 mapping between a person and their online personality. An account and their posts need to actually have a weight. It need to actually matter what an account's history is across the web.
I think this is what blockchain is supposed to solve. It is not fast and efficient enough for all the small monetary transactions. But surely is good enough for blogs or things like that?
I have a Reddit account that is old with a few thousand of the old "link karma," and received several 4-figure offers for the account for this purpose.
Easy self-hosted solutions, like IPFS or Gemini?
If you get rid of either of those mechanisms, you make it a lot harder to astroturf.
HN would be the same way without dang.
No company is going to risk posting without revealing that they are behind the post if doing so would result in - to make it extreme - jail time for the poster AND company leadership.
Ultimately, this is not really a technical problem but a social or legal one. As long as we let people get away with fraud - and let's be honest, astroturfing is fraud - then enterprising individuals will find ways around whatever technical means we put in place.
Uh, it has been like this for years. I personally know a friend who was hired to post fake comments on reddit 5 years ago. It could have been longer and I just don't know.
I guess the whole thing works very well because people still have "doubt" if it happened today.
Maybe starting a decade ago, when I'd tell people about Reddit, I'd switched to telling them that the front page already appeared dominated by marketers and manipulators, but that most of the random subreddits were more genuine. Though even some subs at the time, such as for groups of interest, were run by marketers or in service of marketers. (Many subs seemed moderated by the eclectic mix of kinds of people you could find to do that thankless task for free. But some were obviously effectively working for brands, especially when groups of interest were built around buying stuff.)
The source of information is important which is just one of the many reasons why sites like reddit are poorly suited to be used as a reference.
What gives?
The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.
The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable.
Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search.
After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.
Well startpage has the same results as google, but i stopped using it for reasons I forgot.
What made you chose Kagi?
That was it.
And the first time I saw a reported bug in the search results getting serious attention and a fix I was sold.
That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like. I imagine that's dependent on a lot of factors, from the context of why the user is searching, their demographic, and their biases. When I search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" I want straight facts - ingredients and bullet point steps and nothing else. My mother would want some background about the recipe, where it's from, and what makes it different. You can't get that from the search term alone. You need a lot more context.
It's exactly what the promise of 'personalized search' based on tracking everyone around the internet told us it would give us but it doesn't seem to work very well.
Maybe we can't agree on what people want, but what I'm sure we can agree on is what people don't want. I don't recall anyone ever saying "I wish there were more ads in the content I'm consuming".
So we could at least start with that.
At first it was click-through rate, but that turned SEO into sites into clickbait to get high click scores. Then they switched to time spent on the site, and as a consequence we get recipes that are filled with 2h of prose above them just so people stay longer on the site.
Baking is a science, not art... so recipes calling for a cup of flour and two teaspoons of butter are useless to me, while recipes with ingredients in grams are useless to many american grandmas.
On the other hand, a pinterest page with a photo and a large overlay asking me to register is useless to both of us.
And once you start measuring some things by weight, you quickly realize that most things are easier to measure out by weight than volume (particularly sticky ingredients like honey), so you start wanting to measure everything that isn't a tiny amount by weight.
I convert all of the recipes I collect to gram measurements for this reason.
Site offers extra paid content or services, or takes donations? Rank up. Ads? Neutral or rank down based on type of ads. Affiliate links? Rank way down.
Those are more and more the same person - especially when it comes to online ventures.
But this does not sustain the chocolate factory.
They're already pushing out content to replace it with more fucking ads!
There is legitimately nothing good about them. At all.
But I don't want to "consume content", I want to "get information". Most "content creators" don't provide any info. Or at best there is some info there but you have to watch an hour worth of video for the 20 useful seconds.
People who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to create regardless of financial reward probably aren't producing anything of value. That basically excludes every for profit website out there that would be "killed" by less monetization. Killing them off is a good thing.
If you put the cart (making money) before the horse (creating value) then you are not really a productive member of society. Takers are like irresponsible children, they take without any awareness of the ramifications their behavior has on society.
This kind of attitude is similar to colonialism, an attitude representative of most of commercial enterprises today. Givers give value knowing that when they give, they receive, without any need to unnaturally focus on the end result.
If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker. All major browsers enable you to use one. Even on mobile, vast majority of ads are easily defeated with a simple DNS-based blocking. I only see a handful of ads on Tik Tok and mobile Twitter. They're still mostly bad.
That misses the entire point: Google search results will still be manipulated to push those low quality results higher because even if you don't see the ads enough people do that investing in SEO is worth for those sites.
As long as there are any ads, the incentives stay the same. You're saying an internet completely free of monetary incentives would be better. I doubt that's true but it really doesn't matter, because it won't be happening.
So ‘How to unclog a toilet’ is always going to get SEO optimized spam. However, most topics don’t get that many views making them less viable for this business model.
That assumption is worth reconsidering. It may be that fewer ads would just be more expensive to run and would work out similarly revenue-wise in the long run. The value of lots of ads may be diversification and smoothing out revenue, not increasing net.
- to gather compressed information quickly
- to navigate the web
The first point is best served by sources that I like and trust, often authoritative to some degree. If they already have a good search (like MDN or Wikipedia) I will often use that directly or go via DDG: !mdn keyords..., !wiki keywords... If not, I type the name of the website as a keyword in front (like reddit...)
The second is really more about finding specific types of websites. For example John Smith's blog that I don't remember etc.
What I'm saying is that to fix the web, we need more sites that can act as the first point above. Whether they are wikis or not is more of a practical consideration. The point is that they don't suck and that there's not enough of them IMO.
I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.
That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.
But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.
That'd be nice, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that where Google has already applied AI, it has seemed to make things worse, not better.
AI AdBlock is going to kill whatever is left of Google within the year.
AI content spam is absolutely going to kill social media and search results, but AI adblock will be worse to Google's bottom line.
It's coming, and it's going to be brutal.
But the bit of social media where people are listening to celebrities, getting their news, sharing memes, discussing common interests? It might get flooded with bots so convincing as to be indistinguishable from normal users.
Then folks will learn not to trust it just because it is a computer once everyone is announced dead, and everyone will have to make claims that they aren't.
Which metrics can proxy user satisfaction without turning into clickbait-land?
Edit: To the friendly people downvoting me: Try for yourself and you'll be surprised how much good and informative content you can find on YouTube.
Yeah... i prefer text. It's even wors with tech stuff.... do they expect me to retype the commands/code from the video?!
We've been conditioned into thinking text is better because we've all been through schooling, which consists of text books and a person yelling in front of a blackboard. If you let kids watch high quality YouTube videos instead, they would get a much better education.
Videos aren't dense enough, information-wise. I can't just put them up on a screen as a reference, and they require too much interaction as I have to back up, play, back up, play, back up, etc. in order to use the information being relayed.
If I only have a video telling me something, it's better than nothing, but it's going to slow me down, reduce my understanding, and will inevitably leave out detail that is important to me.
Not that everything on YouTube is crap, just most things. Sometimes seeing a video of someone doing something is the only way I can figure it out. There are many particularly useful videos of how to use complicated test and measurement gear. And tying knots. But the video isn't efficient enough for me to start there.
This is what I'm trying to say: Sometimes you don't have better things to do, because you need the knowledge that is in the video. If you're doing something important and somebody comes up to offer to show you a much better way of doing the task, does this have to be the response? "I have better things to do".
Some YouTube videos are worth the time to watch, and I would argue that for recipes you'll spend your time better starting with videos vs search engines. Unless it's something you already know how to make and just need a reminder of the measurements of the recipe.
Talking about cooking, you have the BBQ channels on YouTube, with people showing you how to best cut and prepare different cuts of meat. If you don't personally know somebody to show you these techniques you'd be lost with only text content and no video.
I think it's easier for people to rage at an annoying YouTube video when trying to find information, than to rage at worthless SEO spam. But the solution is the same: close the tab and go back. It doesn't take many seconds to notice if a YouTube presenter is an idiot.
Sifting videos is tedious and time-consuming. Sifting text is much more efficient.
I have, and I really dislike it a lot. I think video is one of the worst formats to convey a recipe in.
I have seen some that write the recipe in the video description, and that's fine. But not enough do it to make YouTube a place I go to get recipes.
I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers, but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy for juniors to do either.
They have enough information when yiu clock back and select a different result. And this hasnt killed SEO spam.
Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get page after page of blank SERPs.
[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...
[1] https://searchengineland.com/googles-more-personalized-resul...
[1] https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
[2] https://github.com/arosh?tab=repositories
I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.
Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US based and there was problems using every credit or debit card. The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google Adwords.
We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads were not approved because they were in the crypto space where indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and also work for Web3 projects.
Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.
BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google back in 2013 in the same vein [1].
[1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...
Could you please elaborate on your question? Since our issue was supposely solved filling all the requirements there is no difference about the different spaces. This is bad execution by the book.
And to be clear, I think large parts of Reddit is of no interest to government agencies.
You know that is impossible to prove or disprove so that argument is worthless.
Individual topic sub Reddit’s are okay if they are strict about keeping on topic.
Anything front page is insanity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
Which is funny as builtin search is so utter shit you pretty much need to use google to find anything
Imagine you're one of the few remaining sources of human content on the Internet, and you look at the terrible cat and mouse game google plays forever with spam, you don't really envy it. So imagine telling the world hey, reddit is the new google, everyone come do your searches (and spam) here, gl mods.
The fact that unpaid volunteers (mods) are handling the spam problem is an upside.
Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues.
Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.
When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I need to go manually into each review set and compare the quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically avoid shopping there for entire categories.
Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".
Each subreddit is controlled by a few essentially random people that likely have personal gain as one of their motivations.
If you think you aren't being advertised to on reddit just because the spam isn't as obvious as elsewhere, think again. The advertising there is more sophisticated than bots dropping links in comments.
There was a leak a while ago showed one of the moderators of wallstreetbets that was posting fake options gains, and it still gave him a massive following which he used to sell them a newsletter or something.
There are many subreddits where there will be a link in the sidebar to a monetized website affiliated with one of the mods.
And even 10 years ago, I remember at least 1 moderator of the programming subreddit somehow always had his blog posts highly voted and ending up on the front page, while any other submissions, especially ones that might counter his claims, would end up being stuck in the "spam filter". And if you messaged to have it unblocked, they'd only respond 1 day later, which means it would never show up on the front page due to the age factor of the ranking algorithm.
It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.
It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.
I would love something like swurl [1] but just with those three!
[1] https://swurl.com/
If you have an amazing recipe you want to keep control of, trade secret is the way. And then it can’t very well be posted to the internet.
How challenging would it be to just check common searches and generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including those words right in the page.
I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.
Truth is, it's all astroturfing all the way, all the web. Even reddit.
Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on search. My views are my own, etc.
Edit: Bing GPT is getting better, but it still makes mistakes sometimes. If anyone wants to stay updated on its development, you can follow the team on Twitter https://twitter.com/MParakhin.
How you could get the number “about 1000” from either of those is beyond me.
Whatever, it's a rounding error.
Very few people upvote stories around here so that number is actually very large. Considering the current top thing on the news feed is a magnitude lower points, that actually means a lot.
1. The quality of the search algorithm’s ability to sift through nonsense to find “the good stuff” seems to have gotten progressively worse, and that’s largely fueled by:
2. Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage where all the “good stuff” is now behind walled off gardens that Goggle doesn’t report on. For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense. Sure there are exceptions to that, but it’s clear what direction the tide is going.
The “good old days of the internet” where the best stuff was just a Google search away seem long gone.
If they can supply enough relevant ads,"rich snippets", shopping widgets, or links to content they pulled from wikipedia (that keeps you surfing google-owned properties)...the organic search results don't matter.
Actually, if the organic results are low quality, then maybe you're more likely to use the content above. So the organic content optimal quality is just "better than Bing", but worse than the ads.
We need something better than Discord for community discussions and support.
Reddit is indexable.
At least the Nim team has a Matrix bridge I guess, so it’s a solvable problem somewhat. But I find joining yet another Discord group just obnoxious.
I long for the async-only text forums of yore. I’m getting old, aren’t I.
I imagine it's harder to get useful content out of that vs forums where topics are pretty contained in threads and it's more formal so there's less noise and pretty much all posts are relevant to the topic.
Maybe if forums had fancy apps for local display and reply etc, and you could sync them between servers, and it could be kind of decentralized. Someone should build something like that and come up with a good name. It would be a useful net of news. Just a thought!
Even if you could always go to another Uni, it's still annoying and bad.
That's not my experience. I appreciate the rant as much as the amazing article by "experts". What bothers me is in case of anything which make money for someone and who pays Google addwords fees is presented prominently while the rant is buried.
> “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd
Except when they are. The community of so-called experts discarding what eventually turned out to be the truth because it goes against their thinking is hardly unheard of.
> still made by a qualified expert?
It is pretty common that an expert who disagrees with the consensus will not be qualified, because the principal requirement for getting qualified is that you agree with the consensus.
Have you tried other search engines because you might be surprised that the problem is more to do with Google than the internet.
I am using some subreddits very frequently (like r/hackernews) but boy has it become obvious how many bots there really are.
I think though, that we will not see a startup solving this any time soon, that will not succumb to bots itself.
I'm breaking my head since January (as a hobby) to create some ai driven semantic search index, but the problem starts with trust.
Is that some kind of easter egg, just expressing hope, or is this pointing to some other post, or am I missing something? This post has 33 points at the time I'm writing this and doesn't seem to be a repost (according to https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dkb.blog)?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
>Long live Google + “site:reddit.com”.
> "retool slack integration"
I've just googled this and the top hit was literally the instructions to set up the slack integration. Not a link to it, the actual instructions, although the link to the source page in the Retool docs was there. The rest of the hits were all hits in the Retool docs, except for the last result, which was someone making an HN comment making exactly my point on the last time this was discussed.
Google search isn't broken or dying.
"best xxx reddit" that's google working as intended, you searched for a topic on reddit.
I swear with the proliferation of LLMs most people have completely forgotten what a "search" in a search engine means.
Because the top results are complete crap, and obvious SEO spams in most cases. If Google just allowed me to blacklist some sites from my search results I could actually get good results.
Also maybe they shouldn't not rewrite my queries for me, I don't need them to helpfully remove 3 words out of 5 from my search.
https://imgur.com/a/2OKnAtb
Actually, I begin to wonder if maybe Google might be switching to some "high-quality" mode when it detects that you are a "technical" user?
Seems like a bit of competition was all Google needed to be good again.
... and ...
> sites filled with affiliate links and ads.
... suggest the poster is, for some reason, not using an ad-blocker. Strange.
> What it actually means is that the amount of people using Reddit as a search engine is growing.
I don't understand this claim. If reddit search is Google search + the keyword reddit, then either people are finding non-reddit results that way, which seems reallyt weird and unlikely; or they're finding reddit results that way - meaning that they really are using reddit.
That might explain a lot…
OK guys - what are you all using instead?
Spam/SEO/etc sites are very easy to detect - use the presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links, newsletter signup forms, etc as a negative ranking signal, and the problem will be resolved quickly. This can't be evaded, because the same techniques used to evade search engine detection would be abused by ad fraudsters.
The reason they don't do that is that those spam sites help Google in multiple ways - not only do they increase engagement with the search result page ads (the ads might actually be better than the "organic" but spammy results), but the ads/analytics on the spam sites are likely to be Google's which helps them too.
This would not be a problem with any search engine whose incentives are aligned with the users' (Kagi has a "non-commercial" feature for example that I suspect roughly implements the above).
i.e.: https://www.welt.de/vergleich/stabstaubsauger/ https://www.krone.at/vergleich/staubsauger-test/ https://www.stern.de/vergleich/staubsauger/
These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines. And are constantly updated.
And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".
They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution. Well, it does not work.
And Product search for popular every day technical products has become unusable for years now.
Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let this go on for so long.
Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations and tests.
They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in "the old times" (or still have today).
I'm not sure how to solve this, to be honest.
Hey, maybe it's Google's gift to media companies to allow them to monetize, because they surely are making money with it.
We have different definitions of zero I think...
Wouldn't this be expected for product comparison sites? How many winning vacuum cleaners can there possibly be? Is the expected state that the best white goods in any category are experiencing constant churn?
I mean, your criticism seems to be that this content is "very well created" but spam because you don't believe the recommendations are the result of some genuine comparison process. How could Google or really anyone know that, or decide if you're right/wrong? The data is all there, it seems useful, and on stern.de they even have a page that explains how they select products and rank them. In fact the Stern carousel doesn't even appear to be from the same source. The first two use the same icons and such but the third doesn't.
They fed up with people using it without login, and only the websites paying. They just want monthly payment from user too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719