This is the biggest benefit reddit provided to the user base. Google search has been lackluster and appending the word reddit allowed me to see plenty of good anecdotal and informative focused discussions without fluffing up the content for SEO.
Yes but easier to navigate. It’s obviously the red queen hypothesis of a never ending game between marketers and users looking for unadulterated information.
I actually started going directly to the Reddit app and finding the relevant subreddit and searching within it - hope Reddit realizes the gold mine it’s sitting on but I doubt it.
I've found reddit first party search to be pretty lack luster. More often than not, I'd have to fallback to Googling "site:reddit.com/r/subreddit-of-interest <terms>" and while better, that's about a 50/50 a lot of the time.
Reddit does this thing where it advertises other threads on the same page of whatever you're viewing. So sometimes the promoted content was the thing actually relevant to the search and not the current thread. And this would be fine except it's not static/deterministic. The promoted content usually changes between when it's indexed and when it's accessed at a later time - so the thing that made it relevant to the search often isn't there anymore. So you have to either view the cached paged if available, go back and try different results, or refine your search.
I think data harvesting for AI is the real reason Twitter and Reddit want to limit access. Even I was thinking how easy it would be to mine both sites. It sucks because that’s the end of the (quasi) open web.
The data collection for use with training AI is causing an increasing number of smaller hobbyist websites to shut down or become member-only.
It's not a lot of sites (yet), but it's making the web get smaller, and worse, it's affecting the most useful and interesting parts of the web more than the commercial stuff.
I used to think I might be the only one who does this and was beginning to wonder if I am overly reliant on reddit for my search results. Looks like I was not the only one.
I use duck duck go, and haven’t had to resort to that.
Anyway, I can’t think of any searches where appending stuff like that wouldn’t be universally beneficial (or detrimental), so I don’t see the personalization angle.
They just use Bing user the hood and the results are awful. I use some browsers that default to Bing/DuckDuckGo and every time I can’t find something I switch to Google and find the answer right away.
Bing seems to surface a lot more unrelated or spam my websites at the top of the results.
What searches are you seeing that with? I default to DDG and when I can't find something I'll try Google, but usually struggle there too. Google also has ads (for people without ad block...) so "unrelated spam at the top" is baked in.
I see people say this all the time, can you give me an example of your search queries? I never had to search reddit specific stuff but I do add 'github' all the time.
Whenever my partner and I watch a movie we enjoyed we'll search up threads for it on Reddit because there's always people discussing recommendations of similar films, or at least movies that people who enjoyed the other film liked as well, to add to our backlog.
Works especially great for horror movies, for us at least. I don't always quite understand why I may have vibed so well with a particular horror film since they can be so hit-or-miss between individuals, but other people who are more genre-savvy will be in the comments to explain it to me and have some great recommendations :)
I've been searching for a new camera to buy. Rather than reading general reviews from blogs where I don't know if they're sponsored or not through a Google search, I was searching "Fujifilm x-h2s review reddit" or "best camera under $2000 reddit" on Google instead. I've found a lot of the time, it can be hard to tell if a blog post from a Google search has actually used the product, or is just keyword spamming and hoping for a referral fee. Especially if I'm looking to buy something in an area I'm not familiar with and don't know the trusted review sites yet. Granted this can still happen on Reddit but I assume it is rarer.
I've also found that if I search for something directly on Reddit, I get all sorts of results. Some related, some tangential. And a lot of the time there's porn or NSFW content mixed in.
If I see a referral link in any kind of advisory/review article, I immediately assume the whole website is a low-effort, no-ethics attempt at making money, and not much else. There are very few exceptions to that rule, where it's fairly obvious that the site is doing fairly extensive testing or research and not just spamming with chatGPT-like platitutes.
Whenever I need an opinion about a product or a service or comparing 2 similar things reddit is the only place I can consistently get real people with honest takes. Sometimes there are paid comments but it's usually pretty obvious and the experience is still miles better than a SEO fluff affiliate marketing blog that makes up 99% of Google searches.
Unless you happen to already know of a specialized forum for a topic, it increasingly feels like Reddit and Wikipedia are the only parts of the internet that are still valuable; everything else is content farms or SEO spam.
Even then I'm finding that Wikipedia's quality has dropped dramatically in recent years. As they become more zealous about only including "encyclopedic information", I'm increasingly finding pages that have had all of their useful information sucked out of them.
I feel like everything has turned into the blogospam that recipe blogs are known for. I searched the other day for how to use github's personal access tokens. The first 4 results are all unhelpful blogspam. Pages and pages of text talking about personal access tokens. No details on how to use it. Not a single snippet of command line, nothing.
Ugh, I can see it now: How to use virtual environments with jupyter lab. Before going into the details of this tutorial, let me tell you about the first time I ever used a computer. My father was working as a travelling shoe salesmen at the time...
If the content is there but is not accessible (findable) then it may as well not be there. The Internet is content farms and SEO spam strictly because that's what can be found and accessed by the overwhelming majority of people. A non-indexed blog or site, or one that is sufficiently low on the results list, may as well not exist. It's like farting when you're home alone. You farted but nobody but you gets to enjoy the intestinal perfume.
I don't do reddit much, so unless the results in google are inaccessible while the blackout is ongoing, this won't affect google's ability to serve the same results as it did last week.
Three dots next to the search result in Google, than in the "About this result" window there is a little "Cached" link right at the bottom. That "Cached" link is however missing for a lot of results.
Ouch a couple of people didn't like my straightforward observation.
The thing is google is still working just as it was ... the fact the results are dead atm is beside the point.
A person visiting old bookmarks to reddits that are unavailable at the moment could say the same, their bookmarks aren't working. I wouldn't author an article about bookmarks not working as such ...
The point of the article is that many people rely on Reddit being a major source in Google results (i.e., appending "reddit" to a search) because of how terrible Google's "organic" results have become with ad and SEO spam.
Yes, Google is working as normal, but "normal" is terrible and posts on Reddit made Google results less terrible. If Google's results are so bad that I feel the need to limit the results to Reddit, then it's probably a problem with Google and the type of sites that it has incentivized over the years (i.e., spam).
It misses the point that many people don't use google, those search results from different search engines would similarly be impacted.
You should see the basic search page google hands me to use and has been that way the last 7 or so years. Then again, I used to be a very heavy user of google, multiple switches or operators for each advanced search, a habit from the times when that's all I did all day long. Before they made it hard for me, I bypassed their BS limit of f'all they eased in instead of the 100 results a page if one wanted and I crawled though multiple search pages and a few dozen results to land credible information to exclude echoes.
I know google results have dropped off the deep end, but framing reddit going dark as being of significant impact to search results is not honest. Yes, the result these people want is now inaccessible - it's not a new thing, results that are inaccessible are not unexpected. It's no different to the many deep searches I've done in the past and found what might have been useful results, were actually private unless one agrees to sell up their tracking data or the site was behind a pay wall.
I'd agree, Google and the like incentivised spam by shrugging for a start and then realising clutter gets more clicks and ads served.
I understand a lot of people are annoyed that many useful reddits are dark at the moment, a honest conversation would acknowledge that, rather than handing out prizes to those who the most upset about the protest.
> I know google results have dropped off the deep end, but framing reddit going dark as being of significant impact to search results is not honest. Yes, the result these people want is now inaccessible - it's not a new thing, results that are inaccessible are not unexpected. It's no different to the many deep searches I've done in the past and found what might have been useful results, were actually private unless one agrees to sell up their tracking data or the site was behind a pay wall.
In your opinion it is not honest, and many people disagree with you. This is an example of the “dosis sola facit venenum” or the dose makes the poison. Some random forum post you came across in a deep search that no longer can be accessed is barely noticed. The size of reddit and how weighted it has become to google users is why google search results are now poisoned. If you want to understand the issue, you have to step out of your own specific uses and look at how a large percent of people use google searches.
If a grocery store loses access to a couple products a month, shoppers would barely notice. If they lose access to 20% of products that are normally on the shelves, that is significant and will effect customer behavior.
If people want to insist it really is a google issue ... sadly no matter how much they would like to think there's getting a prize for being right ... they are simply wrong. This could be a bookmarks issue, or a duckduckgo issue if they were so to be believed.
I know people have the last couple or so years been focusing results using reddit, but it changes little - results are there, just for the moment those results are dark.
If they want technical stuff they might soon learn to use inurl:stackexchange ...
Whether or not I have struck the few no longer available / exists pages was actually quite irrelevant, it was just stated to point out dead pages are not unexpected.
>If people want to insist it really is a google issue ... sadly no matter how much they would like to think there's getting a prize for being right ... they are simply wrong. This could be a bookmarks issue, or a duckduckgo issue if they were so to be believed.
If the grocery store is relying on one supply chain for a large percent of their products, and they lose access to that supply chain, it is the grocers' issue. Saying "well technically it is a supply issue and could happen to any business" is missing the point when shoppers are displeased with what is available. Saying it is really reddit's fault is missing the point that Google SEOed itself into a position where they did not have a robust supply chain to relevant results people were searching for and now their results shelves are empty.
Your example isn't so great as it is. Getting closer would be saying a grocery store has fruit and vegies, but one prominent supplier known for prepackaged bite sized stuff the masses are used to consuming, has serious supply issues, however the store still has fruit and vegies, and in amongst what they have to offer, is some quality products - actually some are that much better, it's just people have either not noticed or shunned those products for not looking right.
However even that modified example, still doesn't really reflect on the problem the average user will insist what a great trick it was to use reddit to try and focus results. The average user unknowingly ignore a lot of other areas on the web that they could be using to focus what they're looking for. I guess that's one of the things A.I. will be able to do, something similar to what the old google search algorithm used to work where it seemed like google could work out of the number of search terms which word was a focus word (often a broad term to cover the field the rest might be common in.)
Like I stated in the last reply, a site going dark, it's not a google problem. Google's search has sucked for a few years ... and I know for all the hard to find or failed things I couldn't find since whenever, including reddit would have had zero effect.
I've been doing a bit of this as well. Unfortunately, it seems that Google hides the 'Cached' link on mobile devices (at least in Safari) unless you 'request' the desktop version of the search results page. I don't know why they do this; it's extremely obnoxious. But then again, this kind of obtuse nonsense is par for the course these days.
There is a torrent with a large compressed dataset with reddit's text, I remember it was ~2TB. I can't find the url right now because it was discussed in a reddit thread.
Yeah but the point is that the subreddit blackout means you can't actually view the threads. The best you can do is hope that Google Cache has a readable version of it. And the longer the blackout goes on, the more likely it is that the results will be purged from the SERPs anyway, since they're now just an error page instead of relevant content.
I've been using web archive to open reddit links. It's a bit of a hassle, but it's often less of a hassle than trying to find that information somewhere else.
Monopolization effects from social networks is so powerful. I really wish decentralization would take off again, but it's a vicious cycle.
Search incentives SEO hacking. SEO hacking causes searches engines to stick to weigh reputation scores more. Reputation scores favor large social media platforms that have strong moderation practices. Quora, reddit, and other platforms become more valuable than SEO hacked blog spam.
This has to be one of these most useless sites on the Internet and it blows my mind how frequently the content from this site is exposed via Google search. Now that I think about it, I think I should probably just block it on my local DNS server.
I hate how easy it is to get confused about what content on the page is even related to the original question. I have to get into my “Quora mindset” where I’m constantly double-checking that I’m not reading the response to a different random question injected into the original page.
I gave up on Quora! I don't even bother looking at all anymore. If Google gave me the ability to block certain sites from my search results, this would be at the top of my list.
Quora is often self-promotion now. The template I think of when replying to your comment is:
Great point you bring up on how useless <website> is. As the CEO of <random company>, this is a problem we have put a lot of effort into addressing. You may consider the following as a solution:
…
Yandex, I just use for 'spicier' content...they can have my sordid thoughts.
Amazing how many .com companies are on there with a lot of Russian sub-content.
Wave was the way my group of friends watched LOST. Even though it ran like dogshit on the Atom-powered netbooks we were using at the time. What a great product that they just... tossed. It was IRC with benefits.
I'm glad that reddit not being profitable up until right now is being highlighted very well. So much for raising money from autocracies & then whining about dissent
It cannot charge subs anything since they don't pay them anything. They can try to forcefully make them go public or change mods (I kinda see how it can go bad and turn into r/anarchychess) but thats kinda it.
So, genuine question, how much of Reddit is archived? If there’s a lot on the internet archive, say, could that now be bundled up similar to how the Usenet stuff is on Google groups?
"These archives are purely text and include no media. They are json items scraped from the Reddit API and include all information for every post and comment 2005-06 to 2023-03."
Well i am not talking about impulsive “make repo private” type of action but rather the team that maintains large open source projects to take coordinated action in moving, removing or updating the license of their projects.
Forking code is not an issue - i can fork half of github and it wont mean much without maintenance.
> i can fork half of github and it wont mean much without maintenance
Well....yeah? open source doesn't mean you don't have to do anything to make it work. Many times I've forked a project, cleaned up maintenance issues so it ran on my instance, and then did a pull request so the original author could incorporate the update.
While we are blessed with many turn-key projects that require little more installation effort than following detailed instructions, FOSS is supposed to be a community effort, not something falling on the shoulders of a tiny maintenance team.
> No one wants their work stolen to train ais and then monetised for not even a mention in exchange.
I feel (or perhaps hope) the spirit of FOSS precludes the notion of "stealing." Besides, open source is no stranger to being monetized for the bare minimum mention required by whatever license.
What are you on about? A significant portion of open source software is GPL licensed.
Taking GPL'd code and redistributing it without making the source available IS stealing. It is community code. If you want to use it, you have to give back. Otherwise pick something with a BSD or MIT license.
> Taking GPL'd code and redistributing it without making the source available IS
... copyright infringement. Against which you might want to lawyer up and sue in court, if you feel litigious (and have have deep pockets to pay for the expenses, or someone else does it for you). But is nowhere as clear cut as stealing, like you mentioned.
That's putting the cart before the horse. FSF's goal with GPL was to make all software free. Removing or sealing off projects is antithetical to that. That's what I'm getting at.
I should have been more clear, my point wasn't really on the semantics (and inexactitude) of "stealing." I can agree with your usage in this context.
Unfortunately LLMs directly undercut the work of the people and companies who produced the training material. Releasing a bunch of art, writing, or code into the world for others to use is starting to lead to AI models that threaten to take work away from the original producers.
I dont think I have ever got a quality search result by appending reddit.
Cant for the life of me figure out how HN users find useful results there.
chatgpt has improved search for me by orders of magnitude. Especially since google has started to border on useless.
Bur searching reddit? Meh.
Not for technical stuff at least.
Niche high quality subs may point me in the right direction.
Like r/ponds for example. Wonderful little sub.
r/doggroomers is absolute shit mostly full of shaming dog owner pics and toxic comments.
r/programming was great 8 years ago. Now I doubt any human over 18 posts there.
Honestly if reddit never comes back again I think the interwebs have gained a level in quality as it is just a toxic echo chamber for young people who think they are some form of superiour liberals.
Depends on the product. For Game Reviews, Steam reviews are better.
The problem with reddit is that just because someone recommends a product, doesn't mean they actually bought/experienced it. That being said it is a great way to find a product's defects, as people usually post to reddit.
I'm not entirely sure what that implies. It's in the consumer's best interest to check reviews of products when selecting something to buy. How else would you wade through competing options?
Furthermore, 4chan has no search feature so I don't know how that's even equivalent.
Reddit is one of the few places where you can find an honest (on average) discussion between common people about a variety of topics. This is very unique if you understand that the world is a complex beast and yes/no or authoritative answers may not be the best way to learn about it. Having perspective of many people that you can parse and apply to your own world model is very powerful, be it politics, local events or headphone reviews, personal experiences, relationships.
I would like to see an example of that. I dont remember a single time I found anything useful on reddit other than info copy pasted from some website that had actually usable UX.
I was thinking about using specialized earplugs in my daily life to isolate myself from the street and neighbour noise.
Found reviews of a couple of products and then chatted up someone who said a couple of days earlier was gonna test some of them.
It feels like a community of people who care about stuff.
I think you're just bashing it for the sake of it.
I've recently been looking into getting a UTV, and reddit discussions are great for subjective decisions like this. A few threads that I found helpful are below:
Frankly, I'm stunned you haven't had a single time where something useful came from a reddit discussion; sure, topical forums are usually better for very specific knowledge but for many cases it's great. And obviously you need to be able to sift through the bullshit but we deal with that already daily with Google results.
The pattern that I run into a lot is that I'll find a reddit post which reproduces useful information found on a personal blog/website, but I would've had no prayer finding that blog in the first place thanks to SEO spam. Reddit's UI is not very good, which is why I don't spend my day surfing Reddit, but that's completely besides the point. The problem people are trying to solve is discoverability and trustworthiness: I no longer trust google's search results, and while I know that astroturfing happens on reddit, I trust the stated opinions of nerds with 100,000s of posts about niche hobbyist topics a lot more than the pages of SEO-optimized garbage that google spits out.
I append reddit for my gaming related queries. If you are looking for game suggestions or genre-specific games or queries related to them and want to avoid SEO spam then appending reddit is the only genuine option.
Game wikis are much better than this. Game reddits are incredible echo chambers where completely new players ask questions that should be typed into google and not an internet forum.
141 comments
[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadRefute the opinion, or add something of value, instead of simply sneering.
Reddit does this thing where it advertises other threads on the same page of whatever you're viewing. So sometimes the promoted content was the thing actually relevant to the search and not the current thread. And this would be fine except it's not static/deterministic. The promoted content usually changes between when it's indexed and when it's accessed at a later time - so the thing that made it relevant to the search often isn't there anymore. So you have to either view the cached paged if available, go back and try different results, or refine your search.
They do now and the first thing they want to do is to sell their content to AI labs for millions/year.
It's kinda on us to ensure that it's only in the interregnum that we have the morbid and dysfunctional symptoms.
It's not a lot of sites (yet), but it's making the web get smaller, and worse, it's affecting the most useful and interesting parts of the web more than the commercial stuff.
Reddit
GitHub
Stackoverflow
Even Hacker News
Quality goes way way up depending on topic.
I kinda wish Google would apply some more personalized ML to my searches
Anyway, I can’t think of any searches where appending stuff like that wouldn’t be universally beneficial (or detrimental), so I don’t see the personalization angle.
Bing seems to surface a lot more unrelated or spam my websites at the top of the results.
Every time I stumble in to google I am appalled at how bad the UX is.
Think about what OP said here for a second:
>every time I can’t find something I switch to Google and find the answer right away
If you assume both Google and Bing to be similarly good but not the same, then you would expect this to happen.
Say there are two sets of websites, the ones that Bing finds (B+) and some that it doesn't (B-).
The same would hold for Google, there would be G+ and G-.
Now if you search on Bing first, and find what you need, you stop. This is a result in B+.
If you don't find it, your result is in B-. Then you search in Google and maybe get a G+ result, since they have different sets of websites they find.
You might also not find it (G-) but in the end both search engines aren't that bad, so this rarely happens.
Now you might find the same result if you start on Google instead, and aren't lucky in the first go, and then try Bing.
TIL[0]:
> Layer 8 is a term used to refer to user or political layer on top of the 7-layer OSI model of computer networking.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8
Works especially great for horror movies, for us at least. I don't always quite understand why I may have vibed so well with a particular horror film since they can be so hit-or-miss between individuals, but other people who are more genre-savvy will be in the comments to explain it to me and have some great recommendations :)
I've also found that if I search for something directly on Reddit, I get all sorts of results. Some related, some tangential. And a lot of the time there's porn or NSFW content mixed in.
Even then I'm finding that Wikipedia's quality has dropped dramatically in recent years. As they become more zealous about only including "encyclopedic information", I'm increasingly finding pages that have had all of their useful information sucked out of them.
No! The rest of the content is still there, loads of it. Google simple has stopped caring, no it is not "too hard", they just don't care enough.
Case in point, Google even aids in crappy results, by aliasing your search terms, preventing precision, putting monetization above all else.
Google sucks. SEO/spam is not worse, Google is, they know it, they do not care, because so far it has no affected profit negatively.
1 https://github.com/dessant/web-archives
The thing is google is still working just as it was ... the fact the results are dead atm is beside the point.
A person visiting old bookmarks to reddits that are unavailable at the moment could say the same, their bookmarks aren't working. I wouldn't author an article about bookmarks not working as such ...
Yes, Google is working as normal, but "normal" is terrible and posts on Reddit made Google results less terrible. If Google's results are so bad that I feel the need to limit the results to Reddit, then it's probably a problem with Google and the type of sites that it has incentivized over the years (i.e., spam).
You should see the basic search page google hands me to use and has been that way the last 7 or so years. Then again, I used to be a very heavy user of google, multiple switches or operators for each advanced search, a habit from the times when that's all I did all day long. Before they made it hard for me, I bypassed their BS limit of f'all they eased in instead of the 100 results a page if one wanted and I crawled though multiple search pages and a few dozen results to land credible information to exclude echoes.
I know google results have dropped off the deep end, but framing reddit going dark as being of significant impact to search results is not honest. Yes, the result these people want is now inaccessible - it's not a new thing, results that are inaccessible are not unexpected. It's no different to the many deep searches I've done in the past and found what might have been useful results, were actually private unless one agrees to sell up their tracking data or the site was behind a pay wall.
I'd agree, Google and the like incentivised spam by shrugging for a start and then realising clutter gets more clicks and ads served.
I understand a lot of people are annoyed that many useful reddits are dark at the moment, a honest conversation would acknowledge that, rather than handing out prizes to those who the most upset about the protest.
In your opinion it is not honest, and many people disagree with you. This is an example of the “dosis sola facit venenum” or the dose makes the poison. Some random forum post you came across in a deep search that no longer can be accessed is barely noticed. The size of reddit and how weighted it has become to google users is why google search results are now poisoned. If you want to understand the issue, you have to step out of your own specific uses and look at how a large percent of people use google searches.
If a grocery store loses access to a couple products a month, shoppers would barely notice. If they lose access to 20% of products that are normally on the shelves, that is significant and will effect customer behavior.
I know people have the last couple or so years been focusing results using reddit, but it changes little - results are there, just for the moment those results are dark.
If they want technical stuff they might soon learn to use inurl:stackexchange ...
Whether or not I have struck the few no longer available / exists pages was actually quite irrelevant, it was just stated to point out dead pages are not unexpected.
Edit typo.
If the grocery store is relying on one supply chain for a large percent of their products, and they lose access to that supply chain, it is the grocers' issue. Saying "well technically it is a supply issue and could happen to any business" is missing the point when shoppers are displeased with what is available. Saying it is really reddit's fault is missing the point that Google SEOed itself into a position where they did not have a robust supply chain to relevant results people were searching for and now their results shelves are empty.
However even that modified example, still doesn't really reflect on the problem the average user will insist what a great trick it was to use reddit to try and focus results. The average user unknowingly ignore a lot of other areas on the web that they could be using to focus what they're looking for. I guess that's one of the things A.I. will be able to do, something similar to what the old google search algorithm used to work where it seemed like google could work out of the number of search terms which word was a focus word (often a broad term to cover the field the rest might be common in.)
Like I stated in the last reply, a site going dark, it's not a google problem. Google's search has sucked for a few years ... and I know for all the hard to find or failed things I couldn't find since whenever, including reddit would have had zero effect.
It looks like Reddit is going to let them resume, but with access restricted to Reddit moderators:
https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin...
Other sites, like archive.org and Google, scrape and archive Reddit pages, but coverage is spotty at best.
Search incentives SEO hacking. SEO hacking causes searches engines to stick to weigh reputation scores more. Reputation scores favor large social media platforms that have strong moderation practices. Quora, reddit, and other platforms become more valuable than SEO hacked blog spam.
This has to be one of these most useless sites on the Internet and it blows my mind how frequently the content from this site is exposed via Google search. Now that I think about it, I think I should probably just block it on my local DNS server.
uBlacklist?
At this point I don't think it's ignorance, it's malice: A deliberate dark-pattern to drive "engagement" by layering in unrelated crap.
Great point you bring up on how useless <website> is. As the CEO of <random company>, this is a problem we have put a lot of effort into addressing. You may consider the following as a solution: …
But also they can use it for LLM training and put it into the Google index.
Man, those were the days.
What are the chances of Reddit adding red tape for removing subreddits?
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/histor...
I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects or sealing them off.
Similarly, companies will limit access to ensure monetisation.
No one wants their work stolen to train ais and then monetised for not even a mention in exchange.
The dead internet is even more likely to happen.
This will just lead to forks (if your project was popular).
Forking code is not an issue - i can fork half of github and it wont mean much without maintenance.
Well....yeah? open source doesn't mean you don't have to do anything to make it work. Many times I've forked a project, cleaned up maintenance issues so it ran on my instance, and then did a pull request so the original author could incorporate the update.
While we are blessed with many turn-key projects that require little more installation effort than following detailed instructions, FOSS is supposed to be a community effort, not something falling on the shoulders of a tiny maintenance team.
I feel (or perhaps hope) the spirit of FOSS precludes the notion of "stealing." Besides, open source is no stranger to being monetized for the bare minimum mention required by whatever license.
Taking GPL'd code and redistributing it without making the source available IS stealing. It is community code. If you want to use it, you have to give back. Otherwise pick something with a BSD or MIT license.
... copyright infringement. Against which you might want to lawyer up and sue in court, if you feel litigious (and have have deep pockets to pay for the expenses, or someone else does it for you). But is nowhere as clear cut as stealing, like you mentioned.
I should have been more clear, my point wasn't really on the semantics (and inexactitude) of "stealing." I can agree with your usage in this context.
It's also that google is getting worse. It has been slowly declining in quality for a very long time.
chatgpt has improved search for me by orders of magnitude. Especially since google has started to border on useless.
Bur searching reddit? Meh. Not for technical stuff at least.
Niche high quality subs may point me in the right direction. Like r/ponds for example. Wonderful little sub.
r/doggroomers is absolute shit mostly full of shaming dog owner pics and toxic comments.
r/programming was great 8 years ago. Now I doubt any human over 18 posts there.
Honestly if reddit never comes back again I think the interwebs have gained a level in quality as it is just a toxic echo chamber for young people who think they are some form of superiour liberals.
Good riddance.
The problem with reddit is that just because someone recommends a product, doesn't mean they actually bought/experienced it. That being said it is a great way to find a product's defects, as people usually post to reddit.
If you need to actively find a review for some item you want to buy it's probably not that great of an item imho.
Furthermore, 4chan has no search feature so I don't know how that's even equivalent.
/g/ has "an audiophile general" for example that comes with recommended places to buy, tierlists and reviews.
I realized that looking for reviews like this I would look for reviews in my local language, which you probably can't.
Found reviews of a couple of products and then chatted up someone who said a couple of days earlier was gonna test some of them. It feels like a community of people who care about stuff.
I think you're just bashing it for the sake of it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/UTV/comments/q9mqyo/looking_to_buy_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/UTV/comments/13li1iq/is_3500_lb_eno...
Frankly, I'm stunned you haven't had a single time where something useful came from a reddit discussion; sure, topical forums are usually better for very specific knowledge but for many cases it's great. And obviously you need to be able to sift through the bullshit but we deal with that already daily with Google results.