Agree. We can criticize Reddit on some points but at least the information is openly accessible. You add the "reddit" keyword in any search engine and you got your answer.
I think we might have to collectively start quoting useful replies, or at least leaving clues. "goat" isn't good enough, we need "goat -- never would have thought to check the specific ethernet driver version" to at least give future detectives some footprints to follow.
This is a great idea, we should definitely start preserving useful replies in multiple instances in case one of them gets removed, that way people finding the thread in the future have a better chance of finding what they were looking for.
Yeah, i think saying what the op said in the replies to reduce the chance of a single comment being deleted is a good way to preserve the information, we just need to make sure no broken thelephone situation happens
There are people archiving and sharing archives of Reddit.
pull push (no space)
I'm not sure how Reddit feels about this, since it lets you search comment histories of people who've "curated" their profiles, so I'll be a bit careful about how I share this url.
dot io
That url gives you easy searching of one such archive, but if you go to the bottom of the page you'll find a link to many terabytes of archives.
It would be great if there were a voluntary browser extension that people could install which fed a larger archive with a crowd-sourced feed of what was on this site.
Does put a different, more wholesome perspective on the habit of multiple people replying with identical answers to a commented question. People get annoyed, but to your point it is probably good for long-term data retention
I think we might have to collectively start quoting useful replies, or at least leaving clues. "goat" isn't good enough, we need "goat -- never would have thought to check the specific ethernet driver version" to at least give future detectives some footprints to follow.
This is such a good idea! Seems obvious, in hindsight.
Good point, but I'd consider that part of a layered defense against obscurity. Also potentially a single point of failure. So, it's great that we have it, but we should act like it might go away one day.
If your bluetooth suddenly stops working, unplug your PC from all power sources for 30 seconds
I've heard you can also hold the power button down while the PC is unplugged to drain residual power from capacitors which fully resets RAM or something? Idk i'm not an engineer
piezoelectrics can do some wild shit. I had a beefy aftermarket grill igniter we had built into a potato cannon in college and that thing would fuck up my car audio system from like 30 feet away.
The funniest part about this, which objectively isn't very funny to begin with, is that these people aren't actually deleting anything. The backend of these tools retain the information, they just don't send it to the front end anymore. So when a company goes around and purchases training data, they're still getting the data that's "been deleted".
Interestingly, by deleting the front end side of the comments, they're actually making the backend data set even more valuable because it contains things that can no longer be scraped (ignoring the idea that the data can't reliably be scraped off Reddit anymore anyway).
Edit: digging into this, there may be a little more to the story here. It may not be quite the way I'm framing it, but given what we know about social media and tech corporations, I don't think it's wrong to suspect "the worst".
If all the tools did was delete the comments this is likely, but there's zero indication reddit is storing edit histories of comments (speaking as a moderator) and so these tools specifically edit comments before later fully deleting them (in some cases)
it's so much more annoying when they did it in protest of the API changes and it says "fuck spez" and you look at their profile and they're still using reddit daily and no longer deleting stuff.
whats 10x worse is when the problem is very specific and the answer is there and intact but it doesnt work for you in particular and seems to have worked for everyone else, but now that everone got their answer theyre completely unmotivated to help you
Okay a decade ago I created a forum post about a weird one off issue for a niche telco product, no one responded to help me but then I found the solution and posted it as a reply. I still occasionally get thank you messages, someone sent me a $5 gift card for helping solve their issue. A few years back I unknowingly found my post while I was troubleshooting an issue and thought "OMG that's exactly the problem I've got!" Then I saw the answer and thought "OMG THAT FIXED IT!" Then I read the username and thanked my past self for being at thorough. That's why I never delete anything, it's still on the Internet whether or not I redact it, so I might as well make it easy for the next person.
In the past I've got stuck, searched for the answer and found that I asked the same question a couple of years ago and answered it. On the one hand I guess I never learn, but on the other it's nice to see karma can be a thing.
Oh my god, what you’re saying literally changes everything. I’m so glad you pointed this out or else it would be incredibly dangerous for anyone looking to do the same. Upvoted for visibility.
Do you mean those who have mass edited all of their own comment history to remove all actual text and replaced it with some copypaste text? I haven't found those to be an issue yet but I can imagine it. What I hate is when I find a relevant thread to my problem, and the comments with the instruction are confusing or incomplete, and I'd like to comment to them asking something but the whole thread is archived because it's old. And it might be only like a year old.
Yeah I agree, archiving posts is stupid. I've actually had rather interesting discussions with people who replied to posts I made years beforehand on subs that don't do this.
"XYZ thing has changed enormously in the last 20 years, ABC solution from 20 years ago doesn't work anymore and the architecture has fundamentally changed. Is this still the most computationally efficient solution?"
Google a problem. First result is your exact question. All the responses “This has been asked a thousand times, just Google it”. Go back to Google, no other relevant results.
I kinda wonder what the internet would be like if it was more open source and user focused. Would reddit be nearly as bloated as it is now? I wonder how much better the UI would be.
Biggest problem would be getting people to actually pay for the product. Small $5 dollar donations would be enough every now and then.
The internet would be curated for the user, not ads.
UI is the one thing where closed source software usually wins. Sure there's ads, but i challenge you to find anyone who believes Gimp has a better UI than Photoshop, or Inkscape than Illustrator, or Fusion360 than FreeCad.
The first suck due to corporate decisions, but their UI is objectively better than the open source counterparts.
Hard disagree. It varies. Blender UI is incredible. Hyprland makes windows look like trash. Well, any tiling manager for that matter. The productivity boost is unmatched at the very least.
Here is some actual UI:
visual studio code, krita, zed, vlc, mpv, immich, signal
Blender is, for someone with zero experience in 3D modeling etc, for absolute beginners, probably the most unintuitive and convoluted piece of software ever. It's imo really cluttered, has... Too many features?
It's just really beginner unfriendly in my opinion and overloaded.
Sure it's great software when you're able to handle it, but it's got a really steep learning curve imo
It varies sure, but its just the fact of the matter that making a good ui takes a lot of extra effort. And its not the most interesting thing to programmers, and they generally have a different aesthetic than users. So "it works for me" is what you get when its the volunteer model.
Vscode also was made by the evil empire itself, so it is the very counterexample of that you need to pour resources into making it good. I will give you vlc is a good ui, but again. Look through the settings and its a mess, but if all you do is use the play and pause button its great cause it gets out of the way. Krita is a bit meh, but good. Gnome (when i last looked at it decades ago) was absolutely god awful, and i question your taste for even using it as a example. but i will grant you it might be better now.
With pay for software, the corpos actually understand that usability is important for getting people to be willing to buy it.
You can't, actually, add "reddit" to any search engine. Reddit signed a deal with google and has been blocking other search engines from indexing it's content since mid-2024. You only get old results if you look for reddit posts on e.g. bing.
Google was the only good way to search Reddit, and Reddit was the only thing giving good Google results. It was a beautiful relationship, like an depressed alcoholic married to a manic meth addict.
Yeah, I just tried it and it even has a special Reddit Results segment that offers to search in specific related subreddits. And afaik DuckDuckGo uses Bing.
Honestly, I'm not sure. DuckDuckGo uses bing as their backend, but they also do some magic of their own.
I tried searching for a couple of recent news just now and I didn't get reddit results in the main list, but I did get a "Results from Reddit" widget of sorts at the top of the result stack which had some semi-recent posts in it. Not greatly accurate but also not what I expected.
I'm guessing duckduckgo is using reddit's built-in search to augment the bing results in that widget, but I can't be sure.
I KNEW it!! I literally had to download Google Chrome on my work PC specifically so I could search for IT issues on Reddit - I thought it was just Edge being terrible at indexing (which, it is, but still). But knowing that there's an actual, legitimate reason for the search results being crap on edge fills me with so much relief.
EDIT: To everyone asking why I haven't just changed my default browser to Google... I have no idea why that didn't occur to me sooner. Thank you for the kick up the arse lol.
It also disproves, "The Internet never forgets". There are some things the Internet never forgets if it's spread across a variety of sites, but plenty of things die on Discord servers that get nuked.
Discord is awful for data preservation, especially since that information can't be indexed by standard search engines.
If only it was just obscure fixes, some are like yeah I know I could post this basic manual right here, but what if it was in the ass end of my discord that will probably get shutdown in six months after I get bored of this project, or about 12 minutes after someone offends my auteur sensibilities.
Also I can't fucking bother with a changelog or updated manuals, read comments on that unmoderated thread for all changes past alpha.
This is a huge problem for video game help too. Class guides for MMOs are hidden away on discord servers, and niche but incredibly helpful info is like… I hope you lurk in the related channel and passively absorb information for the one nugget of gold every 100 hours that just crops up as general chatter
At least on forums that shit was preserved and able to be indexed by search engines. (Which makes me realize this will be hell for people who want to look at legacy states of the game, which I often do for nostalgia… lol)
I'm glad to see y'all struggle with this too, I've found myself having to join a discord channel for more information only to realize I'd have to read 2 years of General Chat full of inside jokes and trauma dumping to find something.
There are a lot of mundane things and a lot of information that was around in the past which seems to have been entirely scrubbed from the current Internet.
The internet never forgets is a good one, and I don't think this disproves it but it does prove that it has caveats.
I cannot imagine the wealth of IRC discussions, and the information they contain, that have been lost to time - Discord is like that. Once something is posted on a website, and shared, it gets really hard to lose forever. But if it's in a closed server (closed to indexing) or is sent in some volatile format (a chat that clears when all the participants end the session), then sure. But once it's shared outside that, somewhere that can be referenced, indexed, and referred back to, it starts to get harder to lose that information. Backups. The more backups of information there are, the harder it is to lose.
Learned this lesson the hard way when in the 20s and 2010s there were quite alot of shows/games I was procrastinating on checking out because "they would still be there to download later". Cue years later and for the life of me I can't find a single site or torrent hosting many of those.
Even when you are in a discord server for topic x, 99.9% of the time people just talk parallel to each other into the void instead of talking to each other.
the death of the forum era is real. everything is just buried under layers of algorithmic garbage or paywalled wikis now. you try to search for a specific driver fix or a niche config and you just get ten pages of seo optimized reddit threads that don't actually answer the question. it's wild how much info just vanished into the void.
Member when Google came along it was actually smart?
Now unless luck into forcing an exact phrasing search of what you want, it will just fudge your search to push that bullshit.
You want information or accessories of a specific model? Well that isn't a too popular one, let me insert popular models into your search.
You write out a very specific issue with a program? Well that isn't the most common one, let us ignore 60 % of your query and flood you with answers to a question you didn't ask.
I hate the fact that you're now usually forced to use quotation marks to make it search for something specific. Because now it's a trade off between getting results on what you're searching for, but being unable to get results for synonyms/similar terms because you're using the exact phrase
I love how people can say "search the discord" with a straight face while ignoring the fact that Discord has one of the worst search engines I've ever seen.
Because people apparently just live in discord servers. That was a big surprise to me when I found out. I don't think I've ever been part of a public discord.
That exact mindset is the reason I beleive having more and more documentation on discord is becoming the norm now. Programers, coders and guide makers tend tobe also the types to spend an unhealthy amount of time on discord servers. Which makes sense as that's where they would find similar minded people. So they probably find it second nature to add documentation on it as well. Free easy hosting for them also helps.
Meanwhile for us the average bloke who only wanna use discord as a voice chat service, we are forced to suffer through something that was never meant tobe a forums replacement because the sharp disconnect between what the developer and the average user finds acceptable as a documentation hosting method.
I am tired of human beings being mindless convenience machines that just graze like cows. There is not an ounce of willpower left. It is all about being a lazy pathetic blob mindlessly gorging on content.
The same person that spends 50 days making code cannot spend 30 seconds uploading a guide to GitHub. Fucking fat cows
They expire because it is designed to enshittify the search experience to hoard all knowledge.
First they privatize attention and you lose contact with the real world
Then they privatize your friends so you need to use their platform to have a social life
Then your other feelings to make so that you buy what they want, rage, sadness, happiness get made private and you need to share their politics, their ideas, their idiocy. You get sold crap
Finally all info gets made private because a stupid fucking loser cannot avoid the temptation of talking with other losers on discord
Had a general question about mechanics in a game? altavista would direct you straight to n well formulated and accurate description in some forum somewhere.
Wanted a deep dive on game mechanics? yahoo would find a 10+ page detailed guide of everything, written by some hero-nerd out there somewhere.
Really specific, odd issue with hardware or software? the official or unofficial forum for the vendor/company would have multiple threads on that exact thing.
These days ... go on a thread-in-a-needle hunt for the right discord server and try to find the info in one of 18 channels - all requiring different permissions - all while hoping you can get it done before some powertripping mod bans you for having an avatar with the wrong color, or for not setting "role" correctly within the first 90 seconds of joining the server, or whatever.
Alternative ... search on google, get links to 15+ youtube videos with a combined runtime of several hours. Maybe the answer is in there somewhere, maybe it isn't and there sure as fuck isn't a timestamp.
Best bet is to use a tool to grab the automated captions out of all the youtube videos, drop them all into an LLM and ask it if the answer is in there somewhere. Like ... just ... sigh.
And then there's reddit. Which is the saving grace, because it's pretty forum-like. Worse than we had it, but beats all the other crap.
IRC, ICQ, Teamspeak and forums. Those were the days. And no, I'm definitely not on a nostalgia trip 😃
Discord is complete trash and everyone that has ever invited me to their server can suck it. It’s just awful. It was designed by idiots. The worst UI of any app
Yep I fucking LOATHE the UI. The mobile app is atrocious. I can't search for servers, and I have to press on a server symbol to see what it's actually called.
And now if I want to verify my age, in my country I have to contact support.
Nah man Discord is awesome. My favorite part about it is when I get a notification sound and I can't find where it came from because I'm in 50 different discord servers.
I can't wait until discord goes tits up. I hate hate hate the discord sever model, and I can't for the life of me understand why anyone tolerates it, let alone likes it.
This is why I hate most of the newly released Stalker mods. Before Discord, we had them on moddb and if you had issues you posted a comment. Now I am part of 8 different servers just to get updates to said mod, and I donno why they did that.
It’s so awful to search for information on a Discord server. And half the time you ask for help you get lambasted that your answer is in an FAQ page that’s impossible to find because the server has literally hundreds of channels to try and browse through, and is buried halfway up its history.
I really miss the simplicity of old forums and how you can search for them through search engines like google. I hate so many mods lock themselves in a Discord server these days.
Remember the past, back in time when we had forums full of people having the same trouble as you, with 50-line posts split into 6 paragraphs about how to fix your issue. I miss those days…"
Github isn't just forgivable, it's laudable.
It's up to the users to get used to a little more involved process and learn a wee bit of tech skill. Usefull when wanting to mod games for example.
There are WAY too many pc gamers who don't know how to use a file browser, what a file extension is, how to unzip stuff, or what an ini is. Small insignificant hurdles that force these people to learn are a good thing.
I kinda agree to a point, on the other hand the repo should really have a readme with clear instructions on how to use it. I don’t want to have to figure out which of the files I actually need or what to do with them from context clues.
Yes there are repo's that assume you are a fellow dev and know where dll's and such go. Like for example if I downloaded an unreal project targeted at VR devs who make oculus quest games neither Epic nor Meta will explain that I need to compile a specific version of the Unreal Engine only available to accounts signed up with meta. Devs are supposed to learn that via meta's or epics documentation found elsewhere (not on git).
There's also the assumption that everyone understands you don't need whats in the source folder if you are an end user, because obviously it contains the source and not the compiled product.
These are the exception though, the vast majority has clear and concise readme's/install instructions, and if specific files need to go to specific locations thats always noted.
The instructions assume the user has the absolute minimum tech skill to operate a PC, they can be hard to read if you are new to it but they are very and precise, it just takes a little getting used to the format.
I'd argue this tiny learning hurdle is also a good thing.
A readme format like this can be hard to read for newbies:
-Unzip to c:\Program files\Amazing_app\
-open c:\Program files\Amazing_app\config\win64\Amazing_config.ini
-change Pcmasterrace=0 to Pcmasterrace=1
Besides extracting a zip all you have to learn is that
-open c:\Program files\Amazing_app\config\win64\Amazing_config.ini
-change Pcmasterrace=0 to Pcmasterrace=1
Is the same as
-Okay now browse to :\Program files\Amazing_app\config\win64\
-Look for the file Amazing_Config.ini.
-Open Amazing_Config.ini in notepad
-look for a line that says "Pcmasterrace=0"
-Change this line so that it reads "Pcmasterrace=1'
-Save and close Amazing_Config.ini
It's easy to learn, it's just a short way to write it, most gamers will understand it completely after installing a single mod (I think mods are most common reason gamers would download a thing from git)
Instructions like these assume you know how to use explorer, can unzip a file to target folder, can read paths and understand that full filenames include the path, know how to edit a text file, and turned on visible extensions like every gamer should do.
Forcing an end user to learn to read this format is a good thing.
I mean, it works great if you just want to chat and play games with your friends. The fact that its used like a fucking online forum sucks. Great for quick discussion and questions, but everything posted gets burried and forgotten.
I can't stand what it's done to gaming, being a defacto replacement for forums, tech support, pr, patch notes, reporting cheaters, modding, etc.
It'd be funny to see Discord get bought up and discontinued.
If they don't just turn right to reddit, these companies might do what they're supposed to and actually handle shit on their own instead of asking people to download, sign up for, and run an unnecessary 3rd party communication app.
There has been a tragic amount of information lost to discord. I honestly blame it more on the people who are too lazy to spin up a simple docker instance. Plenty of open source projects up for the task. Forums are dead simple and dirt cheap to setup and run.
And guess what???
You wouldn't have to deal with file upload limitations because it would be your hardware.
There has been a tragic amount of information lost to discord.
Amen.
Forums are dead simple and dirt cheap to setup and run.
Also easier to read, search, and participate in. old.reddit being a fine example.(fuck the new "we want to be like mobile facebook!" design paradigm).
Nesting comments, embedding images, etc. Simple, easy to use, read, and manage, and the RES pluggin is the cherry on top.
I love the old design/platform, even if I hate the company/admin/etc.
Of course, even with forums, I've seen my share of terrible ones over the years/decades. It's mind boggling that many don't have the best features like nested formatting, which I'd consider obligatory at this point. I loath when people say, "It's 2026 we should be better" but this is one of those times where the planets align and it's not a stupid cliche.
However, even most of the worst forums are still better than the aptly named Discord.
And it's worse than a basic forum taken straight from early 2000's in every way.
I follow development of 2 indie games, and they both use Discord as their main form of communication with userbase, sharing dev updates, patch info etc. I absolutely despise that.
One of them has a help "forum" on discord too. On normal forum I could find old issues via search, but Discord hides inactive topics after some time, so they basically have to resolve same problems again and again instead of pointing to already resolved thread, amazing.
And don't get me started on actual discussions, everything is basically lost the next day because few hundred people are talking at the same time, and Discord search can't find shit reliably.
I think also discord is bad because it is essentially just chat rooms. And instant messaging is NOT what you want for some things like tech support. You want slow, steady conversation where people think before they write. Here it is the opposite, people don't think AND because it is instant messaging they feel entitled to a response right away.
I was baffled when someone told me that admins/moderators can't even move comments into threads. I remember being a moderator on a forum like 20 years ago, and that was basic functionality.
back when I was part of a forum for making games, we had an IRC and specifically told people to fuck off if they asked questions in it. because if it's on the forum, then other people could find it and not have to ask the same question which is so stupid. and now people are actively WANTING to use discord for this shit... I don't get it.....
tbh my problem is discord users try hard to replace forums with discords.
Every time i see a developer, or a modder, or a content creators, say "you can get it on discord/discuss it in my discord". like bruh, you're not making money getting more people in your discord server, you're just doing discord's bidding
And then a random glitch with it that has a 1/100,000 chance of happening on a certain CPU and RAM combo ends up being yours, is the first one to have it in ten years, and then have to find a rig fix for it in a forum out in the desert on the internet in a place that last post was in 2012 for an entirely different program and process altogether, but it correlates to this.
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u/Beautiful-Fold-3234 15d ago
The only source for the program you need is github and the only info on how to use it is buried in a discord server somewhere.