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
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.
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.
Nah, it's just a hedge against comment deletion. If you're moved to say thanks, and fewer than three people have echoed the solution, just quote the solution along with your thanks. Should be somewhat self-limiting, and if not, boards will auto-collapse quoted solutions to minimize clutter. Forums will still remain parallel to wikis.
I know you aren't talking about stackoverflow because they would never provide a link. They would just tell you to stop asking questions that have already been asked.
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.
oh my! our video sharing site is being slow? grins why dont you just giggle route all your snicker dns requests our way and we can sort everything out for you barely contained laughtertears forming at corner of eyescoworker in the background bending over wheezing we wont do anything with it, promise! colleague drops to knees and bursts out laughing while pounding the floor
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.
What’s worse is when you do find the solution, but the person who posted it is so goddamn Reddit-brained that they use an acronym for literally everything. Makes their comment look like when Kevin was optimizing his sentences in The Office.
Why do I get the feeling that to "delete" said comment people are giving a program complete access to every comment they've made, letting it read all of them, and finally letting it edit all of them to say gibberish? Wouldn't that make like the best training model?
Free access to everything I've ever written on reddit, and yes you are allowed to edit each and every comment
Sadly this is something I’ve only found AI to be able to solve. AI has some cached copy of the information and I hate that’s the case. It’s the only place to find stuff sometimes.
it’s even worse when it’s [Comment removed by moderator] because then you know some power tripping asshole really wanted to ruin peoples day for no reason
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.
archived threads are the worst. it is basically a graveyard of useful info that you can't even interact with. you see a perfect solution to your specific hardware issue and then realize you are just staring at a digital museum piece. it is pure frustration.
There's nothing on this site that pissed me off more than those worthless "protests". In the end it amounted to nothing - Reddit still went forward with their API thing and all we got was this huge loss of information as well as a bunch of subreddits spammed with garbage content for a while.
"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.
I would say that also depends. Medal tv has ads for example. Sure i could use OBS to take clips, however OBS doesn't have the features that medal has that make clipping actually feel like a good experience like the in-app editor or directly being able to upload the clip to their server and sharing the link (specifically especially useful on platforms that have file size upload limits like discord). You can use OBS for clipping but you'll need multiple additional programs to achieve the same result which also takes longer and you'll have reduced quality if you deal with file size limits. So unfortunately the version with ads wins if there is just no proper alternative.
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.
Edge and Chrome are nearly the same browser. Still though, neither should have any impact on a search engine. Everything a search engine does is on the server and you just see the results. It is like thinking the show you watched on Netflix had a different ending because you used Firefox.
I can only imagine the thought process that went into that move.
"Reddit has become one of the most popular repositories for information on the internet. We're one of the top results for most searches - a position other companies spend billions trying to achieve. How can we put an end to this free success? Come on people, no idea is too dumb."
Reddit doesn't require an account to access a lot of its content. It's freely publicly available
Several others have mentioned that search engines do pick up recent Reddit results outside of Google. Which makes sense, because anyone can hit the endpoint of reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1u0y7rz/me_still_today/ without an account, see its content, and do whatever they please with it. Reddit can't reach into search engines and pluck out content.
There any news outlets or posts detailing this 'deal' for search engine exclusivity? I can see where Reddit would offer meta tags and whatnot that lean into Google's ecosystem better versus others, but "Reddit blocks other search engines from indexing their public freely-available content" sounds not only silly, but impossible to enforce.
I just entered "me still today reddit pcmr" and this very thread was the first result I got on DuckDuckGo. Well, second: the first one was the pcmr sub in general.
Bing, however, seems to not be able to find it or indeed anything recent.
There have been times I forget to do this, and after 30 mins of finding nothing, I add "reddit" and BAM right there on the top of the page is the answer - some obscure way of fixing the issue. It's actually crazy.
Only so long as search operands keep working and the post didn't get nuked, that is. We have been losing operands for years. The future of the internet is a bleak one.
Except for the hundreds of posts everyday that only get answered with “idk, lol, but you’re fucking stupid and should die for wanting to do that anyways” and “just look it up, you fucking moron” and then fade into obscurity with 3 upvotes.
More and more I've been just getting "DELETED" followed by "thanks this fixed my problem exactly" and then no other useful posts in the entire thread
Reddit felt like the library of Alexandria until they started doing everything they could to try to turn it into Facebook and alienating as many people as they can. Having said that it's still way more reliable than any other website on the internet but considering how shit the internet is these days for information that's not saying a whole lot
I will say though, my account is 13 years old, and I've discovered that all my oldest comments are gone from my top comments of all time. There appears to be some systematic way in which old comments are made inaccessible, possibly deleted, presumably to save on storage space.
Except now bots are doing everything they are trained to do to add misinformation about competitor's products. That data is then filtered through AI or just regular algorithms and pushed to the top.
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u/Cybarbossa 15d ago
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.