This is how protests work. You inconvenience other people so that they pressure the target of the protests to give in to the protesters. Never understand why people from that country do not get this
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Absolutely! A lot of people seem to think a protest is shooting yourself in the foot and complaining about it. No, a protest is causing a ruckus so that everyone - protestors or not - get frustrated with the target of the protest. The point is to screw up search results on Google. The point is to make the "front page of the internet" an empty shell.
I went on reddit briefly to see if anything I subscribe to is polling to extend their blackout. r/DCcomics had a poll filled to the brim with "stay open, I'm slightly inconvenienced!" comments. These guys have clearly never been a part of or needed to protest for their basic rights before.
The mainstream view has lost a lot of that spirit, but plenty of Americans go just as hard as the French. Our corporate media downplays or slants the perception of protestors to make them seem like a noisy misguided minority when all we're usually asking for is basic dignity.
Then the news media goes off and makes any anti-protest vehicular homicide a celebrity, and right wing nuts flock to their go fund me pages.
It's not that we're as bad as we look, mostly.
I think we need to start thinking about the hard work of moving a lot of that essential information from Reddit to open community wikis.
I would be down to help if such an effort becomes reality.
Me as well, we could automate a good chunk of it using web archive
So would I. Particularly for the "how do I solve this super specific problem?" troubleshooting posts. Those are treasures.
This has already been affecting me a bit. Now I'm not complaining because I fully support it. But I've recently been looking up product suggestions, tech help, etc and many of the reddit links in the search results were private communities. I was like "oh so this is actually having an impact at least."
I actually wish more subs would stay dark, especially since the CEO was basically like "they'll get over it soon"
Well that’s our fault for letting information get congregated in a centralized service to be fair. Any information that is stored without redundancy on a single service should be considered already lost.
The Fediverse doesn’t fix this by the way, as far as I know. The data can be accessed from other instances, but as I understand it the data still lives on the instance. The day an instance does, poof, all the information it contains goes away.
But! It makes it easier to make information redundant, by having an instance that automatically archives information for example.
We had a problem, many people knew that we had a problem but we did nothing to fix it. We have the same issue on StackOverflow or even GitHub, by the way (although the latter is a bit mitigated by people having local copies of the repositories for example). It will come bite us in the arse one day.
RIP to everything lost on Geocities.
It will never be possible to preserve all information forever, nor do we need to, but we could certainly do better than the usual thus far.
Hopefully those communities that choose to stay dark indefinitely will migrate at least some of their information to external platforms for non-reddit access.
I doubt they'd be able/go so far as to export all the threads, but I'm thinking that it'd be nice if the communities with robust and informative wikis would at least make those available elsewhere. Same with the Fediverse too; I feel like any compilation of information like a wiki ought to be hosted elsewhere for some form of redundancy if possible.
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Yup, I've already been really frustrated by this... Google's search results are so useless, full of advertisements, blogspam, astroturfing, etc, the only way to read about genuine reviews and experiences about stuff is to add " reddit" to the end of my search queries.
I figured out yesterday that if you go to the Google cached version, you can still see old posts. If I try it on mobile, the cached option isn't there, but on my PC I can click the (...) next to the search result, and click the cached option. Trying to figure out how to do that with mobile.
I fully support the blackout and I am trying to keep my Reddit traffic to a minimum, but I was trying to figure out a technical problem yesterday and it was a huge pain to find anything useful. Way too much SEO crap to wade through.
Good. That is the whole point.
Good. They should stay closed. Sadly a lot of subs are capitulating and opening up again.
Fewer than I thought though, I would have thought the whole thing would have evaporated by now.
Hold the line!
Love isn't always on time!
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It is unfortunate for sure. I've come across this issue already.
But that experience hasn't been great for a while anyway. Reading through comment chains is a nightmare on new desktop reddit.
Looking forward to hopefully replacing 'reddit' with 'lemmy' in my search queries, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Yep, this just demonstrates how we shouldn't rely on one entity to be the arbiter of community information. It should get better over time.
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that's why I hope that some subs go read-only. keeps the information that has been gathered over the last few years, while making it so people mostly don't interact with it in their feeds anymore
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It is the techical help that hurts the most. Raspberry Pi, Linx and Steam Deck are the big ones I find help for on Reddit.
But to be fair it just encourages me to search harder elsewhere, or better yet forces me to tinker more myself to find the solutions.
Regardless, it is a wealth of users that the users have given for free for so long.
Maybe search results should link to archives rather than live urls
It's one extra step to put archive.is/ in front of any dark reddit url.
Kagi can filter out reddit automatically with it's lenses. You can do something sort of similar manually with -site:reddit.com in your query.
Another alternative is just using wayback machine to access reddit. That way they don't get your traffic!
Reddit will open them back up with new moderators if they were pretty active, there is already precedent from when the kotakuinaction creator intentionally closed that subreddit several years ago. It may take a little more time if a lot of subreddits decide to stay closed, but it'll happen sooner or later.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/13/17568556/kotakuinaction-reddit-mod-shut-down-administrator
I wonder if there is an import script that can migrate threads and comments over to Lemmy
There are import scripts - the problem is that Reddit has disabled the Pushshift API end of March, which makes data exporting significantly harder. There are some archives from before that available as torrent, and there has been effort from r/datahoarders to archive and submit it to archive.org before the shutdown.
I've been looking into that for our sub, and concluded it's currently not sensible - so in case we decide to reopen restricted for archive access I created a bot that re-posts Lemmy postings into the locked subreddit for discoverability, and adds a comment to drive users out for commenting.
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Not the worst and not the best reporting. I am surprised how many people apparently use reddit as a search engine given how many posts I saw in various subs that implied the poster never heard of a search engine given that there was another thread asking the same thing like 5 hours beforehand.
It is interesting they point out that Twitter style short form posts do not actually contain information people would be searching for. Also kind of sad that useful discussion is seen as ild fashioned and "modern" is short videos. I hate video results when I'm searching for something because if it even actually addresses the question it's 3-10 minutes of what is actually 2 sentences of answer. Such a waste of time.
Is that really a thing? When I search for anything I very, very rarely see a Reddit link in the results. The last time I remember was a question about i3wm.
Reddit frequently pops up when I look for answers to tech questions.
Yeah I've noticed this a few times already. Cached pages have worked so far for me.
I often specifically used to search eg. site:reddit.com turboencabulator review or whatever, because on many topics just searching the entire web with Google will give you pages and pages of absolute garbage by sites that mainly exist to churn out (often stolen) low quality search keyword-laden content – especially on tech stuff – to generate ad views
I think they might mean folks who are using google to search reddit, for example, the search term "migrating to lemmy reddit". I know I append "reddit" to a lot of my google searches and now with the blackout, those search results will only take you to a private page for the subreddit.
I was trying to lookup stuff about mechanical keyboards on ddg earlier today, and several results on the first page were reddit threads. So it can definitely happen with some other hobbies/topics I imagine.
Reddit pops up all the time when I'm searching for questions I have about DIY projects around my house, as inevitably someone else has asked the exact same question in the DIY or HomeImprovement subreddits. Same for technology questions.
It's very useful compared to the usual SEO dreck that Google throws up as the top search results.
Yeah it's been inconvenient to Google stuff and have private subreddits come up, but that's life. Hopefully that information will begin moving to Lemmy instances as time goes on.
I jsut click the cached google link. usually works except comments under a few levels wont expand
Create a read only lemmy instance populated with the data from the Reddit data dump. Make sure Google indexes it. Comply with DMCA requests made by users who want their content removed.
Yea this is definitely going to be a thing for tech questions especially. But to be fair we were always going to reckon with the issue sooner or later as long as a single private company is the sole owner of a site that ate all the specialized forums which would have previously housed such information. The best time to rip this bandaid off would have been before reddit was big, but there will be no better time then now.
This is going to the biggest blow to me tbh. So many nuanced problems have been found on Reddit. Hoping some of the data can be transferred elsewhere vs completely deleted but it isn't looking that way.
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Investing time and effort sharing know how and knowledge on a corporate social media was a mistake.
The Internet is intrinsically ephemeral. Data is always a few pulled wires away from going offline. Digital support lifespan is surprisingly short. Those aren’t stone slabs. Even paper lasts longer. The Internet’s strength is the distribution. For the data to endure, you need dedicated resources and individuals. Enthusiasts. Guardians. Professionals. If the responsible organization’s goal is profit, it’s doomed from the start.
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