Reddit used to be a pretty cool thing. And it still has a lot of good information. But I always feel dirty when I do resort to searching Reddit for information.
Aaron Swartz would be appalled.
I feel like Aaron 100% would have backed Lemmy.
(Edit: Not that I or anyone can speak for him, obviously.)
I'm pretty sad these days when I see an issue marked as solved, but then when I get to the solution it just says "this comment has been deleted in objection to the API changes and Steve Huffman is a dirty little piss boy". We've lost millions of hours worth of answers because of Reddit 's greed.
The best way to find information on the internet is to give up on Google and use Kagi. Add a question mark at the end of your search and it'll summarize all of the top results for you, directly giving you the answer and saving you tons of time. They include sources if you want to dig deeper.
Only thing holding me back from Kagi is the impossibility of privacy and a credit card associated with my user.
it'll summarize all of the top results for you, directly giving you the answer
This is literally what the Google AI thing that everyone has been mocking does. For example, it suggested gluing cheese onto a pizza because that was a highly up voted comment on the reddit thread that was the top search results.
Sadly, their CEO is kind of a weirdo. There was a recent post chain on Mastodon I think where a user shared their disappointment with Kagi - had something to do with their not being as privacy-focused as they claimed they are - and the CEO just decided to keep sending unsolicited emails to the OP about this, trying to with them over with phone and video calls
I saw this too. Sadly I don't remember where I saw it.
Bill Gates was a massive dick but people still use Windows.
Steve Jobs was a massive dick but people still use Apple.
Thomas Edison was a massive dick but people still use light bulbs.
People should disassociate creators and their products.
For the record, the real trick is to add "site:reddit.com". But as the site decays over time that will sadly become less useful.
I really think they are going to start requiring logins or the app to view most content. That seems to be what they are going toward with the "unreviewed content" thing.
100%. To be honest I don't even use this "trick" anymore myself because like 60% of the links are inaccessible now.
It's incredibly sad that they destroyed such a great resource, that place was like the Wikipedia of opinions.
For now you can use RedReader to circumvent their app.
old reddit
This ain't just Google. SEO effectively killed all search engines. As an IT guy who's been googling shit before I was 10, I can't find shit anymore.
The entire internet has become a toxic mess.
Sadly this is how I feel too. Everything is trying to squeeze a dime out of my eyes. Man I don't even buy shit unless I absolutely need it.
As a programmer and system admin, I've been using Google since its inception, too. I can't think of an instance that I've failed to find whatever I'm looking for in recent times. People say what you're saying a lot, so I don't doubt you. It just makes me wonder what it is you guys are searching for because I search for some extremely obscure stuff quite often with no issues. This is all to say, I have a fair share of qualms with Google, but the search engine itself isn't one of them.
I've seen a few people mention exactly what you said, so either it's Google A/B testing some dumb shit, or it's because you haven't been using Google the same way I have in the past. I don't just look for information that is objective, few years back, Google was very good at providing links to articles with steps to do X. Nowadays it always redirects me to sites where words related to X are mentioned the most, rather than providing useful information.
I genuinely can't trust google results to be true and unbiased anymore. Nowadays I use a combination of google results, reddit results, Quorn results, ChatGPT fever dreams, and dead reckoning.
This is the issue though. I subscribed to chatgpt plus hoping it would do the work for me, but chatgpt (although it understands a lot) still fails to tell me what I need by 'browsing the web'. I also tried every other known search engine out there but sadly the results are very similar (ddg, bing). So I feel like I'm trapped in a loop where I can't get out.
Reddit makes me feel dirty.
Quora is just plain vomit.
yahoo answers shutdown ruined it all.
Directions unclear. Reddit blocks my work IP for “network security” unless accounts are used to maximize data collection.
I've found that alternative reddit frontends bypass this. That and I believe changing the URL to old reddit.
Of course, this will only work until (if?) Reddit is successful in removing old reddit and preventing third party front-end.
Do you mean New Old Reddit or Old Old Reddit? /hj
No, seriously, they're apparently working on a New New Reddit to replace their half-baked New Old Reddit (and presumably their still-working-perfectly Old Old Reddit).
Yes this is the only reason I still have a Reddit account
It's the only reason I bothered patching my former app of choice.
REDLIB.
As asked already, why do you feel the need for an account for this? It changes nothing. You've surely misunderstood something, you keeping an account has absolutely no relation to any of this.
I have never in my life got any useful information out of Quora.
In fact, it's so bad that when I mistakenly click on a Quora link, and I have some time to kill, I read the page to have a solid laugh at all the stupid answers in there that gets promoted.
Came here to say pretty much this. I will add that one time years ago I went back and gave a correct answer after I had found it. The next time I looked it wasn't displayed. At that point I determined that quora was a scam site.
I think you can filter out Quora results using uBlock, but you need to Google it so, good luck haha
Y'all closing your browser tab at the end? I just leave the tab open, just Incase I need it (or the other 200 tabs I haven't touched in months)
Hit the gym. Delete reddit. Lawyer up.
These days, I only ever use Reddit to find answers and to comment in one small community I probably could not live without. I've drastically cut down on my Reddit usage since whole API debacle.
(Don't ask about trying to move that community to Lemmy. Already had someone ask that repeatedly the last time I mentioned this. They've polled their users, and they're not moving.)
Not as useful now that so many of us who left Reddit deleted all of our comments on there. Broke a lot of those question and answer threads.
Just use: https://search.marginalia.nu/ It crawls forums, wikis and other human generated content.
No SEO garbage, scammers or AI. (mostly) It's still very much an alpha.Nice find! I will switch.
Instead of reddit you can use stackexchange but in the end you don't get your answer
not only that but we get a fresh look at why we were wrong and shouldn't have asked the question in the first place
Reddit used to be really cool for actual niche advice without getting slapped with advertising. I tried to buy a certain kind of laptop, all the results were ads that contained those words, not what I was looking for. Heaven forbid I want pants that fit a certain body type or anything specific. Sometimes there are still older posts but…eh.
I still have a Reddit account but I stopped posting anything to it a couple of years ago. I only use it for a few niche things I can't find anywhere else, like r/SamsungWatchFaces
I hate that google has become a verb
I hate to tell you that it's been a verb for nearly two decades now?
And i have been hating it all this time!
Recently i heard someone tell me that they just googled 'lower decks' on amazon prime...
I agree.
Google the company doesn't deserve to be a verb
This is the way.
I deleted a year ago and can count on one hand the number of times I've used reddit since.
I don't think using it for Google counts at all anymore because that's Google's fault. I occasionally look at r/beermoney for ideas but that's it. Haven't looked at the front page in a year.
There is a disenshittified version of google out there, for now at least: udm14.com.
Every time I've used it, it's for info on a home improvement project. Being that my browser blocks ads, they get nothing from my interactions.
Just go straight to Wikipedia.
For local information, such as what is the best inexpensive insurance in your city, for example, Wiki can't answer.
wikivoyage
I’ve had more luck with local facebook groups or word of mouth than the internet, for this stuff, in the recent years. This and some group chats are pretty much the only reasons I still have a Meta account…
Is Quora good now?
Has it ever been?
Not that I can recall.
when Yahoo answers existed, yes (i think).
No.
Hard to tell when the bar has lowered so far.
Lol no I think quota is beyond redemption.
Ha, reddit is just where people pretend to know things and make confident answers, but it's barely a step above ChatGPT in accuracy
I mean... It's 100% the same here on Lemmy as well
um, it's a bummer the screenshot didn't mention lemmy then?
did you just make this obnoxious comment to demonstrate your own point or???
So this is not really google's fault then but rather while people were using it to find answers in links, they expected shitty SEO and LLM written articles to not mess with the results.
Google doesn’t want you to find answers. They could improve this. They want repeated searches and more time spent on each Google page to increase eyes on their ads.
That is certainly one of the conclusions in The Man Who Killed Google Search.
posts of twitter and tells us to use quora
This is Bluesky!
Same smelly shit.
