- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
What do you guys think about this? (Wasn’t sure which community to post this in)
I’ve been linking this text fairly often, but I think that it’s worth a read. People might be focusing on the blackout but that’s just the “now” - with or without blackouts, Reddit is a ticking bomb bound to eventually explode, and all the information there will be lost when it does.
And the fact that people have been relying on Reddit to look for information shows even deeper issues, not just with Reddit but the internet. Let’s see…
- Google monopoly over the search market. Why would it need to make its product better, if you’re still going to use it?
- Corporations always trying to prevent you from reaching the best result (because it won’t lead you to their product), and engaging on an arms race through search engine optimisation. That’s why people did that “reddit” trick.
- The encroachment of the ad industry into the internet. Oh look, I found the content that I wanted… no wait it’s another ad. Move on…
- Governments more often pandering to corporations than defending the best interests of their taxpayers, and the legislation on what’s allowed or disallowed on the internet suffering in result of that.
- Reddit monopoly over discussions.
- People sharing info in Reddit instead of through more resilient forms of digital media, as shown in the link.
Seems unrelated to open source?
I agree, too many communities here keep getting meta discussion about Reddit - and the open community aspect of Lemmy isn’t very organized.
That said…
This sort of change by the community isn’t new. One of Twitter’s great strengths was that it was an identifiable brand and you could tell someone a username and it was mostly unambiguous.
I remember the days when Usenet archive ran out of money, before Google purchased it back in early 2001: https://www.wired.com/2001/02/google-buys-deja-archive/ - searching Usenet archives was going to be lost.
I think it’s a major loss considering the SEO garbage results you get nowadays. But the fault is on Reddit for doing this to themself, don’t forget.
I noticed it myself too! Hopefully we can get a good way to search through the internet archive backup of reddit people are building soon, or at least get those posts pushed out through the fediverse so people can see them.
I HAVE COME TO YOUR RESCUE, YOUNGUNS
Use your favourite search engine, search “<yourquerykeywords> reddit”. Whatever search results pop up, those threads should be old enough to be archived over at Internet Archive or archive.is. Install Resurrect Pages addon in web browser. Open your reddit search results, and Resurrect Pages gives you the option to open their archived versions. If the “reddit.com/…” archive cannot be found, scroll to an older version if available. You can also modify URL to “old.reddit.com/…” to see if archived version exists.
You can find more or less any relevant threads if you use a combination of Google, Bing and Yandex with that search-fu. You can also use Searx, Baidu, Startpage or any other search engine for this trick.