everybody on ilx complains about reddit

But I'm not here to defend reddit - it just seemed like an opposite description of posting rules I've seen.

huh, the music (gear/production) related subs I follow are more likely to be mad because someone didn't post their tunez (ie just a picture of boxes or unhooked new gear), /r/DIY would probably delete a post if you didn't make it

milo otm

thread title also otm

Unless I'm misunderstanding the issue, any rules about posting things one has made will depend on the particular subreddit rather than being something universal to the site. A lot of subreddits welcome original content.

Just scanning the ones I'm in, r/crosswords for example is filled with self-made clues and puzzles.

I'd attribute the usefulness of Reddit just as much to the participation of community members who take the time to write thoughtful posts and comments and the stacked discussion format where users upvote good content and downvote bad content. I have personally benefited from local recommendations, house cleaning and repair tips, financial advice, cute animals, and non-stop moral catharsis from r/AmItheAsshole.

I have no stake in third party apps, but I'm sorry for those affected and admire the solidarity with those that supported the protest.

And thank you WmC and the other mods who take the time to moderate ILX.

I refuse to accept there's any logic behind it, it's a parasitic website which did even more than social media to kill blogs, and the things of value there (obscuremedia for example) would be much better if they were elsewhere.

― the world is your octopus (Camaraderie at Arms Length)

where should the trans shitposts go

this is a pressing concern to me

Business Insider: Reddit users are boycotting the site for 48 hours, and Discord is perfectly positioned to pick up the slack

Here's an article I didn't read about something I keep hearing: people are using Discord now instead anyways!

I have little-used accounts on both these sites. But I'm wondering, how the hell is Discord a substitute for Reddit/web forums/etc. Maybe there are features on there that have passed me by, but it looks like a fancier IRC. It has better asynchronous features than IRC in that if I am perusing a board for a subject I'm an expert in, I can have a look at recent messages and reply and impart my wisdom... but how the hell is that useful to anyone else in the future? They have to be searching the exact right keywords to turn up some thread of a few messages? On a server they scrounged up an "invite" to someplace else on the web? idgi

The cited alternatives are for The Positivity Network, Unexpected Friends, and Luna's Lobby.

I can only conclude I'm not sure what the internet's for anymore and that's why I like ilx. Even if this account is also barely used.

how the hell is Discord a substitute for Reddit/web forums/etc.

You're OTM about how it works - you have to guess the keyword or ask a regular. Every time I've had to do this I've thought about how much new and niche knowledge is staying ungoogleable now. The messages are subject to much easier deletion than they would be on a crawlable website, too.

That puts it well. Same feeling trying to adjust to Reddit vs old web forums, just feels way dumber this time.

Reddit posts get archived after 6 months. So if you have anything to add/ask about an old discussion you turn up, you have to start a new discussion. In practice, you've got to catch a discussion pretty quickly (a comment on a months old post is not going to float to the top of an active sub). Maybe if this is your experience of the Internet, Discord is not such a strange alternative.

At least Reddit's search was decent... before the blackout.

the thing is a public discussion forum like this has its own boundaries, they're just implicit rather than explicit and they include all of us so we don't notice them

even though a lot of stuff here is indexed by search engines, in practice one is unlikely to run across this place unless one knows the right keywords or asks a regular! and then you have to weigh the upsides, like the fact that this site is _theoretically_ more accessible than a discord server, against the downsides, which is that decades-old drama can be dredged up and used in concerted hate campaigns. public internet information can be used for a lot of bad things, and this is why i limit the places where i put anything at all out on the public internet.

i don't know why that article picked an angle only highlighting the discord servers mentioned in the post it links to and ignoring the actual reddit-like websites listed right above them. i haven't heard a single person talk about those servers but i've seen plenty of people talking about lemmy, tildes and kbin (not that any of them are actually going to take off)

discord is a terrible replacement for reddit, it's apples and oranges but i can imagine a future where reddit and the concept of "message boards" in general go extinct and everyone jumps to shitty chatrooms because that's the way the wind's blowing.

I prefer to believe in an old school forum resurgence.

Or Usenet

phpbb

mIRC

BBSes featuring Tradewars

See y'all at alt.flame.beer.stupid

hell yeah

every so often I visit alt.rocknroll.metal.metallica and I see people replying to 20+ year old messages. probably bots though

Imagine what the internet could be if it wasn't trying to make itself profitable for private owners. https://t.co/v2FTSFFFSN pic.twitter.com/ESH2fcinN8

— Dave (@MediocreDave) June 15, 2023

even though a lot of stuff here is indexed by search engines, in practice one is unlikely to run across this place unless one knows the right keywords or asks a regular!

off topic, but Kate, your post accidentally made me nostalgic about how I discovered this place as a eastern european teen - I used to think of myself as a web search hotshot, enjoying making precise queries that produced fewer than one page of results. One day I felt I had a really cool thought on a subject, and was convinced nothing that obscure could have already been said online. I typed it in under quotation marks, and Google returned an ILX thread as the only result! It felt like discovering a treasure, and ILX has been my favorite place to read in the two decades since. Yay!

as a eastern european teen

Ohoho

Sorry, sorry, shitty of me, couldn't resist

I've been writing a music blog for about a decade now and have been kind of wondering what the point is anymore. I get decent traffic from Google, mostly because I'm writing about albums that not a lot of other people care about, but it feels like that whole ecosystem of blogs and webrings and actually like, Googling stuff because you want to read about it is pretty much dead. do people actually like, read blogs anymore?

Feel like the demise of rss readers really killed blogs off in a big way. It felt like a feedback loop - I used to read blogs regularly but was never an rss feed person, but the stream of constant readership due to ease of following kept the audiences up for those blogs. I guess people use substack now and that sends you an email for new posts so you don’t have to keep looking.

Yeah I read newsletters, which is effectively the same thing, they just go to my email and I mostly read them there rather than on the sites that host them.

Yikes, the last thing I want is more email

I felt the same way, but I set up a filter so they all go to a Newsletters folder. That way, I can just go straight to that folder when I want something to read and not have to sift through everything else in my inbox.

I know it's not everyone's thing, but it's helped wean me off social media.

(Twitter specifically)

Something about the ephemeral nature of social media makes reading certain stories/posts/links more compelling, imo, that little serotonin hit of finding a diamond in the dross. But I never get excited about email, even if it's a newsletter I subscribe to. They just stack and pile up with the rest of my thousands of unread emails.

the one thing I want now is a search engine where I can search for x and get links to actual humans writing about x, for music it's literally just YouTube and lyrics websites in the results now, maybe an amazon link.

CaaL: To get a search engine like that, we would need to train an AI to recognize actual human writing, and weed out results that are auto-generated or that come from AI content mills.

(It's either that or having human workers constantly sifting through the internet, making judgment calls on each individual page as to whether it came from a carbon-based mammal or didn't.)

Then other AIs will be set to work on figuring out the algorithm whereby the "human detector" detects human writing, and try to fool it. It will try to stop making the kind of mistakes that AIs make, and start making the kinds of mistakes that humans make. (Thus getting better at their job of replacing humans.)

Then there will need to be another layer of AI that can distinguish between a human writer, and an AI that is trying to look like a human writer specifically to the "human-detector" AI.

It is a robo-ourobouros.

Maybe we need a system whereby if you can verify that you are a human, you get a kind of symbol, like, um, a check mark.

listen, if we can create an AI which can say something insightful, accurate and true about music, which isn't just recycling a human's writing, and without being able to have the human experience of listening to the music, I reckon our useful time on this planet is probably done.

No disagreement here, CaaL. However, more seriously, I am with you on wishing one could exclude certain kinds of results that we know will not be fruitftul.

How about a little row of sliders that you could use: No Pinterest. No videos. No lyrics sites.

Search-fu used to involve using - and + and quotes and various other strategies to get all Boolean on yr searchitude. Those have, by and large, stopped working.

Unfortunately anyone who could devise such an ideal search engine would be under pressure to monetize it. And we'd be back to square one.

the one thing I want now is a search engine where I can search for x and get links to actual humans writing about x, for music it's literally just YouTube and lyrics websites in the results now, maybe an amazon link.

― the world is your octopus (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, June 15, 2023 12:38 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

The irony is the way people do this now is when searching a topic to add the keyword "reddit"...

that does not sound like it would be any better

think I meant to post this on this thread

As we head into the weekend, I'd like to remind all the founders that your goal is to stay pre-revenue for as long as possible pic.twitter.com/OB3yIEy8ql

— Alex Cohen (@anothercohen) April 23, 2021

(btw my new coinage "robo-ourobouros" should be sung to the tune of "Rock Me Amadeus.")

should we move /r/ILX over to lemmy?

some of the most fun discoveries I've made online is when you websearch a band and stumble across some dude's personal page where they write about entire music scenes that aren't really covered much elsewhere. or like, that guy who tries to review every single album with a mellotron on it. I don't even bother looking for those anymore.

yeah that's the stuff I'm looking for

the one thing I want now is a search engine where I can search for x and get links to actual humans writing about x

Google supposedly took concrete steps last August to rank this stuff higher, but i can’t tell the difference

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update

then a month ago they launched a “Perspectives” tab that is supposed to highlight more trusted human content. i’ve never seen it though. maybe it’s US only.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717685/google-perspectives-search-human-experiences-io-reddit

that stuff is out there but you pretty much only find it by accident -- on blogspot or whatever, or on weirdo joints like neocities xp

The irony is the way people do this now is when searching a topic to add the keyword "reddit"...

― But his face would not turn into hot Kirby (Evan), Thursday, 15 June 2023 17:45 (three hours ago) link

that does not sound like it would be any better

― the world is your octopus (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, 15 June 2023 17:50 (three hours ago) link

At the risk of sounding as if I'm here to defend Reddit from your slander, why don't you think it would be better? It's not the dream search engine experience you're asking for, but it does successfully produce as you say "actual humans writing about x" at least as much if not much more than the other examples you mentioned (youtube comments etc).

it produces, perhaps, some people on reddit talking about it, and if I'm on mobile (which I usually am) I can't even read that properly without it trying to push me into the app. For music, I've never found the discussions on there very interesting, I'd rather search twitter or, you know, here.

?? you just have to press "continue" to get rid of the app redirect popup. it's annoying but not exactly unique to reddit these days

?? that's bad

I mean it then asks me to log in, and yeah I have a password but fuck knows what it is, so I have to close that too, then the link (usually what I want) is hidden somewhere and most of the comments are folded in, if there are any comments, plus it's always more than 6 months old so comments are closed.