everybody on ilx complains about reddit

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.

it is much worse to access and navigate than than anything else I attempt to use on mobile which is really saying something and getting the app would just feel like defeat

xp lol how is it any worse than x-ing out of a mailing list popup on a recipe website? this isn't like yelp where it literally forces the app to open if you want to do anything on mobile. it's just an overlay that you press one button to get out of.

CaaL, i have no idea what you're talking about with it asking you to login. i'm opening it in the chrome app in incognito so i'm not logged in, and it never once prompts me to. i click "continue" and that's it.

and if comments are closed after 6 months, that's not a reddit thing, that's another thing specific to certain subs (or threads). i've rarely seen that. for threads that get a lot of search engine attention, it's not uncommon to see people leaving thank you comments years after it was made.

bigger issue is that Reddit is just really bad for conversation, it's hard for any comment longer than a couple sentences to get more than a few upvotes, which means most people just won't see it, and even if someone replies, if you start replying to that you just wind up in a horrible nesting situation which quickly becomes utterly unreadable

I also hate recipe websites, but after all the faff there is usually a recipe at the end.

look, it's asking me to log in with Google

https://i.postimg.cc/JhM69VXN/Screenshot-20230615-225624.jpg

They're now openly threatening to take the privated subs away from the moderators:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_code_of_conduct_rule_4_2_and_subs_taken/

look, it's asking me to log in with Google

I think that's actually a Chrome thing, I found a way to kill it for every website in Chrome's settings.

Spez is going on the full offensive:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview-protests-blackout

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-its-time-we-grow-up-and-behave-like-an-adult-company

xp oh, i see. i guess i don't see that because i don't link my google account to chrome. i believe that's a chrome setting you can turn off.

bigger issue is that Reddit is just really bad for conversation, it's hard for any comment longer than a couple sentences to get more than a few upvotes, which means most people just won't see it, and even if someone replies, if you start replying to that you just wind up in a horrible nesting situation which quickly becomes utterly unreadable

I also hate recipe websites, but after all the faff there is usually a recipe at the end.

A two day blackout was never going to make them change their minds. Nothing short of permanently going dark was going to do that.

I was late to Reddit, only joined 4 years back bcs everyone'd abandoned FB and I hate twitter and wanted new grist.

TBH I have not experienced a jot of what the fuss is about. I dont use 3rd party OR the native app - I just browse Reddit in Chrome. Oh, the site determinedly tries to force me onto the app every time I refresh with a rude popup but I just doggedly dismiss it.

I've said it upthread but if you stick to yr own corners its a mostly pleasant experience. Gaming reddits are especially useful for detailled tips and charts and whatnot. My greatest disappointment is that /r/melbourne has decided to just close shop completely and move to Discord and I agree with ppl upthread - it is NOT a replacement, Discord is just a fucking roided up IRC client and I'm too old and busy to fuck with instachat. The whole point of forums is you can take your time to read and respond when you want.

I do miss Usenet, on that front.

the admin on one discord I’m a member of switched a few channels to a forum mode that’s kind of ok. good for persistent threads that don’t get lost in bot spam.

good detail in this case study on trying to stay afloat in a sea of garbage

https://www.theverge.com/23753963/google-seo-shopify-small-business-ai