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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Technology
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The one thing Reddit is great for, and for which substitutes do not yet exist, is its crowdsourced information. Especially product reviews. And finding those from within Reddit is impossible because their search simply does not work.
Appending "Reddit" to a Google search remains the best first-past method for making certain kinds of decisions where you need concrete, good-quality answers. Even for that, it's a bit of a minefield. Especially post-mod-purge, a lot of the once-great enthusiast subs have gotten pretty blase. Still better than all those consumer advertorial "BEST OF 2024" lists that you find everywhere full of extremely mediocre and likely corrupt reviews, but nothing compared to the straightforward buying guides you used to find.
On top of that, the "new" sight is a million times less usable than old.reddit.com and search engines shoot you in through that terrifically terrible gateway to experience confusingly-organized and incomplete content. Orders of magnitude worse on mobile, too.
If Reddit is de-indexed, I'll simply never be there at this point. Though I admit, I'm already there extremely rarely.
The SEO spam that I find that Google is absolutely unable to filter out is all the AI-generated sites. They generally have a page with a long list of questions and poorly-generated answers.
It don't know if it's one company doing it at mass scale or if there are hordes of copycats, but it swamps Google search results these days.
New here? Japanese website have been mostly like that for decades now.
I haven't used Japanese websites enough to be able to provide a comparison.
It definitely wasn't the situation for English-based websites five years back. It was an issue at the beginning of this year. I don't know where it really started.
I started noticing it about a year and a half ago…
Pretty sure most of those are not AI generated (yet...).
They pay humans $2 an hour to write a paragraph ten different ways, then mix those with other paragraphs written by other people to create huge "content farms" of sites full of ads.
And they are deliberately shit - because they depend on visitors giving up and deciding to click an ad instead of whatever they came to the site for.
I always experience an onosecond after accidentally clicking on a Reddit thread in the search results. Followed by a short wave of disgust by the often mean/negative comments and pressing Mouse 4/Back.
Wait, I just realized I can block reddit.com completely in kagi. 10$/month nicely spent; begone thot!
I've been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
Looks nice, but for me features like fastgpt are worth the 10$/month
There was slant for a bit. Turned out to not be as reactive to market distributions.
Stack exchange has some good stuff going for it.
The browser add-ons for redirecting to old.reddit are doing good work. Best add-ons 2023
Yeah, I've used one, but there is also sloowly accumulating bitrot there. It's not getting any work done on it, and Reddit was pretty clear that they weren't going to do more work on it.
Submissions of image collections have some bad link; they didn't exist back when old.reddit.com was the norm.
www.reddit.com and old.reddit.com handle underscores in URLs pasted straight into Markdown and auto-linkified differently (one requires that they be backslash-escaped, the other that they not be backslash-escaped).
There's some kind of inline image stuff in the new UI, IIRC, that doesn't show up on old.reddit.com. I was surprised when I bipped over to the new UI and saw it.
You can hack a dark mode in in various ways, but it's normally a light theme.
Not really specific to just the old Web UI, but third-party client issue is a factor for phone users. Reddit's web UI on mobile isn't fantastic. old.reddit.com is okay for desktop use, but it's not really a great solution for phones.
Great overview of the issue