396
Has Reddit’s traffic really quadrupled in 6 months?
(www.bandt.com.au)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
396 points (98.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43317 readers
1097 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Google has massive swing; there's a whole industry around getting Google to prefer your low quality crap nobody wants to see over others' low quality crap nobody wants to see.
If Google has finally figured out a metric to measure "helpfulness" of a website and punishes unhelpful websites, a bunch of dogshit that would have otherwise gotten top spots may have been banished to page 2.
Reddit results would naturally creep up because of that (and therefore get a lot more clicks), even if they didn't change at all.
Didn't Reddit signpost that they'd signed a deal with Google over AI? Is Google driving visitors to Reddit in exchange and to their benefit?
So honest. So unbiased.
Google directly said a few months ago that they're changing their algorithm to expose more Reddit content.
Source?
Google
The whole reason that Google exists today is that their PageRank algorithm was a great way to identify good content. At its basics, it worked by counting the number of pages that linked to a certain page. More incoming links meant the page was more useful. It didn't matter how many relevant search terms you stuffed into your page. What matters was votes from other people, expressed in the form of linking to your page.
But, that algorithm failed for 2 reasons. One is that it became cheaper and easier to put up sites that linked to sites you wanted to promote. The other was that people stopped blogging on their own blogs, and stopped creating their own websites, and instead used walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. That meant it was hard to measure links back to a site, and that it was easier to create fake links.
So, now it's a constant war of SEO people vs. Google Search Quality people, and the Google people are losing. Sometimes there are brief victories for Google which result in good Reddit results appearing higher up. Then the SEO people catch up and either pollute Reddit and/or push Reddit links off the first page.
It would all be really depressing even if it weren't for generative AI being used to pollute everything. With LLMs coming in and vomiting their content all over everything, we might be forced back to the bad old days of Yahoo where some individual human curated lists of good things and 99% of content was invisible.
I actually have noticed a lot more Reddit in my search results recently.