this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
388 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37801 readers
193 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I went searching for something today and instinctually clicked on a reddit link. Fortunately the sub was dark for the protest anyway, but it's crazy how ingrained in me it is to go to reddit for everything.

Unfortunately now we're going to have to get used to clicking on those clickbait tech articles like "TOP 10 FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVES 2023" to find information, and weed out the crappy blogs.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 years ago (6 children)

The fact is that there is some useful info that only is on Reddit. No shame in looking that stuff up since that’s where it is.

The main thing is to stop using Reddit as your go-to time waster/doom scrolling app

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Now I will doomscroll on Lemmy. Problem solved

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Tbh the lack of people and content here has limited my doom scrolling tremendously.

Also helps that everyone here is like a kid on their first day of high school or college. Zero toxicity! 😎

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (4 children)

If people stop providing useful information on reddit, it's usefulness will disappear over time.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (11 children)

There are also lots of people using Shreddit to remove their entire log of comments.

I'm debating whether or not to do that with my account... I have several comments with solutions to specific tech issues, documentation on specific things. At the same time, I feel less and less comfortable with Reddit benefiting from information users provided for free.

load more comments (11 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 years ago (9 children)

Google has been pretty much useless lately because it just spits out this SEO spam (probably all written by LLMs, that's the only way to explain why it's never happened before but does happen now), so losing reddit as one of the best sources of non-AI-generated information would set us back a lot.

What we need is the current state of reddit, but frozen in time and just as searchable as reddit is right now. And since reddit won't want to lose SEO, they will be open to scraping.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (4 children)

There are archives of Reddit history, notably the Pushshift archive & current ongoing Archive Team archive. Much of the data can be searched on the Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive, although it's not as convenient.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago (16 children)

It’ll take time. I think eventually we’ll have enough knowledge on Reddit alternatives like Lemmy where we can add “lemmy” to our search strings instead of “reddit”.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The problem with that is, that not all instances use "Lemmy" or even "feddit" in the URL.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

What do you mean? Who would register at such a place.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Hopefully search engines can eventually work around that.

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (15 replies)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I spent some time on mastodon, squabbles, kbin and vlemmy today subscribing.. it helped seeing many of the same communities in them. I’m 60.. so I know younger minds are nimble enough to make themselves comfortable elsewhere.

What I’m interested in seeing is if others are committed and tenacious enough to stand their ground - outside of Reddit. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older.. things change, and sometimes fighting over turf leaves the winner a ruined playground with bad memories for everybody.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago

The key is amassing a large enough audience of people who want something new, not just people who want a 1:1 replacement for reddit. There's no way lemmy will be able to compete in content volume but I think the idea of "non corporate" social media will be attractive to people

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Muscle memory is also hard to break. I had to remove Apollo from my homescreen :D

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

I know the feeling. I had to put it in a folder “Do not use”. It’s like the first rhing I check in the morning. This lemmy thing has potential. I miss Apollo so much though. Jesus if Christian ported Apollo to use a lemmy backend I’m not sure I’d even notice it wasn’t Reddit. 😀

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (7 children)

It doesn't help the fact that depending of the question, every single answer ends up being only on reddit and nowhere else.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I feel like we need a Redditor's Anonymous community lol.

Hi I'm Swintoodles and I've tried to open reddit 3 times this morning. The site is sparse, so I only browsed for 20 minutes, but I know I can get better!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Ive been tapping the empty space on my phone where the reddit app was out of habit all day

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago

I'm using a pi-hole on my network and I added reddit to the 'blocked list' to cut down on myself clicking the links. I should find a way to filter out the links from my search results easily, but this works for now.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I was going to ask in a full post, but as a comment on this topic would be better: what kind of modifiers would we type in when we want to narrow a web search scope to the fediverse? Like, it's easy to just add 'reddit' to any query, that instantly cuts out all the BS. Hoping there's some magic keyword in the metadata in the ActivityPub guts.

Someone feel free to start a full post on this, if you figure it's warranted.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

This is a very good question - when I'm troubleshooting things my default search pattern is: " 2023 reddit", because 99% of the other search results are pure garbage.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Quitting Reddit's hard, but it's heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here! I've got to admit, even after Mastadons limited success, before today I never seriously thought that federated social media would actually ever work. It just seemed to complicated for average person to grok.

Here we all are though! Decentralizing the decision making for who gets to post and host, what gets seen and what doesn't, seems to be worth fighting for. For enough of us at least to make this corner of the internet interesting for a while.

I've got a question though, are there any non technical people here? If you are interested in technology do you know non technical people who are participating in the black out?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think a Reddit type platform lends itself better to federation than something like Twitter. Reddit is already split up into sub communities so it's easier to digest vs. Mastadon/Twitter meant to be one big conversation.

Your question about non-technical savoy folks being on here is valid and there's probably not many. But Reddit also started out like that and it took many years before it became mainstream. Federated serves are a new thing, even for the technological literate, so I suspect it will take a while to permeate into casual internet users but it will happen in the future.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Fr, it is very hard to break. I instinctively add "reddit" to the end of every search.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This speaks to how bad Google has gotten IMO - I do it too.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

I know, it’s so much harder to find answers to anything past very simple answers with Google these days. After the blackout, I’ll probably do far less jumping straight to Reddit, but I feel like it’s still going to be unavoidable sometimes.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yep, same thing happened to me. Tried to figure out what the Fragile modifier does in Trackmania but I couldn't find the answer anywhere. /r/trackmania is shutdown (based) and i literally couldn't find the answer anywhere. I still don't even know what it does...

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It allows your car to become damaged if you hit a surface too hard. Being damaged will screw up your steering.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

Finally, closure. Thanks a bunch lol.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (10 children)

every time I look at my phone I'm instinctively hitting the RIF app... this is gonna take a while to adapt to, but new communities are popping up all the time, new server instances appearing, and new users flooding in so perhaps we can continue to being unproductive procrastinators.

On the upside, I guess my productivity will go up by at least 5% for a few days.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Absolutely. When I was having my first coffee this morning, I tried to browse Reddit out of a habit. Luckily, Apollo reminded my with a banner that I shouldn't do this. Now I am trying to change my "browse Reddit" habit into "browse Lemmy" habit. So far I it works great - not missing anything until now.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Yeah, as long as content builds out faster than I consume it I could be quite happy here.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I kept googling questions and clicking on the reddit posts. Reddit seems to be the only place to get some real answers sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

It's so hard to weed out the sites that are sponsored to endorse certain products when you're searching for something, or sites that are removing any negative reviews. With Reddit I feel like I could find real honest opinions from people.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (8 children)

It is a shame because there is so much knowledge on reddit that can be lost. Whenever I had a problem I would append reddit to my google search. Bug fixes for games, advice on purchases etc.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Hmm, somebody should make a Lemmy instance that just has a copy of Reddit in it. Probably somewhere hard to sue.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I had to move Sync off the homepage of my phone to avoid the muscle memory of just clicking it mindlessly. I have caught myself once or twice wanting to type it into the URL.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

You don't really have to quit cold turkey. When I stopped using Digg I'd go back now and then but Reddit had become my go to. I phased it out over a little less than a month.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Yeah, it really sucks. Hopefully enough people move to something else that there's a viable alternative.

I'm committed to doing my part this month on Lemmy, but I'll need others to do the same or I'll probably end up going back to Reddit eventually.

So far I've seen good content here, so keep it up!

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Reddit still has tons of useful content and I'm expecting to be clicking on it or some sort of archive in the future. I won't be active of the platform in any way but there's still value in the content they're now using as leverage.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Idk how helpful this is, but LibRedirect basically redirects all reddit links (and other websites like youtube, twitter, tiktok) in your browser to a privacy front-end that doesn't do any tracking or ads or things like that which is better than using the official reddit site.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

I'm keeping reddark open on another monitor as a reminder to stay away

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Unfortunately now we’re going to have to get used to clicking on those clickbait tech articles like “TOP 10 FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVES 2023” to find information, and weed out the crappy blogs.

So... exactly what other users submitting content had to do previously. Unless you just lurk and don't submit anything.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (9 children)

I keep opening Relay today and immediately quitting. Anyone use an app for this? Maybe just need to replace the app location with a new app.

load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›