this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology

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Like it or not, years of insight, experience and expertise live in Reddit threads. But accessing some of them just got harder.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is how protests work. You inconvenience other people so that they pressure the target of the protests to give in to the protesters. Never understand why people from that country do not get this

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Absolutely! A lot of people seem to think a protest is shooting yourself in the foot and complaining about it. No, a protest is causing a ruckus so that everyone - protestors or not - get frustrated with the target of the protest. The point is to screw up search results on Google. The point is to make the "front page of the internet" an empty shell.

I went on reddit briefly to see if anything I subscribe to is polling to extend their blackout. r/DCcomics had a poll filled to the brim with "stay open, I'm slightly inconvenienced!" comments. These guys have clearly never been a part of or needed to protest for their basic rights before.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The mainstream view has lost a lot of that spirit, but plenty of Americans go just as hard as the French. Our corporate media downplays or slants the perception of protestors to make them seem like a noisy misguided minority when all we're usually asking for is basic dignity.

Then the news media goes off and makes any anti-protest vehicular homicide a celebrity, and right wing nuts flock to their go fund me pages.

It's not that we're as bad as we look, mostly.

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

Good. They should stay closed. Sadly a lot of subs are capitulating and opening up again.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Fewer than I thought though, I would have thought the whole thing would have evaporated by now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Love isn't always on time!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm seeing the amount of closed subs decrease every hour. This morning there were over 7000 still closed and now it's just 6510.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's because America has woken up. Given that the blackout was planned for 2 days I'm actually quite encouraged that there are still 6500 after then. Even many of the ones that have opened have opened pending further discussion on the next steps. I'm not optimistic about the overall outcome for Reddit, but the more people that can be driven to alternatives the better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's only 6170 now :(. I'm losing hope.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Regardless if they come back or not, it doesn't mean you have to go back. :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

True, and I'm not! I deleted all my shit and I'm not going to post there anymore. I might read a Reddit post if it comes up when I Google something (because there still is a lot of good information on Reddit that can't be found anywhere else) but I'm not contributing. It's a shame though, I really liked giving away spare game keys etc. on Reddit.

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

It is unfortunate for sure. I've come across this issue already.
But that experience hasn't been great for a while amyway. Reading through comment chains is a nightmare on new desktop reddit. Looking forward to hopefully replacing 'reddit' with 'lemmy' in my search queries, hopefully sooner rather than later.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yep, this just demonstrates how we shouldn't rely on one entity to be the arbiter of community information. It should get better over time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Same here, everytime I ever saw reddit in my search results I'd audibly sigh. How they've managed to make their user experiences so extremely hostile is beyond me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Not the worst and not the best reporting. I am surprised how many people apparently use reddit as a search engine given how many posts I saw in various subs that implied the poster never heard of a search engine given that there was another thread asking the same thing like 5 hours beforehand.

It is interesting they point out that Twitter style short form posts do not actually contain information people would be searching for. Also kind of sad that useful discussion is seen as ild fashioned and "modern" is short videos. I hate video results when I'm searching for something because if it even actually addresses the question it's 3-10 minutes of what is actually 2 sentences of answer. Such a waste of time.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that's why I hope that some subs go read-only. keeps the information that has been gathered over the last few years, while making it so people mostly don't interact with it in their feeds anymore

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This would be the perfect balance. Prevent Reddit from monetizing the subs any further, but keep a record of all the information that was shared since the creation of that sub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

exactly. hurts reddit without affecting the community a whole lol.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I wonder if there is an import script that can migrate threads and comments over to Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Luckily, the barrier for entry is having a computer and hands!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I have thought about writing something like that. We probably would want to do it 1 subreddit at a time to back up to a specific community.

Is that something we think we would need or want? I haven’t done it yet because I don’t want Lemmy to just be a Reddit content aggregator, I want us to have our own content and communities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There are import scripts - the problem is that Reddit has disabled the Pushshift API end of March, which makes data exporting significantly harder. There are some archives from before that available as torrent, and there has been effort from r/datahoarders to archive and submit it to archive.org before the shutdown.

I've been looking into that for our sub, and concluded it's currently not sensible - so in case we decide to reopen restricted for archive access I created a bot that re-posts Lemmy postings into the locked subreddit for discoverability, and adds a comment to drive users out for commenting.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think we need to start thinking about the hard work of moving a lot of that essential information from Reddit to open community wikis.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would be down to help if such an effort becomes reality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Me as well, we could automate a good chunk of it using web archive

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yup, I've already been really frustrated by this... Google's search results are so useless, full of advertisements, blogspam, astroturfing, etc, the only way to read about genuine reviews and experiences about stuff is to add " reddit" to the end of my search queries.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Kagi can filter out reddit automatically with it's lenses. You can do something sort of similar manually with -site:reddit.com in your query.

Another alternative is just using wayback machine to access reddit. That way they don't get your traffic!

[–] saltysel 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is going to the biggest blow to me tbh. So many nuanced problems have been found on Reddit. Hoping some of the data can be transferred elsewhere vs completely deleted but it isn't looking that way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Most of the data has been preserved via the Pushshift data dump/archive. It seems to end at February 2023, and the entire archive (including the separate 2023-01 and 2023-02 archives) is >2TB with zstd compression so it's not exactly easy to search unless you have a few terabytes to spare. Luckily, much of the data still seems to exist.

https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=pushshift

https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Not unless we all opt out of the data collection like I did :) can’t train on me creepy AIs!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I installed the ublacklist extension on chrome and immediately added reddit. There's nothing I can't find on other forums. Fuck reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Create a read only lemmy instance populated with the data from the Reddit data dump. Make sure Google indexes it. Comply with DMCA requests made by users who want their content removed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe search results should link to archives rather than live urls

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

Can't the powers that be at reddit just flip a switch somewhere and remove the mods' ability to make subreddits private? Presumably if they could they would have done so by now (but if not, 🤫!!!)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I presume they could but then those subs would be unmoderated which would be a huge legal risk.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If I remember correctly they did replace the mod teams for a few bigger subreddits and made these public again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Your search results will recover when the information is reposted elsewhere. Not something to really get bent out of shape over.

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

The number of times I have received a this sub is private link over the past few days is super saddening.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I shouldn't be saddening, Reddit was a hellhole anyways, now we have a chance to start anew.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That’s the intended outcome of the protest! Glad it’s working.

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