If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).

And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google’s.

As an example, if you search for the keyword “Lemmy”, DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World’s 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml’s top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.

i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are “ruined” as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and “real” ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).

My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both “usable” (even if less so than the past) and also “degraded” at the same time.

That depends strongly on which “public” we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don’t even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added “reddit” to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it’s less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.

Oh, thanks for the correction!:-)

That does not benefit specifically Alphabet though…

Fortunately, Boeing is a responsible entity and will plan on cleaning it up… right?

Generating turmoil just prior to the USA election maybe?

And that is all that matters, to them, forever moving forward 🤮.

Unless they’re too big to fail, and especially if they are too big to jail, e.g. Facebook, Google, etc. Or if they correctly judge the stupidity and malleability of their audience e.g. Reddit, X, etc.

For them, for now.

So what happens when pleasing the investors becomes the only priority?

Florida says hello. A bunch of other places too, sadly:-(.

I wonder… how many months would it take even Google to sort it all out now, if it wanted to? At some point, even if they haven’t crossed it yet, certain knowledge simply becomes lost forever.

Ads have become so deeply embedded into search results that even Google now can no longer tell the difference between them!?!?

Imagine Jesus Christ as a time traveler, going back from a dying planet to just about the dawn of both roads and also safer sea travel than previously, those two connecting what would become the entire modern world.

Jesus: like, forget all this “religion” crap about what foods to eat & where & when & with who, and like, just be excellent to one another dudes & dudettes

Everyone since then, especially those who borrow His actual fucking name to label themselves: um… how about “no”?

I avoided Reddit like the plague for the first decade - I knew that it had the potential to suck me in and I did not want that. But then during the pandemic, I kept finding myself going to it for answers, and then seeing how I could improve things, and then…

I noticed that at work I would say something “snarky”, which they did too but even so it’s like I was going too far. I typically did not enjoy seeing such things on Reddit, but as a mod I couldn’t block most of it without banning the person themselves from the entire community, so I felt that I had to put up with it - and it changed me, but not for the better. I mean not deeply or anything, but it normalized that style, which still was not good. And now for the same reason I’ve blocked lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - b/c I don’t want that to come into myself. I am no fan of e.g. capitalism but “behead all landlords” seems to me a position lacking entirely in nuance or possibly even substance - like “okay Karen, why do you care what I do so much, and are ready to threaten literal violence unless I comply with your wishes?!”

Yes the mistreatment of all the app devs but especially him b/c he was so careful to document it was a big one for me too, though I glazed over that b/c in retrospect I had realized that I had already started thinking along those lines before that happened. Even so, that was the final straw that crystallized it and made me finally move off the platform. A watershed moment in history, for all of us I think. Well, to be more precise I gave up my mod position and went from checking r/popular quickly from like every few hours to only checking in on my former community once a week, then once a month, then… I can’t even remember how long it’s been now. For awhile I became more active in r/RedditAlternatives than I was in my niche community!:-) But there is only so many times that you can tell someone something before it becomes their choice to not listen, so I just stopped going there at all.

Anyway, the problem is not just Reddit’s toxic AF culture (vision, like bullshit, tends to flow from the top to bottom direction in a company), nor even entirely the for-profit model - though each of those has their own, unique bad things that they add into the mix - and in some sense as you alluded to the issue is social media itself. Like candy, it promises good things, and like candy if taken in moderation it can be absolutely fine (especially during a pandemic when social distancing, especially in countries like the USA where “flatten the curve” was somehow taken as a challenge to encourage doing the exact opposite, to “pwn the libs” or sth I dunno), however also like candy it can leave someone unfulfilled if we always turn to the “easy doomscrolling”, rather than allow our attentions to absorb longer-form content like say, a TV show, or even movie, or even a fully online & free college course like Crash Course World History.

Social media can wreck our lives! Or it can enhance them, depending on how wisely we make use of it:-).

https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb

This is an excellent article. I was just barely beginning to think (still subconsciously, i.e. still intuitively rather than focused) about leaving Reddit anyway, b/c of all its toxic BS, even prior to the blackouts and Rexodus, when I read this. I could not put it down!!!

But I had to, in order to go to work, and yet I picked it back up again ASAP and kept reading through lunch. And as a result, I gave up my mod position of two subs, left Reddit virtually entirely (though I partially stayed for a couple months to post about Kbin/Lemmy), and came here (the age of my current account does not match up b/c I was first on Kbin).

So yeah, it’s long, but like… it PERFECTLY describes what I was intuiting! That Reddit was trying to turn me into a pedantic, narcissistic asshole, by curbing my impulses whenever I wanted to be kind yet encouraging the opposite to let my dark side flow against someone in order to demolish their arguments. Long, detailed answers to someone with specific questions and pleading for answers were penalized, yet short quips like “u suk” got heavily up-voted.

But it’s not merely Reddit ofc, it’s also Twitter, now X, and FaceBook, and any for-profit social media that prioritizes “engagement”, e.g. talking rather than listening. e.g. why is Reddit’s search function virtually nonfunctional, and why can each sub only have a maximum of two pinned posts? (I almost started looking into what it would take to write a bot that would allow for a megathread of megathreads, which the native Reddit refuses to provide for, except I could see the writing on the wall that bots were going to be obliterated, so I didn’t bother.) Every single time such limitations line up with making new posts, their profits always magically seem to be increased - bc recall that ads are between posts, not between comments, so more posts = moar ads! Even if people stopped responding to people’s questions… although usually someone somewhere would at least try, so it increased “engagement” of the type that furthered profits, while decreasing it overall. Hence these items were never going to be fixed.

Hence Reddit was enshittified. e.g. in r/Android people would constantly ignore the begging, pleading, demanding, and threatening from mods to put requests for new phone recommendations into the weekly megathread… and some huge fraction of posts to it were always like “what phone should I buy?”, “what Android phone should I purchase?”, “Which model phone should I get?” (until they could get removed) - often with no other details given, somehow extremely often back to back, as if nobody else in the whole entire world existed with the same identical damn question, these childish minds (of whatever age) just continually blurted out their requests for attention, spamming the entire world and preventing serious discussions about Android, which basically had to move elsewhere - i.e. the kids got so noisy that the adults had to flee the room looking for a more contemplative quiet.

Which is why we all find ourselves here:-). But even here, the addictive nature of even not-for-profit social media still has its dangers, as too does eating too much food etc., it’s not the thing itself (once the profit incentive has been removed) but the amount that can be deleterious.

This headline would have carried a ton more weight if it wasn’t so extremely click-baity.

The ends do not justify the means?

Entirely separately from the message content, I find it so awesome to see the author acknowledge their potential biases right at the start! :-D

So much of journalistic integrity seems dead these days that I wanted to call that out as being good, even though it probably is mandatory, but even so… how many would actually do it?

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