Nevermind, have figured it out.
Described: Why whenever I figure something out myself after posting a help thread, I’ll write a whole report on what I did before it got fixed (because often I’m just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, and I never know what exactly moved the needle)
Like I said in a previous thread that ended up on this topic. There’s a special place in hell, with Satan from Little Nicky, a few pineapples and some lobsters to hang off these asshole’s nipples…
Me, who completely nuked twelve years worth of Reddit posts and comments which were often one of, if not the only relevant search result to an extremely niche problem.
Oof yeah. Finding a reddit thread with your exact query as the title, getting excited to see a comment, aaaaand… It’s “This comment was deleted by EliteUltraEraser Premium TM. I value my privacy,…”
(I do get it though. And who knows, maybe this will actually help in the long run
and not just lead to increased usage of Discord communities so ask the same thing over and over and over again because they aren’t fucking publicly searchable god I hate what Discord has done to the searchability of issues in the tech space?)Oops, might have gone a little off topic there.
Ah, I think my edible just hit, that explains it
OK im gonna stop commenting now.
Depending on how you nuked it, reddit might have just restored the comment behind your back. My reddit account shows 0 posts/comments, but a month ago I got a reply to a comment in a post I made five years ago providing instructions on how to get a game working in Linux.
Yup, I occasionally get replies on posts over a year old that don’t show up in my history because I thought I deleted them.
Edit your posts. Don’t delete them.
Nothing is 100% but my comments were first replaced with excerpts from books in the public domain, twice. Then I went back a third time and replaced the comments with gibberish, then delete. Most of the comments I find still active are just the excerpts from the books. They read like plain English, so it is very difficult for an AI, or even a contractor, to pick up on the fact that it is worthless.
Nah, reddit restoring comments is a myth. You just didn’t delete all your comments, even though probably you thought you did.
See, Reddit, being the duplicitous bitch that it is, doesn’t really show you all your comments when you go to your profile. It’s limited to your last 1000 (?) comments or so, any comment that goes beyond that horizon is gone from your view forever, but it still exists in the thread.
The way to solve that is to first do a GDPR request. After a few weeks you will receive a zip file containing a file with all your comments and a link to it. You can then use an overwrite and delete tool and point it to this information. It will likely run for several hours or even days, depending on how many comments you made, because reddit throttles edit and delete requests, but it will effectively delete everything.
Me too actually
“Why are you trying to do [x]? Have you tried doing [y] instead?”
“You shouldn’t do [y] either, you idiot, you absolute fucking buffoon. You should instead do [z, which costs a fortune and/or requires you to restructure your entire life]”
Thread closed [x] already answered please go to link: completly unrelated topic actually about [a]
But it will be slighly more efficient
“Just install Linux”
goes to goople
searches ‘1980 cx500 only runs on one cylinder’
comment from 2007: “replace this module right here:”
[broken Photobucket link]edit: might as well add the problem. lol
if the carbs are clean and tuned well enough to be ruled out the problem is likely the CDI module as they are over 40 years old and are known to fail. if replacing the CDI doesn’t seem to make a difference the problem is likely the ignition system on the whole. the next step in the process would be the stator but since you have to pull the motor to change it you may as well go ahead and rebuild the ignition system with modern components. there are a couple different aftermarket solutions such as Ignitech. i opted for Rae-San.
So much was lost with PhotoBucket. A mind boggling amount of information is just gone.
Common issue with most image hosters. I think a lot of the time the issue is the users deleting their images, rather than the hoster going down.
I remember someone once made a meme about that:
Ow
i love this
People who write a whole novel about “google is your friend” and try to make you feel stupid for asking a question are the ultimate assholes. You wrote 3 paragraphs just to bully a stranger on the internet when 1 sentence could have answered the question. Thanks for being a royal knob head.
I just googled ‘is google my friend’ and google told me it was not my friend. Help.
google is not your friend. it is a tool at best.
Wrong!
Google: How to do xyz
7 million AI generated SEO optimised bullshit websites: Here’s you do xyz (we don’t know either but we use lots of words Google likes so we get put first)
Literally happens all the damn time anymore
Whole first page is ads and threads of people saying, ‘Just Google it,’ ‘There’s a search function here for a reason,’ ‘thread locked due to frequently asked question,’ etc, etc.
I miss the earlier days of the Internet where people were more helpful. Or hell when Google wasn’t just ads and SEO crap.
And this is why I have always hated every single jackass that responded to a question with “just Google it” even when Google didn’t completely suck cock.
If I had just one single answer from a reputable source doing that, I wouldn’t be asking real people. Search engines were never infallible. Niche topics have always garnered shit results.
This was always dickhead behaviour, but not for the reasons you guys are circlejerking about. Often the answers to these questions are extremely easy to find online (even today, Google is nowhere near as useless as people make it out to be). But the entire point of asking other people through social media or a forum is because you want to engage in discussion with other humans. That’s literally the entire point of these websites: to foster discussion, both for the sake of learning and for the social entertainment we all need. People who sign up to them and then completely shutdown attempts to start discussions are absolutely braindead and don’t understand any of this. Modern forms of social media only encourage this kind of performative social interaction. So many people seem to think the sole purpose of discussion-based social media is to dunk on others with a vicious reply and “win” by earning more points (ratio) instead of having an actual back and forth discussion with another human.
I mean, there has definitely been a noticeable and significant decline in the quality of search engine results, particularly on Google. It used to stand out at least a little bit from Bing (a search engine that went very hard into inserting ads into results early on), but they’ve essentially become indistinguishable. Aesthetics and connections with other platforms like Gmail and YouTube have become the only real reason to stay with one over the other.
Sure, I completely that it has declined significantly. I think the comments in this thread about it “sucking cock”, being “just ads and SEO crap”, or a “bloated, shit site” are hyperbole though. It is still the best search engine for most use-cases and queries, including finding answers to “how do I do X” type questions. I use DuckDuckGo (AKA Bing) but only because it gets close enough to Google’s results to be a superior choice for me overall when I take into account its massive privacy advantages. In terms of results, there is still enough of a gap that I will occasionally need to rely on Google’s results for particular queries. I actually used to use StartPage for this exact reason and only switched because it had issues with VPNs.
I FOUND A STACK OVERFLOW QUESTIONS RECENTLY THAT WAS LITERALLY THIS!
Nr. 1 accepted answer (lots of years ago): something something plenty of information available on Google, no need for this thread
Nr. 2 answer (way fewer years ago): seeing as this is now the first Google result for anything relating to this, here’s how you do it.
(shame I can’t remember what exactly the question was. Please still believe me? 🥺)
(shame I can’t remember what exactly the question was. Please still me? 🥺)
I think about half the threads on stackoverflow fit this criteria
it’s crazy how those comments are aging like milk precisely because google/web search is going to shit (in addition to being dickhead comments ofc)
just weird to look back and think about how we thought it would never change
YouTube searches are also truly awful, and have been for around a year.
a friend of mine discovered the tip to add “before:2025” (or, the current year+1) to your yt search to improve it. i have no clue why that does anything but it reverts it to pre-enshittified functionality
To give google 1(one) droplet of credit, the enshittification didn’t come from them alone. In fact I’m fairly sure that if they could get their way, the page would still return useful results, only, JUST below all the paid ads. SEO Spam doesn’t help THEM either.
The problem is… A lot of the “good” results on google came from like. Enthusiast websites. Webforums. And… Reddit.
Enthusiast Websites are much rarer now. They got consolidated into media conglomerates and then closed down. Only a few remain.
Webforums are in a similar zombified state, most got vored by “social media” and Discord (P.S.: if you are a dev or artist or whatever and use a Discord server as the main helpline/download source for a project you’re doing, fuck you very much, you are the ACTUAL worst <3), which aren’t indexed by search engines.
Then Reddit got Spez’d, so THAT avenue is fucked too.
Fedi isn’t indexed by search engines either (AFAIK), so you can’t do the old " reddit" trick replacing reddit with lemmy. It won’t work.
linux mint forums
And when you finally find some helpful forum with content from 15 years ago, you’ll have someone be like “GUYS I FIGURED IT OUT! Here’s a [broken] link to someone else who solved it” with a dozen or so “Thanks, that solved the issue immediately for me!” Comments after it.
Me lately trying to figure out how to do anything on Linux
Me scrolling through 150 stackoverflow pages and ‘helpful’ third party websites that don’t answer my question
All those letMeGoogleThat links from the 00s have turned into Rick Rolls (figuratively speaking).