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.

  •  LlamaSutra   ( @LlamaSutra@sh.itjust.works ) 
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    2 years ago

    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

      •  kadu   ( @kadu@lemmy.world ) 
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        2 years ago

        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.

        • Grab those comments and repost them in a place where you are more comfortable. You can keep that knowledge out there without needing to keep your account if you don’t want to. Some of those apps actually give you your comment history in a file when they’re done.

        • I’ve been on the fence about wiping my account as well. It’s just hard for me - my history, wholesome interaction with users, friends made, how many people I’ve helped, I’ve written a few guides. Man it just sucks. (the largest guide I’ve written, for Vindictus, is partially outdated, but also I put in sooooooo much effort into it and I’m really proud of it. maybe I’ll download and save as a .doc or something)

          I think I just need to hear someone’s stance on it, hear their points, and be persuaded

          I also need to figure out -when- to do that if I end up doing it. I assume before the 30th, but I’m not sure if some have started doing it already, and why

        • Honestly? ChatGPT (4) is basically a stackoverflow 2.0. It’s my goto when I want help with specific problems. There are alternative options, is what I mean.

          I deleted all my comments on Reddit. I do not want them to benefit from my knowledge even if it might inconvenience someone else

            •  juniper_ghost   ( @juniper_ghost@beehaw.org ) 
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              2 years ago

              I have seen a lot of highly upvoted comments on reddit which were very, very wrong.

              I still use reddit for help on things. But for topics that I’m less knowledgeable about (so I can’t gauge the accuracy myself), I try to just take everything with a grain of salt.

            • One of my favorite parts about reddit is people will always be there to call out your BS, whether it be via downvotes or a comment. I always appreciated that because more times than not, they will tell them they’re wrong and explain why, sometimes even with sources. A lot of the time, they redirect people to better sources of information, like a telegram group about a custom android rom

              Of course, this isn’t true 100% of the time, not even downvoted comment is wrong - like the other person commented, it’s fair to take it with a grain of salt

              That’s why my solution for this is to research a topic EXTENSIVELY by reading tons of threads and comments about it, put them all together in my head and consider them all, and then decide on the best outcome/answer based on all the research combined. That way, I don’t just rely on 1 person’s response and hope they’re right. For most things though, them being wrong might not even make a huge negative impact

              I’ve found that Redditors also generally have our backs - they warn us about stuff to do or not to do, that companies don’t warn us about because it would otherwise profit them

        •  NovoDuck   ( @NovoDuck@beehaw.org ) 
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          2 years ago

          If you don’t have too many maybe consider posting them on Lemmy as new posts before deleting them? Keeps the information discoverable and helps populate Lemmy with good content, while giving Reddit the middle finger - TRIPLE WIN!

    •  Mia   ( @Mia@feddit.de ) 
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      2 years ago

      The fact is that there is some useful info that only is on Reddit.

      I mean reddit has become a insanely huge knowledge base for all sorts of technical problems and other topics. I’ve searched with site:reddit.com so many times for problem solving.

      • Yeah exactly and me too! It will still have its use (until they decide to remove that too).

        Funnily enough, I’ve found that ChatGPT gives really good technical troubleshooting tips (like DIY and programming stuff). Cuts my troubleshoot time down tremendously.

    •  rarkgrames   ( @rarkgrames@lemmy.world ) 
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      2 years ago

      I think this is exactly right. I plan to use info available on reddit as reference material if needs be, but I will no longer be posting and therefore creating more content for reddit to sell on in the future.

    •  hadrian   ( @hadrian@beehaw.org ) 
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      2 years ago

      I’d be interested to know from someone more tech-savvy whether googling advice, and then clicking on the cached version, still counts as viewing reddit. Because I’d ideally still like to append reddit to my google searches without giving them ad views.

      AKA if someone monetises advice given for free, we should be able to freely access it.

  • 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.

  •  Swintoodles   ( @Swintoodles@beehaw.org ) 
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    2 years ago

    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!

    • I have set a 0 minute timer on Boost and Infinity, so I can’t navigate to reddit. On the first day of blackout I had to open reddit to try and find the name for lemmy, squabbles and raddle so I had some alternatives as I couldn’t remember them!

      I have opened and closed youtube way too many times. It’s been tough. I even went to 4chan after many year last night. A real blast from the past.

      Full relapse yesterday.

      I’m hoping to do better today.

      We so need a RedditsAnonymous!

      -edit- I said on the first day I went to reddit… but it’s only been one day!! wow. that’s embarrassing lol

      •  boobas   ( @boobas@beehaw.org ) 
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        2 years ago

        It’s going to take time to reposition, but for the long haul this is the best course of action, personally I’ve uninstalled and blocked - but I do miss some of the subreddits from before.

        This community seems to be in its early steps, so every contribution means progress, and sooner rather than later we’ll be back to where we want to be!

  •  altruisticfix   ( @altruisticfix@vlemmy.net ) 
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • 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

    •  flatbield   ( @furrowsofar@beehaw.org ) 
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      2 years ago

      For what it is worth, I am about your age. The special thing about Reddit is scale. I come from the days of Usenet and it had scale. CompuServe did too. So this can suceed if people want it too. I am not going back for now. Deleted my app. Thinking about deleting my account. For me Tax, Law, and Medical stuff seem like the difficult gaps.

  •  farados   ( @farados@vlemmy.net ) 
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    2 years ago

    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.

    •  fiah   ( @fiah@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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      perhaps some lunatic out there will try preserving some of that in the fediverse, although I guess it will be nigh impossible to separate the quality content from the mountains of shit

      edit: of course they’re already on it: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiveteam_has_saved_over_108_billion_reddit/

      ArchiveTeam has been archiving Reddit posts for a while now, but we are running out of time. So far, we have archived 10.81 billion links, with 150 million to go.
      Recent news of the Reddit API cost changes will force many of the top 3rd party Reddit apps to shut down. This will not only affect how people use Reddit, but it will also cause issues with many subreddit moderation bots which rely on the API to function. Many subreddits have agreed to shut down for 48 hours on June 12th, while others will be gone indefinitely unless this issue is resolved. We are archiving Reddit posts so that in the event that the API cost change is never addressed, we can still access posts from those closed subreddits.

      •  hadrian   ( @hadrian@beehaw.org ) 
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        2 years ago

        I’d be interested to know from someone more tech-savvy whether googling advice, and then clicking on the cached version, still counts as viewing reddit. Because I’d ideally still like to append reddit to my google searches without giving them ad views.

        AKA if someone monetises advice given for free, we should be able to freely access it.

      • This will be how I use it as well. Reddit usually tends to have the most concise, up-to-date answers for a lot of questions that I have about most my hobbies. Especially video games.

        That will hopefully change, but it was such a good way to basically guarantee I found the information I actually wanted.

    •  MoonRocketeer   ( @MoonRocketeer@beehaw.org ) 
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      2 years ago

      I have this problem because Google hasn’t been as good the past few years unless I append “reddit” to my search. During all of this going on, I’ve been trying to be diligent about viewing the cached version instead, but it’s not always available.

      • Really specific issues are more often than not only found in reddit, and that’s not even all, for me at least; a lot of those answers in reddit are short and to the point. Sometimes you search for the solution of a problem and find posts on websites filled with irrelevant information that you don’t really have the time/patience to read. . .

        •  Delain   ( @Delain@feddit.cl ) 
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          2 years ago

          I’m worried, not all but large enough group of Reddit users are already deleting their account, and with that are gone years of knowledge and good answer threads using the tool that retroactively edits your comments.

          They have their full right, of course, but it will be a net loss for the future.

          •  zeldis   ( @zeldis@sh.itjust.works ) 
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            2 years ago

            There will be archives made available by various groups I’m sure. And that’s assuming Reddit doesn’t just go undelete all those. Either way I’d guess that certain subreddits/communities will end up finding their new home here or elsewhere and over time the information that shows up on reddit will become more and more stale

            • If you delete an account now, all the threads it ever commented on will lose context and become useless unless archived already. That’s the situation we’re in, people are deleting their accounts without thinking about all the content that they have contributed to and destroying it.

              •  bionicjoey   ( @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ) 
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                2 years ago

                I think their mindset is that they don’t want Reddit to profit off of those contributions. I understand that, but personally I won’t be nuking my account, even though RiF is the only way I really browse the site.

                • Once everything is archived and the archives are properly searchable, destroying the content on reddit by deleting accounts and issuing GDPR deletion requests to make sure they can’t leave the content up and anonymize it is a very reasonable thing to do.

  •  lodronsi   ( @lodronsi@beehaw.org ) 
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    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.

  •  neal   ( @neal@lemmy.world ) 
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    2 years ago

    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.

  •  GraceGH   ( @GraceGH@beehaw.org ) 
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    2 years ago

    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…

  •  prlang   ( @prlang@beehaw.org ) 
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    2 years ago

    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?

    •  Jenga   ( @Jenga@beehaw.org ) 
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      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.

      •  prlang   ( @prlang@beehaw.org ) 
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        2 years ago

        Yeah I can see a path for this ramping up slowly, especially given the horrible mismanagement of places like Reddit. Even if they weather the storm of the blackout, given the official app, it seems like they’re just chasing the same infinite dumb stream of memes design that places like Facebook and Tiktok have already embraced. Probably because that’s where the money is? I don’t know.

        The more niche communities are always what made me hang out at Reddit though! I’d bet they continue to alienate and marginalize them enough that more people continually jump ship over the next couple of years. I do hope Beehaw and other spaces like it succeed in becoming a non-profit and truly community driven, and the web decentralizes itself again.

    •  fiah   ( @fiah@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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      2 years ago

      it’s heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here!

      it just works! I don’t know what happens with this reply because I guess beehaw.org is offline right now, but I figure you’ll eventually see it? That this is possible with an organic collection of instances is pretty damn cool, and I hope it keeps on working as more people pile on

        •  fiah   ( @fiah@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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          2 years ago

          so the communities that run on a specific instance are dead in the water if that instance is frozen? I thought that maybe the other instances might continue exchanging posts regardless of whether the original instance is currently online

          •  pivotraze   ( @pivotraze@infosec.pub ) 
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            2 years ago

            Honestly, I’m not sure. I would hope it could continue with other non-frozen Instances. But in my very limited experience so far, I’ve seen it do that (click Reply, and turn into a spinning circle) a few times. Just never finishes.

            Then again, I see this thread is on Beehaw and I’m commenting to it. So I have no idea. I do see my Subscribe is still pending though

    •  RoyBeer   ( @RoyBeer@feddit.de ) 
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      it’s heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here!

      How do you see that? ok nvm I just realized it’s right behind the username

      It just seemed to complicated for average person to grok.

      Oh, yeah definitely. I’m still struggling to wrap my head around the most basic things. Like, initially I created multiple accounts until I realized I could actually just search for stuff in other instances.

  •  Wiitigo   ( @Wiitigo@lemmy.world ) 
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    2 years ago

    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.

    •  Turtle   ( @Turtle@lemmy.world ) 
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      2 years ago

      This is a very good question - when I’m troubleshooting things my default search pattern is: “<problem> 2023 reddit”, because 99% of the other search results are pure garbage.

  •  eight_byte   ( @eight_byte@feddit.de ) 
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    2 years ago

    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.