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Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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I loved the way you wrote this for some reason. Very clear and well-informed
Probably like most of us, I use reddit as my search for quite literally almost any question or research I do - and this was done multiple times a day
I honestly have no idea what I'm going to do to find information. I absolutely LOVED reading real people's real and genuine with anything. Tech, cooking, intermittent fasting, specific games, guides, custom android roms, careers, I could go on forever. And I would look across dozens of threads and even more comments, and then smash them together in my head to come up with the most likely accurate answer to my problem. And let's not forget when dbags or misinformation is dowvoted to oblivion!
As a techie, I can't even count on my hands how many times I have found someone random person having the same completely random and specific PC issue that I had - and they showed what they tried, what didn't work, then I look in comments and find 6 different valid potential solutions. It was absolutely glorious and so useful
I hope that somehow, something even greater emerges from all of this that fills in this "need". I don't think reddit will ever be the same, and now I'd feel dirty using it to find information even if most of it will probably still be there
EDIT: wanted to add that I'm also worried because reddit was so easy to use and user friendly (at least in the ways we modified it lol) which made it really easy for people to join and add to the mass amount of information on the platform. I'm concerned that kbin/lemmy won't work as a true replacement because they don't seem nearly as straightforward
Trying to Google for anything specific nowadays is almost completely useless, if you cannot find it in the first page of results the rest is usually trash. Googling with Reddit was one of the last ways to get actual insight and/or reviews on things. Corporations are crippling the usability of the internet entirely for the sake of profit.
I definitely moved to DuckDuckGo the moment I realized Google was ignoring the text I was writing on the search box. I was searching for a bug fix in my code for weeks, something very niche and difficult to find. When I finally got the answer and moved on to the following bug, Google kept mixing my previous bug with the new one, making it impossible to find the right answer. It got so used to me being focused on that niche thing, it couldn't believe I moved past it.
DuckDuckGo forced me to write "smart queries" again, giving context on the search text. But it gave me the results I needed. Not the ones Google googlexplained me I needed.
Reddit's UX for the first few years was hugely worse than kbin's is right now, in my opinion. It took a while for it to get nice, and the lessons learned on it are freely available to successors.
All the fediverse stuff might seem like a speedbump, but for the average user, none of it actually matters.