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Too bad. Hey, crazy idea: let’s create an open alternative for reddit with good content! Maybe something in the fediverse or so.
that would never work
I think you’re onto something
The users who wrote the content are going to get a share of the money, right Reddit? Riiight? /s
Tangentially related- I fucking hate discord
Discord is fine for chatting, voice, and iterating quickly on projects. I have no idea why people want to think it’s a forum. That’s ridiculous.
Its pretty awful for all tbiae things if you care about privacy or can’t signup for an account
Obviously you would need an account to use it.
also not searchable at all. its an information blackhole.
Iirc strictly speaking you don’t need an account to use it, but most servers disable that option for anti spam reasons. But if you’re setting up a server for friends they can chat from a browser without having to sign up first
Discord is self-hosted?
No, but discord chats are usually called “servers”
We use it for our friend group, as we have pub nights, group meals, vacations etc. we also all do each other’s cat care when we’re out of town, so we have a channel devoted to pet photos etc. works well enough for us.
Unpopular opinion: I never liked discord for chatting either. I found it strangely confusing trying to keep track of logins for each group
You may be thinking of Slack
? Discord has one log in.
I fucking hate discord
It’s Cancer, have an upvote.
Would lemmy instances do this?
I know they can’t afford to now, but hypothetically? A lot of people here don’t seem to like data scraping for AI.
You don’t need to scrape. If you want to get all the content on Lemmy, just set up an instance and subscribe to all the top communities, and the instances will just send you all the content.
So there isn’t really a way to monetise or block it. I guess you could only federate to a whitelist, but the biggest instances will federate by default with any new instances until they are given a reason to defederate.
Your Lemmy posts are already being scraped for AI
The level of effort it would take to prevent would be infeasible to ask of even a non volunteer admin let alone literally all of them
Your Lemmy posts are already being scraped for AI
Good, hopefully it’ll make AI that is slightly less toxic than the rest of the internet.
It always baffles me that people don’t want their content represented in an AI - every word you write that gets indexed is a vote for how future AI will behave.
Wait, do you actually want those companies to make even more money from your data, and want these environmentally disastrous “bullshit generators” to keep on going? I’m not saying stopping them is realistically possible, but if I had to choose, I’d greatly prefer a world without AI.
You cannot choose a world without AI. They will get built regardless of what you want.
With that in mind, the optimal (least bad) outcome is that your world views are represented in the dataset.
That’s what I figured, but I am envisioning a future where lemmy is huge and the network of admins is quite sizable.
I guess that doesn’t change much?
It’s structural - you can be open or locked down, and it’s hard to decentralize if you’re not open
You can make it easier or harder to work with that data, but ultimately it’s obsfucation - you could make it hard to parse and obscure details, but ultimately if you want decentralized federation you can’t hide too much
- Run Lemmy instance
- Gain userbase
- Intercept data users are reading and posting from your instance and others
- Feed to AI
- Profit?
Lemmy is way less privacy oriented than reddit and that’s by design.
Some Lemmy instances disallow indexing in robots.txt, however indexers can choose to ignore that and actually blocking them takes a lot more effort.
Some places on a “budget” like Ao3 just rate limit hard.
I don’t like that solution at all though.
The cycle continues:
- Hey you guys can have everything for free
- WTF this is expensive to provide, I think I’m gonna start taking advantage of you guys which someone will pay me to do
- WTF where’s everyone going
- WTF I’m still losing money and always have been
- Screw you guys, screw everybody, I didn’t want y’all anyway
- (fades into irrelevance, gets bought by someone and stripped for parts)
Idk it’s not as pithy as Cory Doctorow’s version I guess
Anyway we’re at step 5 at this point
Yeah, Reddit is Digging its own grave.
It’s getting Fark’d
honestly I’m not convinced step 6 is inevitable. I think enough people are okay with whatever reddit does.
Enough consumers are okay with it, but the core geeks and nerds that created, curated, and moderated the content have jumped ship.
The cruise line is still sailing and there are still drinks and snacks so nobody has noticed the staff have jumped ship. There’s management, low level volunteers, and thousands of kids, moms, and dads.
But sooner or later people are gonna get tired of snacks and flip their shit when management tells them the people who know how to make the steaks have just all fuckin ✨ inexplicably disappeared✨
Content curated by “the core geeks and nerds” might appeal to “geeks and nerds”, not to those consumers.
They want “consumer” content. And if one day they get tired of it then I doubt any amount of “steak” would have stopped them leaving anyway, since that was never what they were looking for. It’s not like reddit has to be the only place they visit in the internet, nor is the internet their only source of consumption.
That’s a fantasy we all hold here because we don’t like Reddit. Reddit doesn’t care that nerds have gone and normies are left behind. People keep using the site and throwing money at “super upvotes”. They’ve floated on the stock market and are doing well. The site is nowhere near dying like Digg. Deep, cerebral, meaningful content might have suffered; but hardly anyone cares as long as they get to see recycled memes, making judgemental comments on other people’s relationships, porn and politics. Their main content is lowest common denominator shit, and it always has been. Facebook is far more shitty and is still going strong. I’m sure Reddit will be fine without us and with their ongoing enshitification, no matter how much we fantasise about their demise.
People don’t realize how much of reddit content is made by bot farms and advertising agencies, propaganda outlets with bots to spare. Which is what’s keeping the normies entertained, not the nerds, not the niche community of a few thousand people.
People like the one you’re replying to always are so sure their echo chamber is right when reality is like complete opposite. Most people on reddit are lurkers and not terminally online people. They just want to scroll and fucking waste time. Community, subs and their mods or rules be damned.
They don’t care if the cat videos are on a banana sub. they’ll happily upvote and scroll away while the terminally online will start complaining why the post is not fit, a repost, or against the rules for 100s of time. And as always, once they leave, they think it is dead.
They don’t care if the cat videos are on a banana sub.
I don’t know why but I can’t stop laughing at this
it’s been over a year since the main exodus. if they haven’t noticed the “core geeks” are gone by now, they never will. pure arrogance imo.
The key capitalistic trick is to time your step 2 just when you have a critical mass on your platform. Upper management has understood that our shitty paywall will remove x% of our users from our platform. But if (100-x)% of our users can pay $y annually, we can sustain our business model and make $z of profit each year. PR will take care of all the backlash but it’s all calculated.
LMAO searching “____ reddit” is the only time I visit their site.
They just really have no clue.
There are numerous occasions where someone has a lingering question on Reddit that I see and know the answer to. It’s too bad it’s on Reddit because I no longer contribute to that website, and refuse to.
All the decent answers I find are from 5+ years ago. I check the user’s activity and they normally quit the place. Warms the heart.
just begin with site:reddit.com test for ddg and it still works
For old posts. I can’t find new posts on DDG. I find them on Google but not on DDG.
I tried brave search begin with site:reddit.com test and it still works
Are they new posts or old ones? They are blocking new ones, not old ones.
I tested and it got lots of reddit queries from even 2 years ago afaik.
They are blocking new ones, not old ones.
I even have diverse reddit queries from last week and even 2 years ago. this workaround is still ok tbh
New means from yesterday, not from last week
new posts do not work
this post in /r/selfhosted is from 8hr ago: SWEKIT v0.1 - an open source library to build software engineering agents (DEVIN) in a agentic framework agnostic manner!
reddit/redlib: https://redlib.kylrth.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1eb86lf/swekit_v01_an_open_source_library_to_build/
doesn’t appear in DDG results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Areddit.com+SWEKIT+v0.1+-+an+open+source+library+to+build+software+engineering+agents+(DEVIN)+in+a+agentic+framework+agnostic+manner!&t=ffit
Based on my testing if you filter results by the last week or last day you get nothing. Past month works.
Good, their answers are generally crap, and I wish they wouldn’t show in searches anyway.
I mostly feel the opposite.
Reddit is one of the only search results that actually has content made by humans.
I mean, you’re right if by humans you mean kids.
Depending on the subject, I encounter more and more threads with <deleted by user> content. And billions and billions and billions of results that are either spam or written by unprofessionals.
The smart crowd is not there anymore. The smart crowd that once was there, has removed the content that Reddit was worth visiting for. Let the Googzz have them and sell ads to each other.
thanks to them for making my deredditification that much easier!
The only way they get my clicks now are when I Google something and they come up.
They really keep making sure that I don’t end up there.
libredirect helps with that on desktop
(browser extension that turns links to sites like reddit, youtube, etc into links to redlib, invidious)
Your fault for using a major search engine honestly
Brave search got an option for that.
We need that for DDG. Opt-in, of course, but with a banner that makes it clear why is that really needed
begin with site:reddit.com test is much more accurate to get reddit search on brave search tbh
So glad I found this alternative. reddit, mods are psychos and the average user not much better
