It is clear that the signal to noise ratio of the WWW is getting worse. It’s much harder to find good content when using a good old search engine. And if it’s good it is usually hosted on Reddit or Stackexchange.
So remember, even if it’s easy too Google something (well, it isn’t nowadays), we want to create a fediverse of good content that helps people (I hope). So, it’s always better to write a real answer if you have the time and energy. Please help boost the SNR and reverse the AI fueled information degradation loop.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people are just really bad in using the right searching terms, and then quickly shifting through all the info to find the right information. Googling well truly is a skill. Though be it a strange one.
Same! Had a discussion recently with a guy searching about gun law in Austria for 3D printed weapons. He showed me his Search Query. Didn’t even include the word “Law”. People just really forgot how to properly query search engines.
It’s not even much of a skill anymore now that there’s so much focus on natural language question and answer. You can straight up Google “how do I X?” And get a relevant answer for just about anything.
Edit: I’m not even talking about generative AI here, googling simple questions without using AI worked well before the AI craze.
That’s not exactly true. The AI answers are often wrong or incomplete. You still need skill, it’s just that the required skill has shifted to accepting this is true, recognizing when the AI answer is not complete and correct, (which can be more difficult due to the answers often being seemingly correct, yet slightly wrong or incomplete), and then doing what you’d do in any other search that nets poor results: adjust and search more or dig further down the given results stack.
I was going to bring up card catalogues and microfiche, but it is more difficult now, especially with all the AI written articles popping up a la carte as top results.
I guess it would be like the physical library having a fee^1 to enter, the librarian men and women in lingerie and banana hammocks, and all the publications unsorted: Fiction and Non-Fiction together with celebrity magazines, The National Enquirer, and nazi publications… and lots of torn out pages.
^1 Fee replaces ads. I’d rather not picture a world where the advertising in the show Maniac exists. (Can’t afford the bus? The ad-reader shows up and speaks ads at you until you have “earned” the $1.25, or whatever.)
Imagine asking chatgpt and it tells you to “Google it”
Didn’t it already tell some teen to kill themself recently? It fits right in with the worst of the internet.
I assume that grok did that, just because that’s on brand
This will be Gemini in 2025
Just Ask Jeeves.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a revival of an AI Jeeves.
Um, where’s Jeeves? Wtf.
Oh god, I thought a wooden stake had been driven through Jeeve’s heart…
That just turns him on, that kinky bastard!
Fine I’ll just tell people to Duckduckgo it! /s
Jokes aside I agree with this message. Better to give at least a basic idea on where to find something, or just don’t be a pedantic cock and give me the damn link, your word is not good enough okay buddy, pal, friend.
I’ll just tell people to Duckduckgo it!
Duck it.
What I’d like to become the standard is:
If the question makes it super obvious the asker has zero clue what they’re asking or trying to do, lightly correct and steer them to beginner friendly resources.
If the question is competent but focusing the wrong direction or will lead to a bad habit, essentially, they know just enough to be dangerous but they’re about to be dangerous, more pointed and technical correction and steering them to either articles or better search terms to use.
If it’s a pointed question with the information to show they’ve done the normal information gathering and either need opinions that are beyond the theory or book standard information or they don’t answer the question, answer the question. Ideally also giving sources to back up your answers.
Bonus points if you can do the above without coming across as a dick. Unless they ask to ask. You can be a dick to those people.
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Old Reddit threads where the answer giver deleted their account & all their comments.
I don’t feel bad about wiping my account, as almost everything on it was useless.
Also I was pissed off at the time, and my goal was to make more people dislike going on Reddit.
Or scrambled all of their posts after APIgate (or whatever we’re calling it). Perhaps they came here, which means OP is right in saying we can be a new source of useful answers.
I’m not sure if Lemmy or other Fediverse posts even get indexed by any of the search engines. I’ve yet to see any in a search result.
They absolutely do. Not only Lemmy posts in general, but I have found my own content completely unintentionally on searches several times.
I guess it’s a matter of lack of good posts that could become the desired search result then. Time will tell if we ever get to that point.
The way that all the copies of the content link to the original post should be some kind of SEO hack. I wonder if it’s triggering specific rules in search engines that detect it and downrank it as cheating.
That’s why when I left reddit I don’t delete my posts (even if those posts suck)
Bonus:
I did, bc reddit locked up my content, and wanted to use it to train a LLM.
Let people ask again, here, in the fediverse.
That’s assuming we’re able to draw the people with answers here into the fediverse, in the long run.
What gets us there is long term stability.
Grow organically, and they will come.
First, the tech enthusiasts, then tech journos, then normal journos, then normals.
It’s how online spaces grow.
Just search for obscure shitty pocketknife models and my dinkum pictures from here are among the top results, sometimes even #1. I therefore conclude that this is not outside the realm of possibility.
Is it the mantis? I had to use kagi and set it to fediverse for it to pop up for me. On firefox and google it it nowhere to be seen for me.
(already had a feeling that someone will say this)
I won’t delete my posts/comments because I want to be helpful, that’s it.
But if I prefer deleting my posts/comments, I will archive it instead.
I respect what r/ArtFundamentals did, and it should be an example: After reddit’s APIpocalypse, they don’t support reddit and decided to close the subreddit. But the advices from the subreddit wasn’t gone–in fact they actually archive it in their own website:
I wrote a script (well, modified one of my old bots) to copy and archive all of my comments before editing them. I left a note in the comments for how to find me in case they wanted the original comment. I felt like that was a fair compromise
Sadly, DuckDuckGo really sucks ass at searching the fediverse.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Lemmy+don't+reply+just+google+it&t=fpas&ia=web
Even if you type in the exact words of the post, it will display 1 post and that is it, then switch to other sources. Probably because of all of the different server names that aren’t Lemmy.
On the bright side, while the top instance hit for “Lemmy” in a Google search is “lemmy.ml”, the top DDG hit is “Lemmy.World”. Not only does LW have ~80% of all Lemmy users but it also shows a default post sort using All rather than Local as ML does. Thus while the chief takeaway from a normie user going to ML is “wow, these guys really hate the USA/Western world” and “bUt BoTh SiDeS eQuAl ThO”, the takeaway from using DDG to find LW is a much more positive experience of “Lemmy”.
So if DDG searches of Lemmy are not always better than Google, they are least sometimes are.:-)
Reddit lost nothing when you deleted your comments, they still exist on their servers and are likely being used to train LLMs now. All that was lost was other peoples ability to readt them
And without my.comment, fewer hits because users cannot see it, which means less people provide training data.
No single drop feels responsible for the flood.
Sure thats correct, but I’m a little uneasy with the idea of “burn down a useful resource for people becuase fewer people helped people results in slower increases of data to Reddit”
A trap for people isn’t something I’d consider “useful”.
Just like a pedo van offering free food to kids… sure kids get fed, but at what cost?
That does hurt Reddits usability for users, though, which is bad for business in general.
I can kinda get the sentiment. I left during the protests too and I can see people wanting to damage Reddit, which is also completely deserved. Of course now Reddit is respecting the right to your comments even less and scrapes them for Google’s LLM models.
Eh. I torched all my comments when I left (and posts, too) and I’ve said before and still maintain that I’m not sorry in the slightest.
If anything wants to know anything I said that was relevant to anything (and not the usual cavalcade of political bickering) they can come here and ask. I’ll gladly retype any of it.
Fuck reddit. The quicker we can dispose of it and just rip that Band-Aid off, the better.
“Just ChatGPT it” is going to become a thing.
“Just make shit up” is basically saying the same thing.
and ill throw that suggestion into the fucking trash.
Until it gets paywalled
When I ask someone for clarification via their expertise, I usually reflexively indicate that I cannot trust google because of the incursion of AI slop, and even if it shows THEM accurate results, it is no guarantee that it will show ME those same results.
If you don’t show me that you at least made some effort to investigate: No.
Its a bit annoying when i google something and search forums and cant find an answer and i go to ask reddit or a forum and someone says"just google it" like am i really expected to make a preamble every ask-post that I’ve searched already?
i really expected to make a preamble every ask-post that I’ve searched already?
Yes. You need to show your effort, otherwise your question will be considered lazy. This is specially true regarding technical issues in volunteer forums.
The seminal essay “How To Ask Questions the Smart Way” explains these and other finer points.
Never thought I would see anybody call having to scroll past some sponsored links and reddit results “hard”. Compared to what, farting? Honestly folks, after 2025 we’ll probably all have a different view of what’s easy and what’s hard.
It’s not hard. It’s that information from people has become more fact than a single persons opinion on a topic. Do you have any idea how many variables are involved in why my cucumbers are dying in my green house? How many links and articles I’ve read before just asking it to the community and finding the answer in literally the first person who replied?
Information, wisdom, knowledge are all empowered by a community, and trusting a search engine to populate those will eliminate the community aspect of information gathering. It’ll cause the watered down, lost in information practices that we have going on today.
Doing this, in 30 years no one will be able to grow cucumbers in their greenhouse becuase all the information you’ll have will be based off the same shitty technique and everyone’s attempt at that technique, and no one will talk about the nuanced variables.
The cucumbers is an example.
I too value the advice of people sharing their experience on reddit, but I also see way too many highly upvoted posts crediting Nikola Tesla with inventing everything but fire. Top google results are increasingly useless junk, but so are top social media results. Having grown up with physical encyclopedias I wouldn’t say information is “hard” to find.
Physical encyclopedias are just time capsules of knowledge, sometimes irrelevant. And pricy too. Having them and then saying information is easy to find is entitlement.
I see what you’re saying. Top up voted corporate social media posts and AI finding top results for search engines and query requests is exactly why people need to ask other people wtf is going on with anything. It’s confusing enough to try to parse through irrelevant information, maybe asking someone will narrow down what you need to know.
Encyclopedias are republished regularly and are free to use at the library, so really… time capsules and entitlement, srsly? Whatevs.
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I know right? People conversing about their problems?! The nerve!!! This is MY space, not theirs. People should only be allowed to post what I approve!!! and I do NOT approve oc asking for help, those fucking betacucks. let me scroll linux memes in peace
For the last decade, the vast majority of helpful results for obscure things has been reddit posts of users asking the exact same question. Usually the person answering knows some context that the person asking isn’t aware of needing to include in their question, which is why they couldn’t find it on their own. Heck, a lot of the time I was missing the same piece of information!
Without someone answering the ‘easy’ question, there wouldn’t have been any results that were clear answers to those questions.
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When asking about the Beatles, are they asking about those still living or all of the founding members? Sice many bands have changed members over time, could they be asking about the time in the band or their age in years?
Suse, this was easy for the Beatles since they had a single lineup and are popular enough that all of that is easy to find. But it is a good example of a simple question that could be asking different things based on context and even if they get an answer it isn’t necessarily what they are looking for, but they didn’t know how to ask. Follow up questions are possible when interacting with others who may point out missing context, but not for search engines.
Also, kind of funny that you are an instance with ‘discuss’ in the name and you are opposed to discussion about easy to search things.
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I’m all for people discussing anything they like. But if you’re just wondering how many ancient world wonders there are, maybe have a look at the Wikipedia article first.
El oh el
I agree even though I will sarcastically answer things with how easy it was to find, but I still give the information. I ask questions about things I could google myself, but I am not looking for just and answer. oftentimes Im looking for a nuanced answer and hope to find someone with knowledge around the subject that can give me a human take. not that I need a human take to know whats human because im so human myself and all. its not alien at all to me and hey who said anything about aliens. heh. heh.
As a software engineer…
Don’t just say “just Google it”. Guide them to the documentation. Ask them about the detail of the question. If it’s an bug, try asking them if they can reproduce the bug.
This reminded me of the time I’m looking for how to do certain things in a software. I found a reddit post asking about the same issue and this is the reply OP got:
Here is the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/mupjsf/how_to_showhide_i3status_bar_taskbar/
Imagine. You search the issue you have. Found the ONLY reddit thread that talks about this, and the ONLY thread that talks about the issue have NO USEFUL ANSWER and, worse, the only reply is TELLING YOU TO SEARCH IT YOURSELF. This got upvoted too 😭😭😭.
Luckily, I found the solution (tbh the solution was there in the docs, but the wording wasn’t clear and it makes it hard to search) and I end up replying the OP the actual answer.
So, this is a PSA for the fediverse: be nice. It’s free.
While we’re still young, we have a chance to become a better forum.
Also possibly an unpopular opinion: you shouldn’t downvote a question, even if it was asked multiple times. Guide them to the answer instead
Has this same energy: https://xkcd.com/979/
Even worse is when they edit their post to add “Never mind, figured it out.”
These people should be unable to reproduce. Just as soon as they edit the post, a shriek of agony can be heard for miles.
I ran across an example of this recently, on fucking Github. Bitch it’s your goddamn issue ticket, on a fucking dev site, and you returned to say you figured it out but can’t be fucked to explain how? GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I’ve posted my solution to my own question a few times (the rare occasion when I’ve been unlucky enough to have an unsolved problem, and lucky enough to fix it).
It’s extra work but every few years I get a note of thanks or up vote, even a decade or more later.
Also Google results differ since like a decade. It may show for you in California, but its nowhere to be found for me in Iran
That insulting is satisfactory
Something, something, recursion.
Looks like you solved your problem by RTFM ;-)
I’ve never seen this acronym, but I’m pretty sure it says reading the fucking manual
Just google it.
As funny as that is, I can’t imagine Google would want to hide anything more than this piece of knowledge right here.
ftfy
its a website that has man pages for stuff.
But what about woman pages? smh so much for inclusion
damm true.
Being nice isn’t free. It takes energy and time. It’s worth it though.
Wow that is infuriating.
The amount of times I’ve googled a problem, and the first result is a forum post of someone just being told to google it then locking the thread is way too high.
I have started getting pissed at people who snap at someone “Don’t necro this post” (Or any of the numerous other things they say), on information that is well outdated that could fucking seriously use an updated answer.
End rant…I’d prefer not, though…I want to keep this rant going.
These ones plus “this is a duplicate of <link to question that is only kinda related and doesn’t address the specific problem being asked in the newer question>”.
Fuck busy body moderators. The people you “have power” over can see how stupid and incompetent you are and being able to shut down forum conversations about it doesn’t hide it, it just means people know not to bother saying it where you’re looking.
Github sucks.
There’s a few things I hate people for regardless of context and one of those is lmgtfy links
