Like it or not, years of insight, experience and expertise live in Reddit threads. But accessing some of them just got harder.
Investing time and effort sharing know how and knowledge on a corporate social media was a mistake.
The Internet is intrinsically ephemeral. Data is always a few pulled wires away from going offline. Digital support lifespan is surprisingly short. Those aren’t stone slabs. Even paper lasts longer. The Internet’s strength is the distribution. For the data to endure, you need dedicated resources and individuals. Enthusiasts. Guardians. Professionals. If the responsible organization’s goal is profit, it’s doomed from the start.
Anything regarding pc building is f-u-c-k fucked rn. Trying to gets some finer info on bios settings yesterday was fucked lol
This has already been affecting me a bit. Now I’m not complaining because I fully support it. But I’ve recently been looking up product suggestions, tech help, etc and many of the reddit links in the search results were private communities. I was like “oh so this is actually having an impact at least.”
I actually wish more subs would stay dark, especially since the CEO was basically like “they’ll get over it soon”
Good. That is the whole point.
Yeah it’s been inconvenient to Google stuff and have private subreddits come up, but that’s life. Hopefully that information will begin moving to Lemmy instances as time goes on.
Yea this is definitely going to be a thing for tech questions especially. But to be fair we were always going to reckon with the issue sooner or later as long as a single private company is the sole owner of a site that ate all the specialized forums which would have previously housed such information. The best time to rip this bandaid off would have been before reddit was big, but there will be no better time then now.
I jsut click the cached google link. usually works except comments under a few levels wont expand
Well that’s our fault for letting information get congregated in a centralized service to be fair. Any information that is stored without redundancy on a single service should be considered already lost.
The Fediverse doesn’t fix this by the way, as far as I know. The data can be accessed from other instances, but as I understand it the data still lives on the instance. The day an instance does, poof, all the information it contains goes away.
But! It makes it easier to make information redundant, by having an instance that automatically archives information for example.
We had a problem, many people knew that we had a problem but we did nothing to fix it. We have the same issue on StackOverflow or even GitHub, by the way (although the latter is a bit mitigated by people having local copies of the repositories for example). It will come bite us in the arse one day.
Hopefully those communities that choose to stay dark indefinitely will migrate at least some of their information to external platforms for non-reddit access.
I doubt they’d be able/go so far as to export all the threads, but I’m thinking that it’d be nice if the communities with robust and informative wikis would at least make those available elsewhere. Same with the Fediverse too; I feel like any compilation of information like a wiki ought to be hosted elsewhere for some form of redundancy if possible.
Migrating the knowledge is one part but it doesn’t fix the dead links in the search results from major search providers. And, unfortunately, that is a hard problem to solve because a static (or nearly static) page like a wiki on a niche website doesn’t necessarily get the same ranking in the indexer as a community on Reddit would.
Yeah that’s true. The only hope at that point would be to copy the search result and plug it into the wayback machine and cross your fingers. If this keeps up, I wonder if the algorithms at Google et al. would start to de-prioritize reddit links over time.
