Have you ever used Reddit’s search? If yes, did you really have a positive experience with it? Personally I found it quite terrible, UX wise in particular. Many people online seem to agree. If you’re looking for something on Reddit it’s actually easier to Google and restrict the site to reddit.com
I’ve used it on occasion…. IMO it’s not bad at finding you something related to your query, but it pales in comparison to google for finding something specific.
I have on several occasions copy-pasted a recent post’s exact title into reddit’s internal search and received a mountain of irrelevant results that categorically failed to contain what I’d specified verbatim. I’m pretty sure the fucking thing is just hooked up to random number generator. It’s hilariously useless.
According to the article, yes. I think demanding some kind of compensation from LLM companies is reasonable but this feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I mean I get your point but Hadrian’s reign specifically (as well as his predecessor’s and successor’s) is considered to be the high point of the Empire
I’m pretty sure reddit’s search is basically fake, a stopgap “todo” placeholder that never got done. It always seemed like they wanted us to forget that Reddit is even supposed to be searchable, but now we know that search really is against their mission somehow. Even from the perspective of greed it never made sense to me.
Reddit’s search was broken when I joined in 2009 and it never improved. The only thing that made Reddit searchable was Google.
Reddit somehow missed that the value of the was in the comments, not the post. Post titles are easily searchable but searching the comments using Reddit’s own search is still difficult. It mystifies me how badly the people running Reddit misunderstand the most basic things about it.
I doubt reddit makes much revenue from traffic generated by search queries. I suspect People endlessly scrolling their feed are more likely to click ads
Have you never searched for a problem where you wanted to hear actual people talk about the solution? If I don’t suffix it with “Reddit” I just get SEO spam/AI generated articles which may or may not actually be useful. Usually I want to know what real people think about the issue.
100% agree. While I think it might be easier to get to a relevant result more quickly in certain cases, I’ve never needed to suffix reddit to my searches to find what I need. Often reddit hits crop up but not because I looked for them specifically.
When you know a post exists, and you type its exact title into reddits search, and it gives you inrelated bullshit so you need to go to google who hand you the exact post you knew existed, it annoys you.
When you do that every time you try reddits search function, you start to really hate it.
Idk I always found the result sorting to be, I mean, obscenely bad. I would find better more accurate results searching in Google “r/whateversub” followed by whatever it was I was trying to find.
This, for me, is a good example of why the assessments that I've seen lately about how much Lemmy/Kbin may or may not have caught on, and the assessments about how Reddit may or may not have been impacted by the migration, are way, way too early and kind of nonsensical to make right now.
It is important to understand that Reddit is set on becoming a public company, and for a public company, not taking any avenue that could provide additional revenue is essentially only one step below setting that money on fire. If there's a chance that something will make the company more efficient, you are kinda obligated to do it. This will constantly (and increasingly) lead to policies like this, which sacrifice user convenience or add additional friction to the experience, because an experience that is open, accessible, non-intrusive and non-restrictive inherently implies lost opportunities of revenue at each one of those unrestricted points (which is a weird paradox of digital capitalism, in which to make your product more profitable it has to become worse, which flies in the face of the traditional capitalist theory that you make the most money by making the best product, but that's another story and I don't wanna get sidetracked).
Anyway what I wanna get at, is that each person has their own points of friction (mobile becoming app-only, old reddit dissappearing, who knows) past which they would find the idea of transferring platform less intrusive than the experience they would get by staying on Reddit. And the fact that cutting Google off is even in the realms of discussion shows that Reddit is very willing to reach those points and beyond. If these changes pile up and the friction created in the experience by them becomes significantly greater than the idea of transferring platforms, then it's not outside the realm of possibility that Reddit will bleed out slowly by taking actions like this. Time will tell.
Honestly after I noticed the declining users on Lemmy I started using reddit again, it just has more activity on a lot of niche communities I’m interested in.
However I still use Lemmy almost daily since I like the content and comments here more, and it’s the kind of platform I enjoy, just like the Reddit of old.
Would have been cool of there was a legal way to migrate some of the core content created by users on Reddit to Lemmy. I’m not even talking about media like images and video. Just conversations and opinion posts, guides, help and advice.
Reddit is a better platform due to the number of users it has. No amount of optimization can make Lemmy better than reddit if there’s no enough users to create content and participate in the discussion.
I’m still not going back though. It’s not essential for me. I already spend way too much time online so if there’s one less platform to mindlessly scroll thru then that’s only a good thing. I don’t really experience FOMO because I don’t know what I’m missing out on.
As much as I hate Reddit, adding it to the end of nearly every google search is the only way you can get decent answers anymore, at least without having to scroll through several ad-riddled junk sites
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