Me, who completely nuked twelve years worth of Reddit posts and comments which were often one of, if not the only relevant search result to an extremely niche problem.
Oof yeah. Finding a reddit thread with your exact query as the title, getting excited to see a comment, aaaaand… It’s “This comment was deleted by EliteUltraEraser Premium TM. I value my privacy,…”
(I do get it though. And who knows, maybe this will actually help in the long run and not just lead to increased usage of Discord communities so ask the same thing over and over and over again because they aren’t fucking publicly searchable god I hate what Discord has done to the searchability of issues in the tech space?)
Depending on how you nuked it, reddit might have just restored the comment behind your back. My reddit account shows 0 posts/comments, but a month ago I got a reply to a comment in a post I made five years ago providing instructions on how to get a game working in Linux.
Nothing is 100% but my comments were first replaced with excerpts from books in the public domain, twice. Then I went back a third time and replaced the comments with gibberish, then delete. Most of the comments I find still active are just the excerpts from the books. They read like plain English, so it is very difficult for an AI, or even a contractor, to pick up on the fact that it is worthless.
Nah, reddit restoring comments is a myth. You just didn’t delete all your comments, even though probably you thought you did.
See, Reddit, being the duplicitous bitch that it is, doesn’t really show you all your comments when you go to your profile. It’s limited to your last 1000 (?) comments or so, any comment that goes beyond that horizon is gone from your view forever, but it still exists in the thread.
The way to solve that is to first do a GDPR request. After a few weeks you will receive a zip file containing a file with all your comments and a link to it. You can then use an overwrite and delete tool and point it to this information. It will likely run for several hours or even days, depending on how many comments you made, because reddit throttles edit and delete requests, but it will effectively delete everything.
Maybe one day instead of [Insert Search Query] Reddit, it will instead be [Insert Search Query] Lemmy
Edit Addendum: Might be cool if people got their old tech support posts from reddit, ask the question that was asked in a post, and then answer their own post with the answer that they gave that solved the issue.
People who write a whole novel about "google is your friend" and try to make you feel stupid for asking a question are the ultimate assholes.
You wrote 3 paragraphs just to bully a stranger on the internet when 1 sentence could have answered the question.
Thanks for being a royal knob head.
It’s that one tool at your work that needs replacement, but management refuses to do more than clean and reapply a new layer of duct tape so long as it still gets the job done eventually, forcing workers to struggle with it until giving up and finding an alternative solution that doesn’t rely on it.
Anybody remember this site? Google used to be so good that anybody with half a brain could find a good result if they would just type a basic phrase into it.
My sweet summer child, issues with google search existed in 2008, things just accelerated at a massive rate once it became the de facto standard and people figured out how to manipulate search results.
And when you finally find some helpful forum with content from 15 years ago, you’ll have someone be like “GUYS I FIGURED IT OUT! Here’s a [broken] link to someone else who solved it” with a dozen or so “Thanks, that solved the issue immediately for me!” Comments after it.
I mean, that is still what I mean. For you - it sounds like a great choice. For the people who want it to die, it might be an awful choice. It’s polarizing, but that doesn’t always mean good. It’s hard to make an informed decision even with a popular choice.
Ah I think I was unclear. The meme is what folks get tired of, the distro is a popular one on its own or as a base for others.
If you’re interested in looking into Linux but don’t know where to start, the only thing you really need to know is how much time you’re willing to put into learning it, and how big the community is. Arch has a huge amount of documentation, but will make things a little harder if you want stuff to “just work”. Debian is more of a middle ground (but huge community), and Mint is a popular easier to get into environment but honestly I’m out of the loop on that one these days.Arch is actually the base of the one I use at the moment for gaming and dev work (EndeavourOS). Options are overwhelming, I get it 😁
The cool thing? Try em all. You can easily find simple installers to slap a whole distro onto a bootable thumb drive and goof off while you feel things out. If you don’t like it, reboot. If your wifi doesn’t work and you can’t find a solution online in a few minutes, reboot. Things are easier and more flexible now then they’ve ever been, but the new user experience is still where Linux really struggles.
Anyway, I’m super into this shit clearly. 😆 Happy to point you in a more solid direction if you want at some point, or I can just shut up lol
It’s great for some people, awful for others. It became a meme because it started to be suggested to everyone even though it’s an awful first introduction to the Linux ecosystem.
a friend of mine discovered the tip to add “before:2025” (or, the current year+1) to your yt search to improve it. i have no clue why that does anything but it reverts it to pre-enshittified functionality
To give google 1(one) droplet of credit, the enshittification didn’t come from them alone. In fact I’m fairly sure that if they could get their way, the page would still return useful results, only, JUST below all the paid ads. SEO Spam doesn’t help THEM either.
The problem is… A lot of the “good” results on google came from like. Enthusiast websites. Webforums. And… Reddit.
Enthusiast Websites are much rarer now. They got consolidated into media conglomerates and then closed down. Only a few remain.
Webforums are in a similar zombified state, most got vored by “social media” and Discord (P.S.: if you are a dev or artist or whatever and use a Discord server as the main helpline/download source for a project you’re doing, fuck you very much, you are the ACTUAL worst <3), which aren’t indexed by search engines.
Then Reddit got Spez’d, so THAT avenue is fucked too.
Fedi isn’t indexed by search engines either (AFAIK), so you can’t do the old “<Search terms> reddit” trick replacing reddit with lemmy. It won’t work.
“You shouldn’t do [y] either, you idiot, you absolute fucking buffoon. You should instead do [z, which costs a fortune and/or requires you to restructure your entire life]”
A lot of the time, the fundamental issue is the lack of information provided by the poster. I’ve seen so many threads where the provided information just isn’t enough, and they don’t react to any of the questions at all.
It was even wrose when there was a site by the name “let me google it for you”, which insulted you while made an animation about how to use this “not evil” website google. You google “how to do [X]” find a nice looking forum, and people either are angry that OP didn’t google it, or they deceptively linked to a lmgify page.
After a month of suffering, I instead reinstalled Windows XP, which I had a lot of trouble with (fugly UI, stability issues, performance issues, etc), but not as much as with the “king of stability”, Linux.
I always used to use “Let me bing it for you” at least then it was probably something they hadn’t tried, and it was proper trolling instead of just being passive aggressive
This was always dickhead behaviour, but not for the reasons you guys are circlejerking about. Often the answers to these questions are extremely easy to find online (even today, Google is nowhere near as useless as people make it out to be). But the entire point of asking other people through social media or a forum is because you want to engage in discussion with other humans. That’s literally the entire point of these websites: to foster discussion, both for the sake of learning and for the social entertainment we all need. People who sign up to them and then completely shutdown attempts to start discussions are absolutely braindead and don’t understand any of this. Modern forms of social media only encourage this kind of performative social interaction. So many people seem to think the sole purpose of discussion-based social media is to dunk on others with a vicious reply and “win” by earning more points (ratio) instead of having an actual back and forth discussion with another human.
I mean, there has definitely been a noticeable and significant decline in the quality of search engine results, particularly on Google. It used to stand out at least a little bit from Bing (a search engine that went very hard into inserting ads into results early on), but they’ve essentially become indistinguishable. Aesthetics and connections with other platforms like Gmail and YouTube have become the only real reason to stay with one over the other.
Sure, I completely that it has declined significantly. I think the comments in this thread about it “sucking cock”, being “just ads and SEO crap”, or a “bloated, shit site” are hyperbole though. It is still the best search engine for most use-cases and queries, including finding answers to “how do I do X” type questions. I use DuckDuckGo (AKA Bing) but only because it gets close enough to Google’s results to be a superior choice for me overall when I take into account its massive privacy advantages. In terms of results, there is still enough of a gap that I will occasionally need to rely on Google’s results for particular queries. I actually used to use StartPage for this exact reason and only switched because it had issues with VPNs.
And this is why I have always hated every single jackass that responded to a question with “just Google it” even when Google didn’t completely suck cock.
If I had just one single answer from a reputable source doing that, I wouldn’t be asking real people. Search engines were never infallible. Niche topics have always garnered shit results.
A lot of people don’t consider the future even when writing helpful posts. I’m as guilty as anyone.
If you link the correct answer, the person finding your post in 6 years better hope the link is still good. That’s the legitimate reason scholarly papers needs to cite specific book editions and journal page numbers instead of using hyperlinks in a bibliography.
If a copy of the book or journal can ba tracked down, the citation will still work.
It’s also why online-only published journals are still often formatted like a book with static pages instead of websites. If you find a journal article that’s important, you’ll likely still be able to find an achived copy in PDF somewhere even if the journal stops publishing or they change domains or whatever.
Lmgtfy used to be a great site to send to people when they asked easily googled questions. Now it’s a bloated shit site that barely works if it even still exists. It would do a flash animation on how to go to Google.com, type in their question and click search. I always got a kick out of sending it to people. R.i.p old Internet. You were great.
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