OpenStars @ OpenStars @discuss.online

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2 yr. ago

Maybe so you don't have to look at replies?

Everyone knows that Santa Hates Poor Kids (warning: explicit lyrics)!:-P

fr fr

Believe it or not, but I was lazy myself in writing my comment. It would have been better to have a question mark at the end. ❓

AI slop

Knowing that you survived probably gives you a nice hormonal boost:-).

Mastodon, apparently /s

Show up at 6:00 to find out!

Survivorship bias: those who live through the encounter have lowered stress.😁

Pure water would be bad, but salt somehow works, just like going to the beach (even if you are thousands of miles away:-D).

Try squirting salt water. No, really!:-)

What if the USA decides to side with Russia against Germany?

This works for every nation I can think of... that would offer this product on their shelves.

Let us know your progress, m'kay? :-P (inquiring tastebugs demand to know! and no I've decided not to change that spelling!)

If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).

And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google's.

As an example, if you search for the keyword "Lemmy", DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World's 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml's top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.

i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are "ruined" as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and "real" ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).

My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both "usable" (even if less so than the past) and also "degraded" at the same time.

That depends strongly on which "public" we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don't even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added "reddit" to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it's less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.

I am thinking - hoping - that it's an unplanned side effect of a change, but that raising the issue like this will likely get it fixed before most people even have to deal with it.:-)

Stuff happens. What's important is how we deal with it from here, imho.

I'm pretty sure that's bc you are on Lemmy.World, which is still running older Lemmy software 0.19.3.

I made a separate post describing this issue. The TLDR for you is that it won't affect you until Lemmy.World upgrades to the modern software version.

After Lemmy.World, the #2 instance on the Fediverse (in terms of users) is Lemmynsfw.com, which is likewise running old software (probably awaiting the new admins asked for). And the #3 is lemm.ee, which does demonstrate this problem.

So even if it does not affect you, yet, it does a lot of other people right now, and will eventually affect everyone using the Lemmy web UI (I don't know if or which apps might be affected).

In that case, it would have been better if OP had offered the type of functionality that they wanted (e.g. cross-platform support, better responsiveness to tablet screens, etc.) to Voyager, as in like make a fork of Voyager and add in the new desired features. Elsewhere in this thread OP acknowledges that this would have been preferable... yet they are going to do their own thing regardless. Which isn't nothing imho, even if something else might have been more ideal.