This article is on Medium, which has a paywall. I’m a member, but not logged in. I was able to read it so it may depend on how many times you’ve read Medium articles.
One point he made that I found interesting was:
So, in light of all of this, should Reddit even exist? Is there really a point to a web forum in 2023? Aren’t we past all that?
He thinks we are. I never thought about it before. Maybe in the case of some Reddit subreddits and other forums, but I don’t think so in general. I’ve got a lot great information from forums.
The only problem is the “<how to solve this issue> reddit” google search. If these discussions start to be on lemmy and we append lemmy instead of reddit, in time there’s gonna be tons of malicious instances that fill the site with ads and generate content with AI just to get to that google 1st page.
There’s also no centralised Lemmy site/index yet that centralises that information.
That’s fine and all if you’re looking for content on somewhere like lemmy.ml, or lemmy.world, but you might run into problems if you’re trying to search for something that might be located on beehaw, or sh.it.just.works instead, which doesn’t have the word “lemmy”, and might get skipped.
You also have places like Kbin, which don’t get captured in a search at all, both because they’re not lemmy, and also because they don’t contain the word lemmy, which doesn’t help if you’re trying to search something that you thought was on Lemmy, but is in fact on a Kbin magazine.
Sounds like an opportunity to develop a fediverse focused search engine
Does ActivityPub have search protocols? Seems like something worth having built in
@CosmicApe Many users feel wary about their posts being searchable.
That’s definitely a fair point that I hadn’t considered. I feel that posts not being searchable should be default for certain communities, but having easy search for things like tech support and product reviews like Reddit did would be a huge help with growing the platform.
@CosmicApe @curt @Hedup @techno156 @cosmic_skillet I just realized you are on kbin. I guess it makes sense for kbin and lemmy to have searchability function but Mastodon users won’t be very open to it.
How is that different than what’s currently on reddit? Unless you are talking about 5 years ago, modern reddit is filled with manipulated conversations
It’s not. That’s their point.
Oh, I misunderstood then. It sounded to me like they were saying lemmy was more vulnerable
Honestly - it’s Google’s job to find a solution to that. They have bright people, I’m sure they can figure it out.
Assuming they care enough to do so. But with all the SEO spam that’s flooding their search results that they don’t seem to be doing much about, I’m not optimistic.