Ok hear me out before smacking the downvote. I know, fuck reddit, fuck spez, burn it down, I’m right there with you. When the Library of Alexandria (allegedly) burned down, a ton of information was irreversibly lost. Scholars have been debating for centuries just how much human knowledge was lost there. If, for whatever reason, reddit were to get shut down and wiped, would we lose a comparable amount of knowledge?
One of the reasons reddit is popular as a search term is because you can get answers or opinions from real people. Not (at least, a few years ago) corporate- or government-backed sites that will spew whatever they’re paid to, not shills pushing their own shitty product claiming it’s a wonder solution to [insert problem here]. Real people who have some kind of knowledge base and/or experience in the topic at hand. Yeah, some of it’s shit, but a lot of it at least makes a solid starting point.
If all that user-generated knowledge, all those discussions, all of that, was wiped from existence, how much poorer would we be as a species when it comes to knowledge or access to information?
All this got on my brain because I was reminded that I never mass-deleted my own posts. I was debating it, but I keep thinking about that one person who really needs an answer to their question at 3am, they do a search, find a promising thread, and the answer they need is replaced by “Glitter frog assume capricorn pincer rockets hip This post has been mass deleted by Redact.” They go to the next search results, a New York Times spread on the "Top 5 HACKS to fix [problem] and, idk, it feels like not deleting is the lesser of two evils.
Obviously the true solution is probably the whole decentralizing reason we’re all here. But between somewhat decent information on a shit zionist site and the complete loss of accessibility to information in favor of even more blatant corporate content, I would kind of rather keep the information there for now, instead of deleting it for a satisfying but ultimately insignificant middle finger to the other site.
There’s a lot to be said on both sides, but my unpopular opinion is that the overnight disappearance of the other site would be a detriment, not a benefit,. At least for the time being.
Alright, im ready to be cleansed by the flames of the fediverse
Not exactly the kind of information I’m talking about. I was thinking more along the lines of “How do I join these two beams at a funky angle” or “Debating getting a [product] but I’ve heard X about it, and that might affect my Y. I wonder if anyone on r/[product] has had this issue?” More experience-based knowledge rather than encyclopedic. Wikipedia is partly how I did the deep dive into the 7 wonders that kind of helped prompt this question. Love it, use it, isn’t the right tool for every job.
anyone know a good copper vendor?
nope, the modern equivalent is the internet archive. i mean it literally contains everything including archives of reddit and wikipedia
Good point, much better comparison than mine
I wouldn’t mind if Reddit comments like “Put glue on your pizza to help the cheese stick” were wiped off the face of the earth. It would be better than shoveling it into an LLM so it can be the output for search queries.
srsly tho, how tf do you get cheese to stick to your pizza?
nails? staples? folded over with hospital corners?
if glue isn’t the best option, my name isn’t harold gunn.
I disagree, we have no natural selection anymore, so these posts are taking up the slack and ensuring we don’t slip too far back as a species.
The archive was still up last I checked, you can back it up. It’s only up to 2023 iirc.
That being said, yes I agree and that’s true for a lot of the internet. Imagine losing GitHub for instance. The problem is worse with Lemmy since its kind of always burning. There’s already a lot of content that has been lost. Instances shut down but some do cleanups I imagine as well. I’ve noticed some images from my posts disappearing. It takes up a lot of space in the end.
The signal to noise ratio on reddit is so low that it’s a poor information source. Its primary value would be to those studying culture and politics.
For sure, ymmv. But i find a lot of times there’s at least one or two people in a thread that actually do have some good input and knowledge. I can filter out the bs decently enough, and when you look at a bunch of different threads, and there seems to be a general consensus on an answer, it can at least provide a good starting point. Even if it’s just adding the term is should be searching into my lexicon.
What do you mean ‘allegedly’? Is this like robin hood allegedly didn’t exist?
The fire is the more popular story. There is debate over whether it burned with Alexandria, burned partially and was abandoned after, or just got shut down earlier (anti-intellectual movement, expulsion from the city caused rapid decline in users) and was destroyed after the fire, or it may have just had its contents moved to other capitals as interest in Alexandria declined.
Although, on the topic of allegedly not existing, there is debate over whether or not the Hanging Gardens of Babylon existed, at least in the city we know as Babylon itself. There is some evidence that it was conflated in historical records with another, much more documented garden in Nineveh (modern-day Mosul, Iraq). “Babylon” means “Gates of Gods” and was the name of several cities. Sennacherib of Niveneh named the city’s gates after gods as well, implying a “Babylon” of sorts.
Nope, because it has already got scrapped by all kinds of LLM trainers. Now they’re charging you access fee to the “clone” of that “library”.
