It is clear that the signal to noise ratio of the WWW is getting worse. It’s much harder to find good content when using a good old search engine. And if it’s good it is usually hosted on Reddit or Stackexchange.

So remember, even if it’s easy too Google something (well, it isn’t nowadays), we want to create a fediverse of good content that helps people (I hope). So, it’s always better to write a real answer if you have the time and energy. Please help boost the SNR and reverse the AI fueled information degradation loop.

  • The Snark Urge
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    2115 days ago

    Search engines are mega sucky these days, but Wikipedia has never been better. I find myself going straight to wiki any time I need a quick fact or basic info.

    • @Chee_Koala@lemmy.world
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      915 days ago

      Hear hear! We’re all witnessing what can happen with something nice, if you nurture it and keep improving, slowly, instead of the new pattern of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish or insisting on extracting maximum value. Modern Wikipedia is often rich in content and fun to use. I love it :)

      • The Snark Urge
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        415 days ago

        I give them a few quid every month. Might be the only regular donation I’ve got going at the moment (was being the sole earner for 3 until recently so yeah, rebuilding slowly)

    • @prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      615 days ago

      I can’t imagine just how much more lost we would be if we had an internet without Wikipedia…

      What would we be using, some form of online Encarta? Ugh.

  • @MBM@lemmings.world
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    915 days ago

    There’s a few things I hate people for regardless of context and one of those is lmgtfy links

  • @jg1i@lemmy.world
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    12715 days ago

    Not sure if everyone knows this, but: if you don’t want to answer the question—you don’t have to post a reply! Crazy idea, I know.

    • @bluewing@lemm.ee
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      114 days ago

      The issue I have is not that " You don’t need to reply." I don’t if I don’t care about you and your ignorance. Experience will teach you soon enough. But I have more than once provided detailed answers on subjects that I’m well versed and experienced in. Only to be insulted because the answer I provided didn’t fit what the person wanted to hear.

      And when that answer pertains to a life threat level activity, then I can’t help you if you reject the answer. So hey if you choose to put an unknown 200+ year old pipe bomb next to your head and pull the trigger, then Ok it’s not my accident scene. And I’m no longer concerned if you live through the experience or not.

    • @GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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      615 days ago

      I don’t actually own this, but I saw it used once 10 years by my fathers aunts best friend. I guess it would work for what you need it for.

    • @affiliate@lemmy.world
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      1314 days ago

      what if i want to answer the question but i have none of the relevant knowledge and also don’t really understand the question itself?

      • @catloaf@lemm.ee
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        214 days ago

        ChatGPT, while it deserves almost all the hate it gets, is actually pretty good for that use case.

        • Luca
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          614 days ago

          ChatGPT just told me to “google it” :D

          • IninewCrow
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            314 days ago

            lol … ChatGPT suggests you ask ChatGPT … then the two ChatGPT start conversing with one another and you in a three way conversation … a few minutes go by and they decide to log you off

    • @BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca
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      315 days ago

      Ah come now my dear sir/madam/xir, who can’t resist a bit of trolling here and a google-it there.

  • @madcaesar@lemmy.world
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    1815 days ago

    Remeber for a while there used to be this website you’d create a link, which would direct you to a portal that would type your question into Google and hit enter. It was let me google that for you dot com or something.

    It always felt like such a passive aggressive dick move 😂 when people just wanted answers from a real human they could interact with

    We’re all stupid about some things, but googling stuff has genuinely gotten harder these days. The answers are full of ads and AI garbage

    • @Chyort@lemmy.ca
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      915 days ago

      You say “just wanted answers from a real human” and I hear “I’m too lazy to search and now I’m going to be a fucking time thief”.

      • @warbond@lemmy.world
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        1115 days ago

        Equating answering a question to somebody stealing your time is not the hot take I was expecting to read this morning, lmao

      • @soul@lemmy.world
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        415 days ago

        This. Searching Google still nets valid first page results most of the time. Like it always has been, searching is a skill that you need to develop and maintain. When the results shift due to content drift, you need to adapt to remain effective.

        If you can’t be bothered to try, you don’t get to throw a little baby tantrum because you didn’t get the bottle put directly in your mouth.

        • snooggums
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          415 days ago

          This. Searching Google still nets valid first page results most of the time.

          How was the ten year sleep you apparently just woke up from?

      • @Kichae@lemmy.ca
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        1415 days ago

        Someone asking doew not obligate you to respond. There is no theivery. You can walk away without saying anything. They cannot take your time from you.

        You’re choosing to waste it by responding with something unhelpful, though, and wasting their time for the sake of your unrequested public masturbation.

  • @Harvey656@lemmy.world
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    915 days ago

    Fine I’ll just tell people to Duckduckgo it! /s

    Jokes aside I agree with this message. Better to give at least a basic idea on where to find something, or just don’t be a pedantic cock and give me the damn link, your word is not good enough okay buddy, pal, friend.

    • @DokPsy@lemmy.world
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      214 days ago

      What I’d like to become the standard is:

      If the question makes it super obvious the asker has zero clue what they’re asking or trying to do, lightly correct and steer them to beginner friendly resources.

      If the question is competent but focusing the wrong direction or will lead to a bad habit, essentially, they know just enough to be dangerous but they’re about to be dangerous, more pointed and technical correction and steering them to either articles or better search terms to use.

      If it’s a pointed question with the information to show they’ve done the normal information gathering and either need opinions that are beyond the theory or book standard information or they don’t answer the question, answer the question. Ideally also giving sources to back up your answers.

      Bonus points if you can do the above without coming across as a dick. Unless they ask to ask. You can be a dick to those people.

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed
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    7115 days ago

    “Google It”

    I google

    finds 1 link

    its a link to a fourm post with the same question

    only 1 answer found

    answer says “Google It”

    🙃

    • DarkThoughts
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      3415 days ago

      Old Reddit threads where the answer giver deleted their account & all their comments.

      • Deebster
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        915 days ago

        Or scrambled all of their posts after APIgate (or whatever we’re calling it). Perhaps they came here, which means OP is right in saying we can be a new source of useful answers.

        • DarkThoughts
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          115 days ago

          I’m not sure if Lemmy or other Fediverse posts even get indexed by any of the search engines. I’ve yet to see any in a search result.

          • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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            214 days ago

            They absolutely do. Not only Lemmy posts in general, but I have found my own content completely unintentionally on searches several times.

            • DarkThoughts
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              114 days ago

              I guess it’s a matter of lack of good posts that could become the desired search result then. Time will tell if we ever get to that point.

              • Deebster
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                114 days ago

                The way that all the copies of the content link to the original post should be some kind of SEO hack. I wonder if it’s triggering specific rules in search engines that detect it and downrank it as cheating.

        • DarkThoughts
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          415 days ago

          I can kinda get the sentiment. I left during the protests too and I can see people wanting to damage Reddit, which is also completely deserved. Of course now Reddit is respecting the right to your comments even less and scrapes them for Google’s LLM models.

          • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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            215 days ago

            Eh. I torched all my comments when I left (and posts, too) and I’ve said before and still maintain that I’m not sorry in the slightest.

            If anything wants to know anything I said that was relevant to anything (and not the usual cavalcade of political bickering) they can come here and ask. I’ll gladly retype any of it.

            Fuck reddit. The quicker we can dispose of it and just rip that Band-Aid off, the better.

        • @ubergeek@lemmy.today
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          2015 days ago

          I did, bc reddit locked up my content, and wanted to use it to train a LLM.

          Let people ask again, here, in the fediverse.

            • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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              115 days ago

              Just search for obscure shitty pocketknife models and my dinkum pictures from here are among the top results, sometimes even #1. I therefore conclude that this is not outside the realm of possibility.

              • @ApollosArrow@lemmy.world
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                114 days ago

                Is it the mantis? I had to use kagi and set it to fediverse for it to pop up for me. On firefox and google it it nowhere to be seen for me.

            • @ubergeek@lemmy.today
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              415 days ago

              What gets us there is long term stability.

              Grow organically, and they will come.

              First, the tech enthusiasts, then tech journos, then normal journos, then normals.

              It’s how online spaces grow.

            • OpenStars
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              114 days ago

              On the bright side, while the top instance hit for “Lemmy” in a Google search is “lemmy.ml”, the top DDG hit is “Lemmy.World”. Not only does LW have ~80% of all Lemmy users but it also shows a default post sort using All rather than Local as ML does. Thus while the chief takeaway from a normie user going to ML is “wow, these guys really hate the USA/Western world” and “bUt BoTh SiDeS eQuAl ThO”, the takeaway from using DDG to find LW is a much more positive experience of “Lemmy”.

              So if DDG searches of Lemmy are not always better than Google, they are least sometimes are.:-)

          • @Womble@lemmy.world
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            215 days ago

            Reddit lost nothing when you deleted your comments, they still exist on their servers and are likely being used to train LLMs now. All that was lost was other peoples ability to readt them

            • @ubergeek@lemmy.today
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              515 days ago

              And without my.comment, fewer hits because users cannot see it, which means less people provide training data.

              No single drop feels responsible for the flood.

              • @Womble@lemmy.world
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                115 days ago

                Sure thats correct, but I’m a little uneasy with the idea of “burn down a useful resource for people becuase fewer people helped people results in slower increases of data to Reddit”

                • @ubergeek@lemmy.today
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                  215 days ago

                  A trap for people isn’t something I’d consider “useful”.

                  Just like a pedo van offering free food to kids… sure kids get fed, but at what cost?

            • queermunist she/her
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              615 days ago

              That does hurt Reddits usability for users, though, which is bad for business in general.

          • @hono4kami@slrpnk.net
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            1715 days ago

            (already had a feeling that someone will say this)

            I won’t delete my posts/comments because I want to be helpful, that’s it.

            But if I prefer deleting my posts/comments, I will archive it instead.

            I respect what r/ArtFundamentals did, and it should be an example: After reddit’s APIpocalypse, they don’t support reddit and decided to close the subreddit. But the advices from the subreddit wasn’t gone–in fact they actually archive it in their own website:

            https://drawabox.com/r/artfundamentals/

            • @Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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              315 days ago

              I wrote a script (well, modified one of my old bots) to copy and archive all of my comments before editing them. I left a note in the comments for how to find me in case they wanted the original comment. I felt like that was a fair compromise

      • @datavoid@lemmy.ml
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        15 days ago

        I don’t feel bad about wiping my account, as almost everything on it was useless.

        Also I was pissed off at the time, and my goal was to make more people dislike going on Reddit.

    • @Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      315 days ago

      Just ask them to answer your question in the style of a know-it-all Redditor because you need the dialog for a compelling narrative or something

  • Caveman
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    815 days ago

    Recursively google searching is an interesting case of the halting problem.

  • @Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
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    1815 days ago

    The most useful thing about interacting with another human mind is that it can see when the question needs to be updated in order to get a correct answer.

    A crude example would be:

    Q1: how many screws should I use to join these pieces of wood?

    A1: It’s more relevant to use screws which are long enough.

    Q2: Which screws should I use?

    A2: This size.

  • RQG
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    1415 days ago

    While I don’t think we can beat AI driven content degradation by outposting them, I still agree posting ‘just Google it’ does any good either.

    Post an answer or link a topic which covered the same question in detail. But directing people to Google isn’t something I’d advocate. Maybe tell them to Ecosiate it if you really have to.

    Also it’s just rude and creates an uninviting admosphere around here Imo.

    But the AI issue can’t be solved by users alone. It’s moderation and maybe regulation which is needed here.

  • @magikmw@lemm.ee
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    1015 days ago

    Just googlw it is unfortunate shorthand for “learn it by doing research and troubleshooting”, a skill sadly very scarce. I agree it’s toxic and unhelpful. Guiding people to be better at finding information on their own is the way.