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.

  • magikmw@lemm.ee
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    5 months 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.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Found the guy who grew up listening to rage against the machine, who now uses machines to rage against the humans who want him to rage against the machine…but fuck you I won’t do what ya tell me! Fuck you I won’t do what ya tell me! Fuck you I won’t do what ya tell me! Fuck you I won’t do what ya tell me! (UGH!) guitar solo

  • jg1i@lemmy.world
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    5 months 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.

    • affiliate@lemmy.world
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      5 months 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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        5 months ago

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

          • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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            5 months 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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      5 months ago

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

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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      5 months 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.

      • datavoid@lemmy.ml
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        5 months 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.

      • hono4kami@slrpnk.net
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        5 months ago

        That’s why when I left reddit I don’t delete my posts (even if those posts suck)

        Bonus:

        a screenshot of deleted reddit comment with a reply thanking the parent commenter

        • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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          5 months 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.

          • Womble@lemmy.world
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            5 months 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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              5 months 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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                5 months 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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                  5 months 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?

          • hono4kami@slrpnk.net
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            5 months 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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              5 months 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

          • ApollosArrow@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            That’s assuming we’re able to draw the people with answers here into the fediverse, in the long run.

            • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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              5 months 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.

            • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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              5 months 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.

        • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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          5 months 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 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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            5 months 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.

      • Deebster@infosec.pub
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        5 months 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@fedia.io
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          5 months 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.

            • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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              5 months 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.

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    Yes please don’t do this. Google doesn’t need more support either from search activity or inclusion into the vernacular. If someone is asking in the fediverse which is still a relatively small community, they are expressing a degree of patience with their answer that suggests they’ve already tried search and came up dissapointed or they are really lacidasical about their question and won’t really mind if you just ignore it and move on. Taking the time to tell someone to websearch something is even more pathetic than a “this” reply.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    A little study of philosophy helps us ask and consider better questions, a little study of google helps us consider a world without CEOs and the constant encroachment of enshittification for shareholder profits.

  • FiskFisk33@startrek.website
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    5 months ago

    So many times I google something obscure, the top result is the same question asked on some forum with a single reply, “just google it”

    • hobbsc@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 months ago

      or it’s a reddit post that once contained the answer but has been deleted in protest.

    • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      and worse, it’s a thread from 17 years ago and apparently nobody else except you has had the issue since.

      • clif@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        You ever revisit an old problem, search it, find someone with the exact problem and as you read it think “yes… YES! This person has my exact same problem! Wait, the tone sounds familiar…”

        Only to realize you found your own post from an old throwaway account? With no replies.

        Because I have. It’s soul crushing.

    • pezhore@infosec.pub
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      5 months ago

      The only thing worse than someone saying just Google it is an op replying to their own post saying, never mind fixed it! (Without actually saying the solution).

  • Philosofuel@futurology.today
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    5 months ago

    I’ve noticed that a lot of people are just really bad in using the right searching terms, and then quickly shifting through all the info to find the right information. Googling well truly is a skill. Though be it a strange one.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It’s not even much of a skill anymore now that there’s so much focus on natural language question and answer. You can straight up Google “how do I X?” And get a relevant answer for just about anything.

      • soul@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        That’s not exactly true. The AI answers are often wrong or incomplete. You still need skill, it’s just that the required skill has shifted to accepting this is true, recognizing when the AI answer is not complete and correct, (which can be more difficult due to the answers often being seemingly correct, yet slightly wrong or incomplete), and then doing what you’d do in any other search that nets poor results: adjust and search more or dig further down the given results stack.

    • nepenthes@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I was going to bring up card catalogues and microfiche, but it is more difficult now, especially with all the AI written articles popping up a la carte as top results.

      I guess it would be like the physical library having a fee^1 to enter, the librarian men and women in lingerie and banana hammocks, and all the publications unsorted: Fiction and Non-Fiction together with celebrity magazines, The National Enquirer, and nazi publications… and lots of torn out pages.


      ^1 Fee replaces ads. I’d rather not picture a world where the advertising in the show Maniac exists. (Can’t afford the bus? The ad-reader shows up and speaks ads at you until you have “earned” the $1.25, or whatever.)

    • K4mpfie@feddit.org
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      5 months ago

      Same! Had a discussion recently with a guy searching about gun law in Austria for 3D printed weapons. He showed me his Search Query. Didn’t even include the word “Law”. People just really forgot how to properly query search engines.

  • CubitOom@infosec.pub
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    5 months ago

    Also, fuck Google. I’ve been removing the word from my lexicon. I say, let me search (or research) that instead

  • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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    5 months 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

  • hono4kami@slrpnk.net
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    5 months ago

    As a software engineer…

    Don’t just say “just Google it”. Guide them to the documentation. Ask them about the detail of the question. If it’s an bug, try asking them if they can reproduce the bug.


    This reminded me of the time I’m looking for how to do certain things in a software. I found a reddit post asking about the same issue and this is the reply OP got:

    screenshot of a reddit thread where OP got a rude reply to search it themselves

    Here is the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/mupjsf/how_to_showhide_i3status_bar_taskbar/

    Imagine. You search the issue you have. Found the ONLY reddit thread that talks about this, and the ONLY thread that talks about the issue have NO USEFUL ANSWER and, worse, the only reply is TELLING YOU TO SEARCH IT YOURSELF. This got upvoted too 😭😭😭.

    Luckily, I found the solution (tbh the solution was there in the docs, but the wording wasn’t clear and it makes it hard to search) and I end up replying the OP the actual answer.

    So, this is a PSA for the fediverse: be nice. It’s free.

    While we’re still young, we have a chance to become a better forum.

    Also possibly an unpopular opinion: you shouldn’t downvote a question, even if it was asked multiple times. Guide them to the answer instead