The irony is that this argument will probably get more attention on Reddit than on any open forum: Centralised platforms are great for discovery and awful for preservation. Use them as the billboard, not the library. Keep the valuable stuff where you control the rules, the backups and the future.

I've been slowly replacing, by hand so it doesn't trigger their detection alerts, all of my 15 years of comments on Reddit, a lot of it valuable answers to tech questions or programming problems, with a randomly prompted unrelated paragraph of ChatGPT whatever.

When one of the first exodi(?) came, a lot people replaced their comments with random words through scripts, back then it was not as detected and prevented (which Reddit promptly scrambled to prevent), and thanks to people doing that I've eventually blocked Reddit from my Kagi altogether, simply because 90% of what I found was either questions with scrambled answers, comments that are just ads from bots, or just unrelated bullshit. So, it does have an actual impact.

Have fun selling that to AI companies.

The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I'm not joking. Look at these:

Those aren't paywalls.

meanwhile i'm using VPNs in browser's incognito mode to not be tracked

That's not what a VPN or incognito modes do.

Reddit sucks for a number of reasons, but your internet literacy also kinda sucks.

I hate that "you were blocked by network security" page so much. Fucking smug fedora wearing neck beard with his arms crossed. What the fuck fo you think is going to be the difference of someone using a VPN vs being logged in with a VPN on network security? You're just lying to me reddit.

What I'm particularly concerned about lately is the growing share of online forums that don't even publish their content on the web.

The most famous example of this type of forum is probably Discord.

As those of you on Lemmy know, many people chose Discord as an alternative after Reddit's deterioration.

Hasn't this problem already escalated to the point where access to content isn't guaranteed not only to some bots but even to individuals without accounts?

Shouldn't those who love the web be extremely wary of online communities that don't even try to be based on the web?

That's what I think.

If search engines truly only show the "existence" of forums, then the open web is truly over.

I don't contribute anything worthwhile anywhere.

It's pointless anymore to try infoposting on reddit.

Take for example the soldering subreddit. The info on that sub is that you must slather everything in flux in order to solder properly. A guy posted yesterday citing 40 years of experience, saying that's not how he's done it. The comments are a mess.

Another post today, someone asks about air filtering the solder smoke. The consensus in the comments is it's not a big deal. You can literally measure the particulate matter yourself to see how bad it is. Basically an average residential room size, say 100-200 sq/ft. You'll basically hotbox yourself with smoke.

Another one that's seen less often but the false idea persists. It's that capacitors never short and burn out. I don't know how or why that false idea floats around, but I've seen it over the years. I've replaced tons of caps that spontaneously combusted. Both electrolytic and SMD caps. Sometimes they just fail and short. No other fault.

Reddit is full of bad info. It's site that relies on word of mouth and popularity contest. You do not build a knoweldge base of technical information this way. You're getting an entropic game of telephone. That's all reddit ever was and ever will be. It's flawed paradigm by default.

A paradigm that lemmy is built off. So don't you all be getting the idea that good knowledge is going to be getting sourced from here either.

It’s way too late

My biggest beef with this new shaky-information world is that they hardly ever accurately date-stamp and time-stamp things anymore. This took me less than a minute to type and I find it mostly worthless so I'll be donating this one for free.

Half of what I post anywhere is horseshit, but you won't know which half or even whether this reply is included in it. Good luck.

Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

After a decade of reddit and over a half million karma I quit for multiple reasons. Primarily the cash grab for the API and forcing the reddit app, but also the explicit acknowledgement that the mods and community were absolutely being exploited for unpaid labor and anyone who didn’t bend a knee could get fucked.

If I could make money off my posts and comments, I could probably support myself.

Not wrong, but I feel like you're preaching to the Choir here.

I still host 3 websites that I publish anything technical or helpful on. It really doesn't cost much to do and is helpful for me to be able to go back to as reference myself.

I never do ads or even seo.

But I get upvotes. They are more valuable than my time or money.

It's a good thing that this could never happen to Lemmy and some vindictive mod would just take their instance offline, right.. Right?

I abandoned my 250k+ karma account two years ago when I saw where Reddit was headed.

You can download archives of Reddit comment and submissions from Academic Torrents.

I'm not aware of any similar public archives of Fediverse content.

This realization and the API thing is why I swore of reddit 3 years ago (to the month).

Unfortunately most of the internet is login-gated at this point. And honestly a lot of it is justifiable, lest you let the bots run wild scraping your site until it goes down completely.

Jokes on them, I'm only there for the porn.

People exist here who didn't get [edit: perma-] banned for stupid and belligerent reasons? Like this one?

Remember they can't afford mods or to pay anyone. They can rip off your content for themselves though!