I went searching for something today and instinctually clicked on a reddit link. Fortunately the sub was dark for the protest anyway, but it’s crazy how ingrained in me it is to go to reddit for everything.
Unfortunately now we’re going to have to get used to clicking on those clickbait tech articles like “TOP 10 FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVES 2023” to find information, and weed out the crappy blogs.
Google has been pretty much useless lately because it just spits out this SEO spam (probably all written by LLMs, that’s the only way to explain why it’s never happened before but does happen now), so losing reddit as one of the best sources of non-AI-generated information would set us back a lot.
What we need is the current state of reddit, but frozen in time and just as searchable as reddit is right now. And since reddit won’t want to lose SEO, they will be open to scraping.
There are archives of Reddit history, notably the Pushshift archive & current ongoing Archive Team archive. Much of the data can be searched on the Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive.
Would it be possible to somehow mirror the archive as a read only lemmy instance? Like… Funny@oldreddit so that it would be still searchable from lemmy?
I can look into doing this because it sounds like a genius idea. I’ll have to work with a friend and see what we can pull together
Let me know how can I help
I’m sure it’s possible. Someone would either need to transpile the current data format to match Lemmys’, or just build a new front-end for it. Also, it might be considerably difficult to host something like this because there’s just so much data. The Pushshift archive alone is 2TB, which is primarily just text.
What does LLM mean?
It means “large language model”, software like ChatGPT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
Thank you!
Large Language Model. A type of AI such as Chat GPT
Large Language Model (like GPT-4)
I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but don’t forget you can often grab a cached copy of the page if you found it via Google. That’s probably the best way to extract some information without giving Reddit a hit right now.
I think it’s perfectly okay to compromise. I’m gonna hopefully use Lemmy as Reddit, and if I can’t find the desired info on here, then Reddit will help me out. I can already find lemmy posts when searching for infos.
Google search has just gotten so incredibly bad. It’s even getting bad at programming searches which used to be a strong suit. Luckily duckduckgo has actually gotten better.