this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on "the best impact hammer" or "how to buy solar panels" without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.
The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.
undefined> I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.
Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos
First we ditched Twitter for Mastodon, now we're ditching Reddit for Lemmy, and sooner or later we'll be ditching Youtube for Peertube.
I really doubt this. I hate to be that guy, but 90% of things I want to follow are on Twitter still. Very few on mastodon. I'm sure it's a people circle thing.
It's way too easy to use Twitter and complain.. it's way to easy to use reddit .. (if you use their app) and complain.
I don't think there is going to be any sort of mass migration that leaves any of these overnight. All of this stuff needs to be better for end users, not just for people who like the technicals and general idea of the fediverse.
Let me know when companies are on Lemmy and Mastadon. Some companies do support via Twitter. Heck I've gotten better deals from Comcast via their subreddit. Then again there is a general fear of companies being on the fediverse.. so would I get that experience here ever? Idk.. but it's a minus for me.
Edit for tldr: I feel like there is a pseido-toxic echo chamber in the fediverse as a whole that will likely harm it in the long run. I don't see it as being a replacement for other things for regular users at the current trajectory. Hope it changes though.
I'd prefer if all those companies just stay on Twitter and leave Lemmy/Mastadon alone. Their influence is what got the internet into the mess that it's currently in.
It seems like we're heading towards all of this becoming "better for end users", it's just going to take multiple years to reach a point where the fediverse is there for a random non-technical person. Assuming it does get there, there's a lot that can go wrong of course. It does feel plausible to me, if the userbase stays large enough to keep regularly generating fresh content and devs keep improving things. Certainly the incompetent leadership at companies like Reddit and Twitter will continue to do ridiculous things that drive users away in the years to come.
Pretty much this. I agree with you 100%.
As much as I'd like to see Reddit die out and places like Lemmy become more mainstream, I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
Ever since dislikes were removed I use a plugin that shows the ratio of likes to views to determine if a video is worth watching.
Most of the time if the likes to views is >= 2% then it's an okay vid.
My understanding is plugin is alright (I have it too), but it’s increasingly inaccurate, especially for videos uploaded after it was created. I believe it took data from YouTube before the dislikes were removed and uses that as a snapshot, then adds the thumbs up/down of users of the plugin and uses that to extrapolate trends from the very limited data it has coming in.
The real solution would be YouTube showing the scores again, but I guess their stupid corporate videos getting BTFO was too much for them.
The plugin you are mentioning is based on dislikes and yes it is very inaccurate. The one I mentioned works off of the ratio between the likes vs the view count so the accuracy is always there, it's a different way of going about it.
I agree that YouTube just needs to bring the dislike count back, it's a pain trying to find these alternative ways to know if a video is good when the data is there. It's so greedy of them, outright harming user experience for profit.
there's a browser plug in for that.
Which isn't entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube's monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you'd only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.
I'm positive that extension has more than 1000 users.
Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?
You'd have to have a separate cohort of non-plugin users & another with a sampling of both, I think. Run some regressions on those data and I think you'd be able to tease out any bias that exists.
Yeah this, it's demented.
I will google something specific that I know is on the internet and it comes back with ten ridiculously off-topic AI spam blogs and "no further results."
It's more important than ever then to make sure that this place stays a place for people, and not bullshit.
Well, what caused the chase for ad-money and affiliate link clicks? Google, Amazon & other mega corps. It's just indirect enshittification :-|
I have been using GPT4 as a Google replacement and it's been working out fairly well.
Which is great.. until it becomes influenced by all the other AI generated crap.