SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

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Loss of niche and technical information (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey All,

Tl;Dr: Save Reddit technical expertise before it's lost to the sands of time and corporate shutdown.

Just wanted to get a discussion started on what would be, in my opinion, the greatest loss that we, as a society, would experience with the loss of Reddit. Proposed solutions welcome. And please don't take this as me supporting Reddit in any way shape or form.

For years Reddit acted as the Internet's foremost discussion board. As part of that it became host to a slew of subreddits which house niche information and technical expertise. I can't tell you how often I've struggled to find a solution to a particular problem only to stumble across it on a years old reddit thread.

That information is, frankly, invaluable. Reddit may not be tailored to providing technical advice akin to the likes of stack overflow but, nevertheless, it is home to some of the hardest to find answers. If Reddit was to disappear tomorrow, so would that information.

As such I think that information should be treated as a goldmine, and just like a goldmine, excavated. If Lemmy is to play host to the great Reddit migration then it might well play host to these valuable tidbits. Exactly how such an excavation could be done without a blanket copy of all data on Reddit I don't know. But I think it's definitely something worth discussing and promoting amid Reddits recent mishaps. Who knows what the future holds for the site? But it's downfall shouldn't lead to the loss of decades worth of troubleshooting efforts and technical expertise.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The first step would be to discourage people from making the gold mine even deeper, as it makes the problem worse. They should be adding gold elsewhere - preferably a decentralised, widely accessible source of information, more resilient against information loss and easier to sort out. From the top of my head, a wiki is perhaps the best approach.

Note that I don't recommend Lemmy as a repository of this info. Lemmy shares a bunch of cons with Reddit in this aspect - if the server is gone, there's a good chance that the info is gone too. And forums in general are prone to add too much noise around the info, as they're made for users to interact with each other.

With that step ready, people could be migrating the info already in Reddit to the new platform, and sorting it out from all the noise (all those posts and comments that are not information). Easier said than done because this would need to be done manually. But it would be basically the online equivalent of mining that gold and transforming it into ingots, because a small gold vein inside a big chunk of rock is useless.

I believe that this should be easier to do for content up to March/2023, since it's archived through Pushshift.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I had a brief read through the article you linked. I'm frankly shocked at how relevant it is. I never considered how widespread the problem is in reality. It goes so much further than just reddit. An extremely interesting article for anybody curious, I'll be dedicating more time to reading it in its entirety this weekend.

Thanks very much for linking it!