This also highlights the problem with a lot of communities moving to Discord, which inevitably ends up as repositories for critical information, but can’t be indexed by Google. Reddit is still valuable as a problem solving resource, and I hope they fix this API fiasco.
The other thing is that Discord search is god awful. There’s absolutely no way to modify your search for better results, whether that’s to require something to appear exactly as typed, or to exclude certain results, it’s just you put in the words and hope you get the right thing. Sometimes that works out, but sometimes it will make the dumbest connections and render your search useless unless you want to trawl through pages of crap you don’t want. Like I’ve found out that Discord considers the words universal, universe, and university to be the same…
Yup, I’ve tried searching Discord servers as a last resort for some technical issues, but man, their search really can’t differentiate between technical terms properly. I’m hoping they fix their search function at some point, but given how the username system change is going, I’m not holding out hope.
I completely agree. It’s not unique to Discord, as any other chat log type of interface is extremely infuriating to search. I can’t stand that so many good discussion groups have moved to discord. It seems to have absorbed some of the Facebook exodus, a some of the focused reddit discussions.
You know that internally they must have better data tools.
I’m willing to bet the lack of api access going forward will make all reddit posts disappear from crawler results anyways. I’m no expert, but I imagine the crawler is picking up on all of the interconnected references to reddit that are all due to free api access. As soon as those connections disappear, so dies the value to the entire community. It will be just like the garbage results we get from every single source now. This is the path of neo digital feudalism.
API calls are almost always private between the caller and the endpoint (think telegram bots or mobile apps). There isn’t really a technically feasible way for a crawler to somehow “infer” any kind of knowledge of how api calls are being used unless the result has some kind of publically visible side effect (E. G. The program using the api is generating a web page and uploading it somewhere crawlable). Google et Al go by how many links from other pages to the page of interest exist (inbound links) and multiply by a smattering of other things like quality of keywords, length of content etc.
That said, if you’re implying that the api changes mean that:
people are less likely to use reddit because they can’t access it via RIF/Apollo
less useful content is added to the site to be indexed,
fewer inbound links will be generated that point to existing posts
fewer inbound links will be generated that point to existing posts
pages stagnate and drop in ranking
This is what I mean, the external references people had in the periphery will dry up. Like if I’m not using Infinity to generate better refined search results, now I don’t post the link to Stack Exchange, and this reference fails to cascade across various copy paste blog resources. Now the original reddit post is a dead end source with no external weighted reference value. It’s all of these advanced features implemented in the periphery using the free API that create the usefulness in the first place.
Searching reddit will be just like YouTube searches now. No matter what technical wording you use, you’ll never find technical references again. I can type the title of a video on YT verbatim and still won’t get the correct results, but I can log into an old account and find the content in my hundreds of playlists I kept as references. It is still there, it is still public.
This also highlights the problem with a lot of communities moving to Discord, which inevitably ends up as repositories for critical information, but can’t be indexed by Google. Reddit is still valuable as a problem solving resource, and I hope they fix this API fiasco.
The other thing is that Discord search is god awful. There’s absolutely no way to modify your search for better results, whether that’s to require something to appear exactly as typed, or to exclude certain results, it’s just you put in the words and hope you get the right thing. Sometimes that works out, but sometimes it will make the dumbest connections and render your search useless unless you want to trawl through pages of crap you don’t want. Like I’ve found out that Discord considers the words universal, universe, and university to be the same…
Yup, I’ve tried searching Discord servers as a last resort for some technical issues, but man, their search really can’t differentiate between technical terms properly. I’m hoping they fix their search function at some point, but given how the username system change is going, I’m not holding out hope.
I completely agree. It’s not unique to Discord, as any other chat log type of interface is extremely infuriating to search. I can’t stand that so many good discussion groups have moved to discord. It seems to have absorbed some of the Facebook exodus, a some of the focused reddit discussions.
You know that internally they must have better data tools.
I’m willing to bet the lack of api access going forward will make all reddit posts disappear from crawler results anyways. I’m no expert, but I imagine the crawler is picking up on all of the interconnected references to reddit that are all due to free api access. As soon as those connections disappear, so dies the value to the entire community. It will be just like the garbage results we get from every single source now. This is the path of neo digital feudalism.
API calls are almost always private between the caller and the endpoint (think telegram bots or mobile apps). There isn’t really a technically feasible way for a crawler to somehow “infer” any kind of knowledge of how api calls are being used unless the result has some kind of publically visible side effect (E. G. The program using the api is generating a web page and uploading it somewhere crawlable). Google et Al go by how many links from other pages to the page of interest exist (inbound links) and multiply by a smattering of other things like quality of keywords, length of content etc.
That said, if you’re implying that the api changes mean that:
That is a plausible concern.
This is what I mean, the external references people had in the periphery will dry up. Like if I’m not using Infinity to generate better refined search results, now I don’t post the link to Stack Exchange, and this reference fails to cascade across various copy paste blog resources. Now the original reddit post is a dead end source with no external weighted reference value. It’s all of these advanced features implemented in the periphery using the free API that create the usefulness in the first place.
Searching reddit will be just like YouTube searches now. No matter what technical wording you use, you’ll never find technical references again. I can type the title of a video on YT verbatim and still won’t get the correct results, but I can log into an old account and find the content in my hundreds of playlists I kept as references. It is still there, it is still public.
Yeah that makes sense! I totally agree! Search is becoming pretty difficult these days!