Like, for example I have a specific issue with a digital audio converter by a popular brand but their customer service is awful. A simple google prompt followed by site:reddit.com would yield solutions almost every time. In fact I would say I did 90% of my googling that way. How do I break this cycle and do you feel this is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing? If anything, Reddit remains the biggest repo of easily accessible solutions for anything. We’re seeing right now what happens if this is being taken away by subs going private. Vanilla Google is a shitshow.

  • readas@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure if there is a good solution. We’re just in the soup. Part of the mess that’s happening is because Reddit can be so good at giving proper answers. In my experience, at least in smaller communities, you have people that care and are curious.

    So your question about a DAC is answered by someone who loves audio and bitrates and was into it for months or years before you even knew you’d have the question.

    To fix trash search, AI is just chewing up all those old answers in the hope that it’ll be as “smart” about rowing as the woman on the subreddit who rowed for 10 years and coached for 5 and gave thoughtful answers to some college kid.

    We’re in the middle of a… a something. And everything will just be shittier for a minute. The algorithms will feast on what’s buried in Reddit and become “smart” enough to give a passable answer, but then we run into the issue of new “smarts”… I don’t think AI will be able to generate new “smart” of any value. It’ll need to be trained by people and who knows if there will be dedicated people pouring info into a new repository.

    • ElectroVagrant@lemmy.worldMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Part of the mess that’s happening is because Reddit can be so good at giving proper answers. In my experience, at least in smaller communities, you have people that care and are curious.

      I think you struck at the real answer to OP with this, personally. As search engines degrade in pursuit of profits, we’re forced back to the basic model of information exchange, communicating with each other.

      The real reason Reddit became such a resource of information was because it was such a central site of information exchange courtesy of its communities. What this means is that to get away from searching a single site and even relying on a single search engine, is that we rely on each other for information as we really always have.

      I know that may sound kinda cheesy, but it’s ultimately true. It’s one of the reasons Discord servers are so popular, in some cases almost exceeding wikis.