It is clear that the signal to noise ratio of the WWW is getting worse. It’s much harder to find good content when using a good old search engine. And if it’s good it is usually hosted on Reddit or Stackexchange.
So remember, even if it’s easy too Google something (well, it isn’t nowadays), we want to create a fediverse of good content that helps people (I hope). So, it’s always better to write a real answer if you have the time and energy. Please help boost the SNR and reverse the AI fueled information degradation loop.
Did you mean “Don’t reply, just google it”? /s
“Check the documentation” should absolutely be a retort though.
One of my least favorite things about the fediverse (and especially Discord and Reddit) is members asking the same simple question hundreds of times because they didn’t bother to do a simple search and didn’t bother to check obvious documentation.
They didn’t know the documentation exists? OK, I will happily show you, and show you how to find it in general. Question only partially novel? Great, I will link an old answer and explain the rest… But I am kinda fed up with how “ephemeral” social media is, which is by design, as that repetitiveness increases engagement dramatically. Many forums should be structured more like a wiki, and its users should reflect that.
Lemmy documentation is fucking terrible.
Ive submitted PRs for documentation to some Foss projects (not just in the fediverse space) that were rejected by the owners.
It is some FOSS projects intention to intentionally add obscurity to their product, specifically when they monetize by paid hosting.
Funny, I wrote plenty of documentation and release notes. In some cases I even got direct commit permissions to the repositories after a while.
And if monetized projects want to have obscure docs: edit the Arch wiki.
Right, and sealioning is also a thing. If we are having a conversation where there is a presumed knowledge of some basic informationor background, I’m not going to sit here and restate that entire basis just because you got in over your head.
Okay, you’re not required to snarkily broadcast that in the conversation, though. You could just ignore it.
Check the documentation can be pretty useless a lot of times. The docs aren’t always great or they’re huge and I have a specific question. Often times I do check them, but they’re incomplete or unclear. Or the docs change or the links die.
Just answer the question anyway and then say where you found it.
If you say as much in your question, you’re much less likely to get someone saying “rtfm”.
Rtfm and LMGTFY by themselves aren’t useful. They’re the equivalent of posting “me too”.
If you think that the answer is in the manual and they haven’t read it, post a link to the manual. Double helpful if you reference the section.
If you think the answer is on Google, I think we can assume everyone knows to try that first, so then no reply is needed. If it’s a particularly tricky search to phrase, maybe help with a link with a searchable phrase in it.
But not replying is always a useful thing to do if you’re not adding to the conversation.
That kind of behavior can also be a sign that the documentation is hard to find or hard to comprehend. Or that something isn’t documented at all, but the seniors imagine it is, because the answer is obvious to them.
cmake comes to mind: I can find the docs for whatever function I want to use, but I honestly have such a hard time comprehending what they mean. It’s especially frustrating because I can tell that all the information is there, and it’s just me not being able to understand it, so I don’t want to ask others for help, cause then I’m just bothering people with a problem that I’ve in principle already found the answer to, I’m just not able to apply the answer.
Then again, I’ve heard plenty of other people complain that the cmake docs are hard to understand…
I can relate to this. And off the record (I know it’s not always a super appreciated opinion in the Fediverse): for this kind of problem I find that LLMs help a lot.
Me. This is me. I’m trying to figure out linux.
“How do I do…something”
“Oh, that’s easy! Just do this and this and this. Make sure you check that that and that.”
“Ok…now how do I do the things you just said?”
“Just do those things the right way.”
“I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THOSE TERMS MEAN, LET ALONE HOW TO DO THEM!!!”
“Ugh, this guy can’t even follow simple directions. What part of that do you not understand???”
“Uhhhhhh…core concepts?”
Maybe start with the core concepts first then, instead of diving in headfirst and flailing about.
I don’t even know what the core concepts are. I’m still unclear by what a snapback or a flatpak are, but apperently there’s drama if you pick one over the other depending on who you ask.
But I know they install programs…but I wouldn’t say I know what they are.
And then you have all the people who tell you you’re using the wrong flavor of linux and if you knew anything you would have used the version they’re using. BITCH YOU’VE BEEN TELLING ME THAT I WAS USING THE WRONG OS FOR YEARS AND NOW I SWITCH AND I’M STILL DOING IT WRONG?!
Good luck with Linux. Sorry you have to deal with people who don’t know how to teach new users.
To me this is where communities having a maintained wiki is great. More than once it’s saved me from asking a question that’s already been answered a hundred times before.
Maybe they read the documentation and the documentation doesn’t clearly answer their question.
You can always just ignore their question if you don’t want to answer. Let someone else do it.
“Google It”
I google
finds 1 link
its a link to a fourm post with the same question
only 1 answer found
answer says “Google It”
🙃
Old Reddit threads where the answer giver deleted their account & all their comments.
Or scrambled all of their posts after APIgate (or whatever we’re calling it). Perhaps they came here, which means OP is right in saying we can be a new source of useful answers.
I’m not sure if Lemmy or other Fediverse posts even get indexed by any of the search engines. I’ve yet to see any in a search result.
They absolutely do. Not only Lemmy posts in general, but I have found my own content completely unintentionally on searches several times.
I guess it’s a matter of lack of good posts that could become the desired search result then. Time will tell if we ever get to that point.
That’s why when I left reddit I don’t delete my posts (even if those posts suck)
Bonus:
I can kinda get the sentiment. I left during the protests too and I can see people wanting to damage Reddit, which is also completely deserved. Of course now Reddit is respecting the right to your comments even less and scrapes them for Google’s LLM models.
Eh. I torched all my comments when I left (and posts, too) and I’ve said before and still maintain that I’m not sorry in the slightest.
If anything wants to know anything I said that was relevant to anything (and not the usual cavalcade of political bickering) they can come here and ask. I’ll gladly retype any of it.
Fuck reddit. The quicker we can dispose of it and just rip that Band-Aid off, the better.
I did, bc reddit locked up my content, and wanted to use it to train a LLM.
Let people ask again, here, in the fediverse.
Reddit lost nothing when you deleted your comments, they still exist on their servers and are likely being used to train LLMs now. All that was lost was other peoples ability to readt them
And without my.comment, fewer hits because users cannot see it, which means less people provide training data.
No single drop feels responsible for the flood.
Sure thats correct, but I’m a little uneasy with the idea of “burn down a useful resource for people becuase fewer people helped people results in slower increases of data to Reddit”
A trap for people isn’t something I’d consider “useful”.
Just like a pedo van offering free food to kids… sure kids get fed, but at what cost?
That does hurt Reddits usability for users, though, which is bad for business in general.
That’s assuming we’re able to draw the people with answers here into the fediverse, in the long run.
What gets us there is long term stability.
Grow organically, and they will come.
First, the tech enthusiasts, then tech journos, then normal journos, then normals.
It’s how online spaces grow.
Just search for obscure shitty pocketknife models and my dinkum pictures from here are among the top results, sometimes even #1. I therefore conclude that this is not outside the realm of possibility.
(already had a feeling that someone will say this)
I won’t delete my posts/comments because I want to be helpful, that’s it.
But if I prefer deleting my posts/comments, I will archive it instead.
I respect what r/ArtFundamentals did, and it should be an example: After reddit’s APIpocalypse, they don’t support reddit and decided to close the subreddit. But the advices from the subreddit wasn’t gone–in fact they actually archive it in their own website:
I wrote a script (well, modified one of my old bots) to copy and archive all of my comments before editing them. I left a note in the comments for how to find me in case they wanted the original comment. I felt like that was a fair compromise
Sadly, DuckDuckGo really sucks ass at searching the fediverse.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Lemmy+don't+reply+just+google+it&t=fpas&ia=web
Even if you type in the exact words of the post, it will display 1 post and that is it, then switch to other sources. Probably because of all of the different server names that aren’t Lemmy.
I don’t feel bad about wiping my account, as almost everything on it was useless.
Also I was pissed off at the time, and my goal was to make more people dislike going on Reddit.
Just stick it in ChatGPT
Noooooo don’t Just Google it try, Use a Search Engine or just WebSearch it<br>
Dont’t make Google an integral part of internet culture
I wish I had the power to make google a not integral part of the internet just by calling it duckduckgoing.
On that note: If you talk about what you searched for last week, would that be “I duckduckgoed” or “I duckduckwent”?
Jokes on you, I google it using ddg!
on one hand I agree. on the other, google has historically been afraid of the verb to google becoming generic, so of course I’d like to see that happen.
I think the middle ground is say google it, but make it clear you mean google it on an alternative search engine
Yep, just like Kleenex, or Xerox, (a faded term for mimeograph/photocopy), Google has become a generic verb/term for search in virtually every language now. To google something is synonymous with search. It no longer implies a specific search engine. (I use Ghostery private search myself). Google has lost the war on their name and “It’s a Good Thingtm”
But there does seem to be a greater amount of “search entitlement” these days for even the easiest of problems. People as a very general rule don’t seem to want to be bothered by the need to learn things on their own. They expect others to provide them all the answers in an effortless format.
I’ve even provided detailed answers to people on some ‘life threat level’ activities that were rejected because I didn’t simply reaffirm their ignorant and misguided thoughts in looking for shortcut answers.
When I ask someone for clarification via their expertise, I usually reflexively indicate that I cannot trust google because of the incursion of AI slop, and even if it shows THEM accurate results, it is no guarantee that it will show ME those same results.
Never say just, and if you bother answering be proper about it
Yes please don’t do this. Google doesn’t need more support either from search activity or inclusion into the vernacular. If someone is asking in the fediverse which is still a relatively small community, they are expressing a degree of patience with their answer that suggests they’ve already tried search and came up dissapointed or they are really lacidasical about their question and won’t really mind if you just ignore it and move on. Taking the time to tell someone to websearch something is even more pathetic than a “this” reply.
A little study of philosophy helps us ask and consider better questions, a little study of google helps us consider a world without CEOs and the constant encroachment of enshittification for shareholder profits.
Search for it on the Internet
I feel like it’s 2000 all over again on the Internet. The bloat has made pages borderline unusable, and using AdBlock or NoScript reverts any so-called “design progress” back to the good old HTML days.
Google is only semi-useful now, while pages like DuckDuckGo are starting to deliver results reminiscent of the old Yahoo or Lycos days.
It feels like my trusty, old-school Internet skills are helping me navigate this mess. The reemergence of usenet / groups feels inevitable.
It’s like a bouncing ball, social media starts small, and then it became bigger. It’s trending on becoming small again. In the future (barring civilization ending war/calamity) it’ll become big again due to some technological progress or shift in society.
So many times I google something obscure, the top result is the same question asked on some forum with a single reply, “just google it”
deleted by creator
The only thing worse than someone saying just Google it is an op replying to their own post saying, never mind fixed it! (Without actually saying the solution).
yeah i really hate that
No I think someone saying Google it is still worse.
The former is being intentionally unhelpful.
Your example is being unintentionally unhelpful.
Intentional malicious behavior is far worse than negligence.
“What did you see, DenverCoder9?!?!”
There is always an xkcd!
and worse, it’s a thread from 17 years ago and apparently nobody else except you has had the issue since.
You ever revisit an old problem, search it, find someone with the exact problem and as you read it think “yes… YES! This person has my exact same problem! Wait, the tone sounds familiar…”
Only to realize you found your own post from an old throwaway account? With no replies.
Because I have. It’s soul crushing.
No, because I went back and answered my own question.
It’s too bad ChatGPT will never replace a real Reddit thread:
Just ask them to answer your question in the style of a know-it-all Redditor because you need the dialog for a compelling narrative or something
Why not just reply with Search it?
