I went searching for something today and instinctually clicked on a reddit link. Fortunately the sub was dark for the protest anyway, but it’s crazy how ingrained in me it is to go to reddit for everything.
Unfortunately now we’re going to have to get used to clicking on those clickbait tech articles like “TOP 10 FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVES 2023” to find information, and weed out the crappy blogs.
In all fairness there’s a lot of knowledge on Reddit anyway, people will likely still need to visit Reddit for historical purposes. It really shows how ingrained Reddit was to internet society when you try to look up fixes for certain things and the only relevant result is from Reddit, but then it’s been privated so you can’t see it. It’s going to be a big struggle for certain things on the internet if those kinds of subreddit never reopen.
I don’t think I’ll go back to Reddit as an active user but there’ll be times I’ll need to go there for actual information.
Amen
That’s a fair point. Even in the case the content is in a private sub, you may be able to find it in some archive (including the crawled page from the search engine). When in need you do what you gotta do.
Agreed
These days, I use a web browser addon that searches archive.org (among others) for cached copies of Reddit posts
What add-on is it?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/view-page-archive/
Maybe a coordinated effort could be taken by some of the lemmy communities to copy and preserve the data? Particularly for users and mods of the now dark communities?