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…
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.
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…
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.