As an example: I was doing a search for the best sesame substitute today. Everything that came up was things like, “11 Best Sesame Substitutes,” and I know for a fact that just about everything they suggested tastes nothing like sesame. Just another site trying to get hits. So I added reddit.com into my search parameters and immediately got some decent answers.
I really hate that I have to do that to get anything useful, but there is a ridiculous amount of useful information on Reddit. I hope the fediverse gets to this point as well one day.
Anway, just needed to vent. Lemmy on.
Instead of using a search engine or reddit, have you tried asking the real and friendly people here for an answer?
I did this to prove a point. You can check it out, crushed peanut or flaxseed seem popular.
https://lemmy.world/post/4349618
The answers on reddit didn’t magically appear out of thin air. Instead of lamenting about the lack of answers on Lemmy, asking here will get you a good answer real quick.
The issue isn’t that reddit has all the answers the issue is that search engines like Google show you the websites that have been best optimized for search engines, not the most helpful ones.
Ending searches with ‘reddit’ works because reddit is the largest group of forums on the web & forums typically are full of people knowledgeable on a specific topic that have good answers.
The quality of returned search results IMO has degraded appreciably. When I search the same question as you posted the entire first page of results is long winded listicals. There’s a lot of seemingly helpful & succinct answers in that post you made but no one searching Google will find it if they enter the exact title.
That’s often my issue, forums will have multiple real people with their own opinions based on their experience. With an article it’s one author who is only writing the article to attract clicks.
People who write on reddit dont produce the info themselves instead they would have also reffered to some book / article (mostly articles) thus reading the articles will give you more info about the topic … just remember before reading the blog/article see the author and his/her qualification , most articles give a brief info about the writer at the top … just make sure that person is genuinely knowledgeable on the topic … also avoid AI written articles
People on forums like Reddit absolutely can produce their own info. Nowadays it’s more often that those articles are based on posts written on sites like reddit.
i’m honestly obsessed with how insanely bad it’s gotten. is there a video of the difference? i know for a fact it wasn’t this shitty before, the - sign would work.
Fair! But I’m also lamenting about the degradation of search engines as a viable way of finding useful information. Additionally, while I have asked questions on Lemmy before (check my post history), it will sometimes take time to get an answer, and you can’t always be sure how quickly that will happen, if at all (I have seen several unanswered questions on here).
However, I do think that posting the question on here would still have been good for me to do. Not so much so that I could get my answer, but to further engagement and help grow the fediverse.
That’s a great option when we have time! But if there’s an issue I need answered within an hour, it’s unlikely it’ll be answered by then.
People answered there within the hour…
I meant for something more obscure like ‘how to use selection filters for fillet repeats in a less common cad software’. It might take a while before someone comes along who would know.
Another issue is also the diversity of responses and some kind of confirmation responses are good via up votes.
Yeah guess you just have to come to terms with not knowing any good substitutes for sesame
You remember we didn’t use to have ANY answers to our random questions provided instantly, right? No magic black mirrors in our pockets.
What are you even complaining about? You had to look at more search results than expected?
I’m not complaining, I just need to use Reddit instead of Lemmy, which I’d rather not do.
Margot Robbie, most questions won’t be answered nearly that quickly.
Is there a way to do a web search on the whole fediverse?
The only things i have found that offer decent search is Lemmy-go https:github.comRaicuparta/lemmy-go/ and Instance assistant
https://lemmy.ca/post/4547927 but they don’t cover the whole fediverse.
With the way federation works it will take some doing, and knowledge of various sites names, but you can do this by adding “source: sitename” to your search
Fediverse is uniquely difficult to do this with though, as traffic is (relatively) low per individual site and you’ll need various names
one of the biggest issues with reddit, imo, is that people would constantly bitch about new / beginner / common / repeated questions, which made it a really hostile environment and unnecessarily harder to get into things. being accepting of those questions is great fodder for discussion, different people to see different answers, more up to date answers, etc. plus it still feels novel here to see posts about things