7mo ago

death of the ruleternet

106 comments

Nevermind, have figured it out.
<thread closed with NO FUCKING ASWER kthxbye>
- Described: Why whenever I figure something out myself after posting a help thread, I'll write a whole report on what I did before it got fixed (because often I'm just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, and I never know what exactly moved the needle)
  
  Those threads with "fixed it!" and no instructions? If they're on reddit, I'm posting "I deleted system32 and the problem went away!"
- Relevant xkcd
  
  Why do I always click on these even though I know exactly what it will be?
- Like I said in a previous thread that ended up on this topic. There's a special place in hell, with Satan from Little Nicky, a few pineapples and some lobsters to hang off these asshole's nipples.....

Me, who completely nuked twelve years worth of Reddit posts and comments which were often one of, if not the only relevant search result to an extremely niche problem.
- Oof yeah. Finding a reddit thread with your exact query as the title, getting excited to see a comment, aaaaand... It's "This comment was deleted by EliteUltraEraser Premium TM. I value my privacy,...."
  (I do get it though. And who knows, maybe this will actually help in the long run and not just lead to increased usage of Discord communities so ask the same thing over and over and over again because they aren't fucking publicly searchable god I hate what Discord has done to the searchability of issues in the tech space?)
  
  Oops, might have gone a little off topic there.
  
  ~~and the experts you need to talk to aren't necessarily available at the time you need them to re-answer a question for you~~
- Yeah that's really unfortunate :( worth it though I'd say. Just gotta build the knowledge base back up in a better place :)
- Depending on how you nuked it, reddit might have just restored the comment behind your back. My reddit account shows 0 posts/comments, but a month ago I got a reply to a comment in a post I made five years ago providing instructions on how to get a game working in Linux.
  
  Yup, I occasionally get replies on posts over a year old that don't show up in my history because I thought I deleted them.
  Edit your posts. Don't delete them.
  
  Nothing is 100% but my comments were first replaced with excerpts from books in the public domain, twice. Then I went back a third time and replaced the comments with gibberish, then delete. Most of the comments I find still active are just the excerpts from the books. They read like plain English, so it is very difficult for an AI, or even a contractor, to pick up on the fact that it is worthless.
  
  Nah, reddit restoring comments is a myth. You just didn't delete all your comments, even though probably you thought you did.
  See, Reddit, being the duplicitous removed that it is, doesn't really show you all your comments when you go to your profile. It's limited to your last 1000 (?) comments or so, any comment that goes beyond that horizon is gone from your view forever, but it still exists in the thread.
  The way to solve that is to first do a GDPR request. After a few weeks you will receive a zip file containing a file with all your comments and a link to it. You can then use an overwrite and delete tool and point it to this information. It will likely run for several hours or even days, depending on how many comments you made, because reddit throttles edit and delete requests, but it will effectively delete everything.
- Good.
- Me too actually
- Maybe one day instead of [Insert Search Query] Reddit, it will instead be [Insert Search Query] Lemmy
  Edit Addendum: Might be cool if people got their old tech support posts from reddit, ask the question that was asked in a post, and then answer their own post with the answer that they gave that solved the issue.
  
  The first Lemmy server I chose imploded 2 months ago.
- Chad

"Why are you trying to do [x]? Have you tried doing [y] instead?"
- "You shouldn't do [y] either, you idiot, you absolute fucking buffoon. You should instead do [z, which costs a fortune and/or requires you to restructure your entire life]"
  
  Thread closed [x] already answered please go to link: completly unrelated topic actually about [a]
  
  But it will be slighly more efficient
- "Just install Linux"
- "But why do you want that?" should be an automatic time-out on most Q&A sites. Especially anything technical.
  I don't need to convince you to make my decisions.
  
  A lot of the time, the fundamental issue is the lack of information provided by the poster. I've seen so many threads where the provided information just isn't enough, and they don't react to any of the questions at all.

goes to goople
searches '1980 cx500 only runs on one cylinder'
comment from 2007: "replace this module right here:"
[broken Photobucket link]
 
edit: might as well add the problem. lol
if the carbs are clean and tuned well enough to be ruled out the problem is likely the CDI module as they are over 40 years old and are known to fail. if replacing the CDI doesn't seem to make a difference the problem is likely the ignition system on the whole. the next step in the process would be the stator but since you have to pull the motor to change it you may as well go ahead and rebuild the ignition system with modern components. there are a couple different aftermarket solutions such as Ignitech. i opted for Rae-San.
- So much was lost with PhotoBucket. A mind boggling amount of information is just gone.
  
  Common issue with most image hosters. I think a lot of the time the issue is the users deleting their images, rather than the hoster going down.
- I remember someone once made a meme about that:
  
  Ow
  
  i love this

People who write a whole novel about "google is your friend" and try to make you feel stupid for asking a question are the ultimate assholes. You wrote 3 paragraphs just to bully a stranger on the internet when 1 sentence could have answered the question. Thanks for being a royal knob head.
- I just googled 'is google my friend' and google told me it was not my friend. Help.
  
  At least they're honest 😞
- google is not your friend. it is a tool at best.
  
  It's that one tool at your work that needs replacement, but management refuses to do more than clean and reapply a new layer of duct tape so long as it still gets the job done eventually, forcing workers to struggle with it until giving up and finding an alternative solution that doesn't rely on it.
  
  Such a fucking tool.

Here is a comprehensive Guide how to do [x]:
{20 paragraphs of Background Story}
[x] is Impossible to do, you dumbfuck
- Oh god you reminded me of this gem
  https://serverfault.com/questions/780150/how-to-cache-contents-in-haproxy#780155
  Someone asks how to do http caching in HAproxy.
  The one answer:
  don't use the wrong tool
  haproxy is a wonderful tool. It does not provide caching. A quick scan of the fine docs can verify this. Unless you want to patch haproxy you need to use a tool that does what you're looking to do.
  don't create impossible problems
  By asking for haproxy to do something that it doesn't and excluding the tool that seems to do what you want to do you've create an impossible situation. There is no technical solution for this. Don't make choices that box you into a corner.
  try varnish or anything that actually caches
  If you get over that you might find this tutorial on using varnish with haproxy useful or try varnish by itself. Maybe squid or memcached would be more your speed.
  In the comments to this ludicrous tirade we get this simple comment:
  This was true and valid back then. Nowadays HAProxy does this.
  And just in case someone found this looking for an answer, here's the example from that link
  undefined
  
  backend bck1 mode http http-request cache-use foobar http-response cache-store foobar server srv1 127.0.0.1:80 cache foobar total-max-size 4 max-age 240

And this is why I have always hated every single jackass that responded to a question with "just Google it" even when Google didn't completely suck cock.
If I had just one single answer from a reputable source doing that, I wouldn't be asking real people. Search engines were never infallible. Niche topics have always garnered shit results.
- A lot of people don't consider the future even when writing helpful posts. I'm as guilty as anyone.
  If you link the correct answer, the person finding your post in 6 years better hope the link is still good. That's the legitimate reason scholarly papers needs to cite specific book editions and journal page numbers instead of using hyperlinks in a bibliography.
  If a copy of the book or journal can ba tracked down, the citation will still work.
  It's also why online-only published journals are still often formatted like a book with static pages instead of websites. If you find a journal article that's important, you'll likely still be able to find an achived copy in PDF somewhere even if the journal stops publishing or they change domains or whatever.

Or someone asked a question on Reddit and got an answer, but then it was removed due to a protest. All you get is the reply “Thank you so much! It works now”
- Honestly I was so mad when I noticed that whole thing kicking off... I had SO MANY PROBLEMS solved by finding answers on reddit...
  Obligatory: Fuck Spez... Greedy POS.

Wrong!
Google: How to do xyz
7 million AI generated SEO optimised bullshit websites: Here's you do xyz (we don't know either but we use lots of words Google likes so we get put first)
- 'VYZ is something i will proceed to give you a summary on and then multiple links all reciting the same data'

Me lately trying to figure out how to do anything on Linux
- At least you're in the right place bro (Arch btw)
  
  At this point, all I know that "I use Arch btw" is a meme, which means it's either a great choice or an awful choice.
  
  Thanks bro. Maybe I'll get to Arch one day. 🙂
- You're lying, no Linux user use chrome
  
  What about that says chrome?

Literally happens all the damn time anymore
Whole first page is ads and threads of people saying, 'Just Google it,' 'There's a search function here for a reason,' 'thread locked due to frequently asked question,' etc, etc.
I miss the earlier days of the Internet where people were more helpful. Or hell when Google wasn't just ads and SEO crap.

This was always dickhead behaviour, but not for the reasons you guys are circlejerking about. Often the answers to these questions are extremely easy to find online (even today, Google is nowhere near as useless as people make it out to be). But the entire point of asking other people through social media or a forum is because you want to engage in discussion with other humans. That's literally the entire point of these websites: to foster discussion, both for the sake of learning and for the social entertainment we all need. People who sign up to them and then completely shutdown attempts to start discussions are absolutely braindead and don't understand any of this. Modern forms of social media only encourage this kind of performative social interaction. So many people seem to think the sole purpose of discussion-based social media is to dunk on others with a vicious reply and "win" by earning more points (ratio) instead of having an actual back and forth discussion with another human.
- I mean, there has definitely been a noticeable and significant decline in the quality of search engine results, particularly on Google. It used to stand out at least a little bit from Bing (a search engine that went very hard into inserting ads into results early on), but they've essentially become indistinguishable. Aesthetics and connections with other platforms like Gmail and YouTube have become the only real reason to stay with one over the other.
  
  Sure, I completely that it has declined significantly. I think the comments in this thread about it "sucking cock", being "just ads and SEO crap", or a "bloated, shit site" are hyperbole though. It is still the best search engine for most use-cases and queries, including finding answers to "how do I do X" type questions. I use DuckDuckGo (AKA Bing) but only because it gets close enough to Google's results to be a superior choice for me overall when I take into account its massive privacy advantages. In terms of results, there is still enough of a gap that I will occasionally need to rely on Google's results for particular queries. I actually used to use StartPage for this exact reason and only switched because it had issues with VPNs.

I FOUND A STACK OVERFLOW QUESTIONS RECENTLY THAT WAS LITERALLY THIS!
Nr. 1 accepted answer (lots of years ago): something something plenty of information available on Google, no need for this thread
Nr. 2 answer (way fewer years ago): seeing as this is now the first Google result for anything relating to this, here's how you do it.
(shame I can't remember what exactly the question was. Please still believe me? 🥺)
- (shame I can't remember what exactly the question was. Please still me? 🥺)
  I think about half the threads on stackoverflow fit this criteria

It was even wrose when there was a site by the name "let me google it for you", which insulted you while made an animation about how to use this "not evil" website google. You google "how to do [X]" find a nice looking forum, and people either are angry that OP didn't google it, or they deceptively linked to a lmgify page.
After a month of suffering, I instead reinstalled Windows XP, which I had a lot of trouble with (fugly UI, stability issues, performance issues, etc), but not as much as with the "king of stability", Linux.
- I always used to use "Let me bing it for you" at least then it was probably something they hadn't tried, and it was proper trolling instead of just being passive aggressive
- Lol

And when you finally find some helpful forum with content from 15 years ago, you’ll have someone be like “GUYS I FIGURED IT OUT! Here’s a [broken] link to someone else who solved it” with a dozen or so “Thanks, that solved the issue immediately for me!” Comments after it.
- Amount of broken links is crazy. I always try checking internet archive, but they often don't have stuff like that.

All those letMeGoogleThat links from the 00s have turned into Rick Rolls (figuratively speaking).

See also: The less hostile but equally useless advice to "Search online"

More than once I’ve had Google return a years old reddit thread with only 2 or 3 comments that just say “I don’t know, let me know if you find out.” What in the shit is going on that THAT is somehow the SEO winner?
- Ad partner > relevance

God, I feel this in my bones. I always hated the scumbags who acted this way so much. I'm really glad I'm not the only one...

I tried to get into making Skyrim mods, but some basic info just isn't on any forums. I then find it discussed on discord servers as if it's common knowledge discovered a while ago, but those same servers also perpetuate myths from Morrowind that were debunked a decade ago by an experienced modder. However, that modder is also a toxic asshole who's now impossible to work with, so finding reliable info from him after 2018 is hard. All the while I'm just sitting here wondering if it's even worth the effort.
- Friends don't let friends use gamebryo.

it's crazy how those comments are aging like milk precisely because google/web search is going to shit (in addition to being dickhead comments ofc)
just weird to look back and think about how we thought it would never change
- YouTube searches are also truly awful, and have been for around a year.
  
  a friend of mine discovered the tip to add "before:2025" (or, the current year+1) to your yt search to improve it. i have no clue why that does anything but it reverts it to pre-enshittified functionality
- To give google 1(one) droplet of credit, the enshittification didn't come from them alone. In fact I'm fairly sure that if they could get their way, the page would still return useful results, only, JUST below all the paid ads. SEO Spam doesn't help THEM either.
  The problem is... A lot of the "good" results on google came from like. Enthusiast websites. Webforums. And... Reddit.
  Enthusiast Websites are much rarer now. They got consolidated into media conglomerates and then closed down. Only a few remain.
  Webforums are in a similar zombified state, most got vored by "social media" and Discord (P.S.: if you are a dev or artist or whatever and use a Discord server as the main helpline/download source for a project you're doing, fuck you very much, you are the ACTUAL worst <3), which aren't indexed by search engines.
  Then Reddit got Spez'd, so THAT avenue is fucked too.
  Fedi isn't indexed by search engines either (AFAIK), so you can't do the old "
  <Search terms>
  reddit" trick replacing reddit with lemmy. It won't work.
  
  linux mint forums

Anybody remember this site? Google used to be so good that anybody with half a brain could find a good result if they would just type a basic phrase into it.
https://googlethatforyou.com?q=Why%20does%20Google%20suck
- My sweet summer child, issues with google search existed in 2008, things just accelerated at a massive rate once it became the de facto standard and people figured out how to manipulate search results.
  
  "My sweet summer child" is a very weird way to start a comment response. It sounds condescending.

Me scrolling through 150 stackoverflow pages and 'helpful' third party websites that don't answer my question

Not sure about [x], but here’s how you do [y]

"Have you tried rtfm?"
- I hate that shit. People answer with "check page 72 of your car manual" and it's like ... you clearly pulled out the manual to pull that page number, I'm under my car right now, just copy the damned sentence.

...GoOgLe is YoUr fRiENd....
springs to mind

This is why I only search somethingawful's archives for answers to my questions.

i've been there too... i understand your pain panel 4

Lmgtfy used to be a great site to send to people when they asked easily googled questions. Now it's a bloated shit site that barely works if it even still exists. It would do a flash animation on how to go to Google.com, type in their question and click search. I always got a kick out of sending it to people. R.i.p old Internet. You were great.

It may be pronounced goople.fart, but it's spelled goople.farht.
I'll see myself aus.
- 🤓☝️its Fahrt*

106 comments

don't use the wrong tool

don't create impossible problems

try varnish or anything that actually caches