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.
“just Google it” has always been a shitty reply. People are asking for your opinion because they want opinions from people, not some nameless site/author/whatever. Even if you’re just regurgitating information, it’s coming from a PERSON not a random article. Never mind the reliability of the source. Heavens forbid that we social creatures social about a thing for a bit.
“I’m not responsible for educating you”
cool, then stfu and let somebody else or nut up and do the work if you want it done right
I’m starting to give up on Google. I’ve literally copy and pasted the same error message in Google, DuckDuckGo, and Kagl.
Google will respond with “no results found” while the others will actually give me a response.
Fine I’ll just tell people to Duckduckgo it! /s
Jokes aside I agree with this message. Better to give at least a basic idea on where to find something, or just don’t be a pedantic cock and give me the damn link, your word is not good enough okay buddy, pal, friend.
A “real answer” is rarely as credible as an article with quotes including time and place, as well as citing statistics and peer reviewed studies. In fact, I’d wager the amount of misinformation on Lemmy is a very high ratio. People are even writing entire fanfictions about current events to fit their narrative.
I agree even though I will sarcastically answer things with how easy it was to find, but I still give the information. I ask questions about things I could google myself, but I am not looking for just and answer. oftentimes Im looking for a nuanced answer and hope to find someone with knowledge around the subject that can give me a human take. not that I need a human take to know whats human because im so human myself and all. its not alien at all to me and hey who said anything about aliens. heh. heh.
The amount of times I’ve googled a problem, and the first result is a forum post of someone just being told to google it then locking the thread is way too high.
Not sure if everyone knows this, but: if you don’t want to answer the question—you don’t have to post a reply! Crazy idea, I know.
what if i want to answer the question but i have none of the relevant knowledge and also don’t really understand the question itself?
Just Google it.
I don’t actually own this, but I saw it used once 10 years by my fathers aunts best friend. I guess it would work for what you need it for.
Ah come now my dear sir/madam/xir, who can’t resist a bit of trolling here and a google-it there.
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”
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).
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!
yeah i really hate that
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.
or it’s a reddit post that once contained the answer but has been deleted in protest.
“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.
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.
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?”
Good luck with Linux. Sorry you have to deal with people who don’t know how to teach new users.
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?!
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.
Or the docs are just out of date and literally don’t mention this feature added 2 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, me too. Im not suggesting all devs are assholes, but Lemmy is one example.
When that happens I do publish the docs online and call out the devs for back stabbing their community.
As a software engineer…
Don’t just say “just Google it”. Guide them to the documentation. Ask them about the detail of the question. If it’s an bug, try asking them if they can reproduce the bug.
This reminded me of the time I’m looking for how to do certain things in a software. I found a reddit post asking about the same issue and this is the reply OP got:
Here is the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/mupjsf/how_to_showhide_i3status_bar_taskbar/
Imagine. You search the issue you have. Found the ONLY reddit thread that talks about this, and the ONLY thread that talks about the issue have NO USEFUL ANSWER and, worse, the only reply is TELLING YOU TO SEARCH IT YOURSELF. This got upvoted too 😭😭😭.
Luckily, I found the solution (tbh the solution was there in the docs, but the wording wasn’t clear and it makes it hard to search) and I end up replying the OP the actual answer.
So, this is a PSA for the fediverse: be nice. It’s free.
While we’re still young, we have a chance to become a better forum.
Also possibly an unpopular opinion: you shouldn’t downvote a question, even if it was asked multiple times. Guide them to the answer instead
Also Google results differ since like a decade. It may show for you in California, but its nowhere to be found for me in Iran
Has this same energy: https://xkcd.com/979/
Even worse is when they edit their post to add “Never mind, figured it out.”
These people should be unable to reproduce. Just as soon as they edit the post, a shriek of agony can be heard for miles.
I ran across an example of this recently, on fucking Github. Bitch it’s your goddamn issue ticket, on a fucking dev site, and you returned to say you figured it out but can’t be fucked to explain how? GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Something, something, recursion.
Wow that is infuriating.
That insulting is satisfactory
Looks like you solved your problem by RTFM ;-)
I’ve never seen this acronym, but I’m pretty sure it says reading the fucking manual
Just google it.
As funny as that is, I can’t imagine Google would want to hide anything more than this piece of knowledge right here.
ftfy
its a website that has man pages for stuff.
But what about woman pages? smh so much for inclusion
damm true.
If someone actually wants help searching Lemmy or the Fediverse, I recommend this site: https://fedi-search.com/
Very simple, but it does the job. It’s also good if one wants to learn advanced Google queries.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work in Tor Browser
“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.
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.
(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
That’s assuming we’re able to draw the people with answers here into the fediverse, in the long run.
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.
Is it the mantis? I had to use kagi and set it to fediverse for it to pop up for me. On firefox and google it it nowhere to be seen for me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I reply “search it”
Never thought I would see anybody call having to scroll past some sponsored links and reddit results “hard”. Compared to what, farting? Honestly folks, after 2025 we’ll probably all have a different view of what’s easy and what’s hard.
It’s not hard. It’s that information from people has become more fact than a single persons opinion on a topic. Do you have any idea how many variables are involved in why my cucumbers are dying in my green house? How many links and articles I’ve read before just asking it to the community and finding the answer in literally the first person who replied?
Information, wisdom, knowledge are all empowered by a community, and trusting a search engine to populate those will eliminate the community aspect of information gathering. It’ll cause the watered down, lost in information practices that we have going on today.
Doing this, in 30 years no one will be able to grow cucumbers in their greenhouse becuase all the information you’ll have will be based off the same shitty technique and everyone’s attempt at that technique, and no one will talk about the nuanced variables.
The cucumbers is an example.
I too value the advice of people sharing their experience on reddit, but I also see way too many highly upvoted posts crediting Nikola Tesla with inventing everything but fire. Top google results are increasingly useless junk, but so are top social media results. Having grown up with physical encyclopedias I wouldn’t say information is “hard” to find.
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.
