If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).
And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google's.
As an example, if you search for the keyword "Lemmy", DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World's 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml's top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.
i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are "ruined" as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and "real" ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).
Housing costs, food, and access to medical care seem like much bigger factors affecting quality-of-life. And we could go on: childcare costs, declining social safety net, rise in not only home purchase costs but also renting as well, enormous rise in cost of higher education, the switch to fascism, all of this would naively seem to me to contribute far more to life than a mere paycheck in the moment, especially if there is lower stability to turn that paycheck into actual living.
The article cuts off fairly quickly though so if it talked about it down below that, I couldn't read it.
My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both "usable" (even if less so than the past) and also "degraded" at the same time.
That depends strongly on which "public" we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don't even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added "reddit" to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it's less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.
I am thinking - hoping - that it's an unplanned side effect of a change, but that raising the issue like this will likely get it fixed before most people even have to deal with it.:-)
Stuff happens. What's important is how we deal with it from here, imho.
I'm pretty sure that's bc you are on Lemmy.World, which is still running older Lemmy software 0.19.3.
I made a separate post describing this issue. The TLDR for you is that it won't affect you until Lemmy.World upgrades to the modern software version.
After Lemmy.World, the #2 instance on the Fediverse (in terms of users) is Lemmynsfw.com, which is likewise running old software (probably awaiting the new admins asked for). And the #3 is lemm.ee, which does demonstrate this problem.
So even if it does not affect you, yet, it does a lot of other people right now, and will eventually affect everyone using the Lemmy web UI (I don't know if or which apps might be affected).
In that case, it would have been better if OP had offered the type of functionality that they wanted (e.g. cross-platform support, better responsiveness to tablet screens, etc.) to Voyager, as in like make a fork of Voyager and add in the new desired features. Elsewhere in this thread OP acknowledges that this would have been preferable... yet they are going to do their own thing regardless. Which isn't nothing imho, even if something else might have been more ideal.
Hrm, me either. Both desktop Firefox and Chrome leave a GINORMOUS gap (>1 full page height for me) but don't show the video. The only Extension I have in that Firefox is uBlock Origin, and Chrome has none.
Safari not only auto-plays the video, but after I paused it and scrolled down it started to auto-play again, though pausing it the second time worked so it may have been some oddness in something not being finished downloading (yet it still started up the video regardless!).
Can these kinds of "ads" be pointed to as evidence that Lemmy no longer restricts advertising - i.e., it's main selling point? Netflix likewise does "not" have "ads" either - those videos that auto-play after you watch something, and when you pause something, and when you don't select something fast enough, and when you leave the player connected for too long, etc. - those, again, are "not" ads, just so you know. You know, um... in the sense that "well ackshually" they aren't (except, in fact, they are).
Edit: I also see the giant gap from https://startrek.website/post/16820546 too, but NOT from the OP Lemmy.World post. It looks like this may be related? I'm glad that video embeds are working again but... when they auto-play like that, WITH SOUND, that seems to cross a line for me. :-(
It sounds really nice. Something to decide early on is whether to make it open source. Many people who use Lemmy specifically (more so than Reddit I am saying) will only use an app that is open source.
Holy fuck, I click the plus sign to learn a little bit more about this topic, and my browser-based Lemmy web UI autoplays a video with sound. This is the first time I've noticed such a thing on Lemmy and worries me: will we need plugins/extensions to stop such things? Why isn't the sound muted by default?
Probably I could block the community for now, but I'm talking more about this new trend that I have not noticed before on Lemmy.
Can anyone recommend an extension to auto-mute these videos? I use Firefox on Android, with Blokada 5 app, and the extensions uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger. I am not certain of the video type - OP has not inserted it, so it seems to be pulled automatically from the source, as: https://prod.vodvideo.cbsnews.com/cbsnews/vr/hls/3368993_hls/master.m3u8.
If it helps, this seems strictly a Lemmy issue: none of PieFed or Mbin or Tesseract do this autoplay:
Survivorship bias: those who live through the encounter have lowered stress.😁