For me it feels like breaking up with someone after many years. At the same time, I feel a bit dirty mentioning the name in the post title.
For me it feels like breaking up with someone after many years. At the same time, I feel a bit dirty mentioning the name in the post title.
I hate reddit. But it feels like the library of Alexandria burning down (yea I know). All those google search results and educational subreddits that are shutting down forever, and because they are too small reddit won’t force open them again.
A lot are in the pushshift archive, but that cuts of at 2022. Also, it doesn’t include a lot of the smaller subreddits.
I have had my PC running 24/7 with multiple VPNs to avoid rate limits downloading as much as I can before the API dies, but with some blackouts moving forward a day I have already missed a few.
Like many others, I would often add “reddit” to the end of my searches to get better results, half the websites on web searches now are either AI generated, copies or are completely AD ridden websites that ask you to turn off your AD blocker.
Reddit has answered almost every question I’ve ever had for years. The potential loss of all the knowledge is my greatest concern.
i getcha, but it was people who did that. it’s kind of hard to shut us up, we’ll answer more questions wherever we are
most knowledge has a shelf life anyway
I think this is honestly the biggest issue. Web search has been garbage for years, with legit the only saving grace being Reddit users sharing their knowledge. This is gonna have a horrible effect on producing good search results.
Totally agree. I feel like this is the equivalent, to some degree, of Stack Overflow just suddenly going away. The history needs to be preserved, somehow.
Is there anything in the Fediverse that is like a Stack Overflow clone? Might be time to start working on the backup plan for those big websites that do not show a sign of going away yet to avoid the rush when they inevitably do.
how exaclty does this pushshift work? I downloaded some zsts from it but what do I do with them?
The file you downloaded is a compressed JSON file, it’s not something you can really just look at. But it contains all the data needed to build a nice UI around.
I don’t know what OS you are on but on linux you can run
zstd -d -c file.zst | jq .and it will print everything in the file. It’s not really readable though. Also it doesn’t have any of the media content, only the text