Here’s hoping at some point search engines will return Lemmy links when people look for answers, but we’re not there yet
Comment on How Quora Died
d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 5 months ago
If you were looking for answers to such questions 10 years ago, your best resource for finding a thorough, expert-informed response likely would have been one of the most interesting and longest-lasting corners of the internet: Quora.
I disagree, the best place for such answers used to be Reddit, and Stack Exchange for the techy stuff. Quora always felt like cancer for some reason and I never really used it.
ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world 5 months ago
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
search engines are thoroughly crap right now. Abandon all hope that they will become better.
M137@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You say that like it’s true for all search engines. Which isn’t the case and is incredibly dumb to think.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Lemme guess, you’re a kagi cultist.
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
The problem with Lemmy is the federated content gets duplicated on multiple sites, word for word, which isn’t good for SEO
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
That is a search engine problem, not a lemmy problem.
russjr08@bitforged.space 5 months ago
crazyCat@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Have we said anything useful yet? Just kidding, but I just look for casual commentary on here, all surface level and meme stuff when tired at the end of the day.
RecallMadness@lemmy.nz 5 months ago
I think Something will have to change quite significantly.
Search engines give heavy weighting to uniqueness of content. And with Lemmy content being replicated across the fediverse that doesn’t exactly happen.
And I’m not sure you can set a canonical URL that’s off site. And then, if it does and that site goes down, you “lose” the content.
AA5B@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s not just that it’s not unique, but any single instance is less heavily viewed, even if the overall response is
Haus@kbin.social 5 months ago
I'd say there was a period before reddit hit its pinnacle where Quora was significantly better. Probably more than 10 years ago, though, and only for a few years. I remember when I started spending more time on Reddit than Quora.
Gork@lemm.ee 5 months ago
I think that’s because Quora paywalls responses from volunteers, preventing others from seeing them unless they pay a subscription. Pretty scummy.
stoy@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
I wouldn’t call it scummy, just bad business, give people one premium answer per week, so they know the quallity and at incentivised to pay.
ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Do they pay the people who answer the questions? I genuinely don’t know. But if they don’t then, yes, it is scummy to just profit off of someone else’s work and not pay them.
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’ve contributed to sites like Wikipedia.
Not everything needs to be measured in money though. There’s inherent satisfaction in the work with things like this. And at the end of the day, we all benefit from having platforms with accurate, well thought out answers. Today you’re answering, tomorrow you’re the one with the question.
AA5B@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It is though, because they gamed search engines well enough to frequently be in the top results yet never had an answer you could see. Annoying as fuck