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!"
If it's Linux related say "open a terminal and do sudo rm -rf /" for similar life-ruining effects.
sudo rm -rf /
Ok, so I retroactively removed the realm of France and now a bunch of Spanish people are pissed about living too close to Luxembourg and the number of great cheeses in the world has decreased by 80%!
What now?
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?)
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
Man Discord sure does suck for attempting to re-surface answers to previously asked questions.
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.
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 bitch 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.
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.
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.
"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]
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And the link points to a solution from 2006 using a method that's been outdated and unsupported for a decade.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
haproxyyou 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
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'
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.
It's a choice, it's just a funny meme that half of folks I these circles want to die and half will use anyway lol.
You do you bud, there's no One Beat Distro and a lot of em can be bent into whatever shape you need anyway.
I mean, that is still what I mean. For you - it sounds like a great choice. For the people who want it to die, it might be an awful choice. It's polarizing, but that doesn't always mean good. It's hard to make an informed decision even with a popular choice.
Ah I think I was unclear. The meme is what folks get tired of, the distro is a popular one on its own or as a base for others.
If you're interested in looking into Linux but don't know where to start, the only thing you really need to know is how much time you're willing to put into learning it, and how big the community is. Arch has a huge amount of documentation, but will make things a little harder if you want stuff to "just work". Debian is more of a middle ground (but huge community), and Mint is a popular easier to get into environment but honestly I'm out of the loop on that one these days.Arch is actually the base of the one I use at the moment for gaming and dev work (EndeavourOS). Options are overwhelming, I get it 😁
The cool thing? Try em all. You can easily find simple installers to slap a whole distro onto a bootable thumb drive and goof off while you feel things out. If you don't like it, reboot. If your wifi doesn't work and you can't find a solution online in a few minutes, reboot. Things are easier and more flexible now then they've ever been, but the new user experience is still where Linux really struggles.
Anyway, I'm super into this shit clearly. 😆 Happy to point you in a more solid direction if you want at some point, or I can just shut up lol
It's great for some people, awful for others. It became a meme because it started to be suggested to everyone even though it's an awful first introduction to the Linux ecosystem.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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...