>This is going to be patched out, isn't it?
Look on the bright side, with OpenAI buying content licensing rights to Reddit, at least the AI generated SEO websites will get better, surely...

I expect more paywalls in the future.
Once they have established that the open internet is useless, microtransactions for visiting sites will no longer seem outlandish.

did you try the user guide?

>>2827
Editing software having a user guide!...

>>2824
>+reddit
This is less good because of people deleting their posts to 'protest' because of >>2825

Why, you're supposed to buy a course, of course!
What's that, you don't like paying 200$ to listen to an Indian teaching you outdated information in a barely-understandable way of which you don't even need half? Too bad for you...

>>2824
Read the friggin manual

It probably depends on what you are doing.
I have been working with Blender and Unreal recently. Both of which have a lot of resources available to help when I have problems(which is all of the time). Firstly there is google, which often leads to my question already being addressed on the Forums on the official sites of said programs, but also their are often Youtube tutorials that come up and actually do help. Often both the Forums and Youtube only half answer my issue and I have to mess around myself though, Unreal is very finicky like that but I suppose once I learn more it will get better.

In addition to this Unreal has an official discord, I don't use Discord but I think that would probably be a good place to get live help.

Youtube I believe has a built in filtering system that lets you show results for videos in strict lengths (under 4 minutes or between 4 to 20 minutes for some reason, no idea why you can't just set it yourself)
Don't use google, most "search engine visibility optimizations" are target at google results and even without that, Google has been dogshit sliding down a poop drain for a while now. Duckduckgo, Searx, yandex and even bing are more reliable. But putting that aside, search engines typically let you search for content between or before using a special before: 2010 code which should filter out any content made past the adpocalypse. This works on youtube as well.
It's also worth checking out forums dedicated to the software you're using (if it exists) rather than just prodding and poking around search results. A lot of people claim that they usually just search for a problem and get a direct answer on a forum, but most forum content doesn't actually show up on searches so you have to manually get your feet wet and go them to find what you're looking for.

>>2833
True, blender stuff works because there's still a decent amount of forum-like sites that talk about it. 3D stuff in general seems to have escaped SEO/ clickbait hell, but that's probably changing. Much of the stuff is years old at this point, however, and blender has gone through some major changes over the years so results are mixed.
Discord is information death, so that's terrible news about Unreal. You can still find answers to questions that were asked in 2005, but you won't find it on discord for a question asked today unless you're in the right channel of the right server and you have permission and other people haven't talked recently. God, what a terrible thing.

>>2834
Oh, huh, I didn't do google supported that "before: ####" thing. Neat. I guess we'll have to mark the date of GPT3 being publicly usable as the new cutoff date.
Yeah, you're right about forum stuff. Forum Search itself is a godsend and most forums support it without registering an account.

>>2837
Unreal still has an official forum, it's just got a Discord as well as that, but then most things seem to have a Discord now.

>>2824
Use a better search engine. Problem solved. Linked me to a video under 5 mins straight away.

I miss old internet where every topic had at least 3 forums dedicated to it where there were at least 10 users posting tutorials for free in threads filled with replies where other users had posted follow up information. Reddit is almost as good but it'll never be as good as proper forum.

Oh and remember when there were actual wikis?

These days everything is already locked behind a verification wall. Usually discord. Sometimes a website with paywall. All search results are useless. My pet peeve is when I search for something and the first 20 links are youtube videos with 15+ minute length because the person posting them is trying to farm ad money.

>>2839
That's one of the videos that failed to contain the information in a concise way, actually. Using your same search I can see a reddit result that conveyed the information in seconds.
(This isn't actually the info I wanted though, it turns out it was Ctrl + B... I think? Did I really already forget it)

>>2841
Yeah, I agree. People used to joke about thread necros and "PM'd you the fix!" stuff, but it really can't compare to today. Sadly some company, fandom, learned that wikis could be a source of profit. There's also that awful fextralife place that embeds twitch streams in addition to the usual ads.

>>2842
Last year I returned to an old hobby. Which has obviously changed a bunch since the last time I messed with that stuff 15 years ago. I was happy to see the usual forum was still around and active. But I was frustrated by the fact that a small group of users have started some kind of slander campaign against it. To the point where they actively hide information from everyone and lock it away within their discord channels and whatever the hell else they use. They claim the forum is not a good source for the information despite the fact that all the active developers use it.

I discovered that they purposely post wrong information on it and the usual wiki. Engage in a campaign to delete pages off the wiki. Send false DMCA and other requests to have code/projects they didn't write taken down from websites hosting them. They've also made the open repo hosting projects related to this stuff mostly useless since they're attempting to promote their own.

I tried to avoid them as best I could but I needed a small file that was only hosted on their discord channel. I bit the bullet and made an account using a throwaway email. I joined their discord. I discovered the file I wanted was locked away within a channel only approved users can access. There was a process for applying for access that included an interview with a mod. Before I got a chance to do that I was locked out of the account because discord demanded that I hand over a valid cell phone number (which I don't have) to continue using it. This is like a lot of stuff now where they bait you. They'll let you make accounts and lurk for a few minutes then they'll demand cell phone+photo ID for "security purposes" or to verify you aren't a bot (even though half the users are bots).

Anyway, I ended up writing my own version from scratch in like 5 minutes. I shared it on the open forum. This caused a shit stir and they dogpiled in an attempt to get my account banned and have the file taken down. They're attempting to claim copyright for something I released for free. When that didn't work they claimed it was illegal for me to post it because I didn't license it under whatever license they use. Despite the fact that it's original work that isn't pulling in code from anywhere else.

I've gone through similar issues with most things I contribute to since about 2017 or so. It wasn't like this in the good old days...don't even get me started on the things happening on repos like github (I try to avoid it).

The worst part is if you point out people are doing thing everyone calls you crazy and claims you're just trying to slander them. Even though most of them openly admit they are doing this stuff. Usually for ad money but also simply for clout. I never thought we'd get to the point where you'd get threatened with violence for releasing software or even TLs of foreign media for that matter.

I don't understand why people just can't be happy and work together.

>>2842
>Yeah, I agree. People used to joke about thread necros and "PM'd you the fix!" stuff, but it really can't compare to today.

It wasn't as bad as people said because there were always multiple options to get at or discuss that information. Unlike now.

The most frustrating part of old forums for me were the moderators that insisted on locking topics for no reason or the admins that used the add-ons that auto-locked a thread after it aged. I always thought it was stupid they wanted you to make new threads for the same subject instead of simply bumping an existing one already filled with the information. This was mostly done to inflate stats in the name of ad money. But I'll spare you the essay on how old school google adsense worked back then.

While lurking 100+ page threads could be frustrating at least the information was presented in a format where you could see the discussion develop over time. Reddit isn't good for that type of thing. It could be. But the upvoting system drives the most useless stuff to the top and buries the useful stuff behind a lot of crap. Then there is the issue mentioned before where people constantly nuke old accounts and the information posted along with them. At least on old forums it was usually impossible to delete your posts because the admin didn't want the information being lost.

The main issue is the fact that no one runs their own websites anymore. Everything is now hosted behind log-in walls on major platforms that lock out anyone that isn't willing to hand over their real ID. Then there is the whole secret club thing where people lock stuff away on purpose simply because they want to lord over the users with their mod powers. Oh and the whole ad money thing I've mentioned before. Which drives self-censorship as people are terrified of losing income streams they really didn't deserve in the first place.

I will live to see the day where the internet becomes totally useless. It already mostly is if you aren't willing to play ball with the 2FA stuff. They're already talking about replacing passwords with DNA samples in the MSM for "security". Even though most of this crap is more unsecure than it has ever been before. The only reason people don't ddos and hack into stuff like the old days are the bug bounties and pay offs from big tech companies. Which gobble up all the talent and pay them to do nothing just so they don't produce anything of value that might compete against them.

Switching search engines isn't really that useful either since most of them are using the same database and filter content the same way. All my old Google-fu from back in the day doesn't really work anymore. They're no longer designed for people that know what they're doing. They're designed to display ads to people that say "Ok google" and ask dumb questions to their phones. There are some work arounds left of course but more and more of them get removed every year.

I am shocked things like RSS feeds on websites like youtube still exist. I am sure they'll get removed very soon.

>>2843
Ouch, that's rough. There's a lot of reasons to hate discord and I guess you pretty much summed up my main gripes. Game modding has really suffered with mods, information and tools being scattered about.
I kind of wonder how feasible it would be if someone hosted information and stuff scraped from discords. Not personal information or accounts or meme channels or anything, just raw information so people can actually access it again. Hell, just scrape it for URLs linking to mega or google drive and stuff.

>>2845
I wrote a script to scrape information from such channels a few years ago. The problem is they lock most of it up behind private channels now to prevent this.

Game modding is by far the best example. But it applies to a lot of different things now that used to be openly hosted on forums. For example, the last time I wanted to watch combo videos for a 10 year old game to improve my own skills they were locked up in some discord server that required;
>Valid cell phone number
>Approval of moderation
>some stupid process to prove you weren't some random troll they dealt with years ago that called them mean names
>some other things I forget
All that for a stupid combo video that would have been hosted on the wiki years ago.

When I attempted to update the relevant wiki my account was locked because they assumed I was the troll that thrashed them ages ago. I wasn't. I was just some random dude that hasn't gone to a tournament in a few years because the people running them became insufferable to be around. I can't even watch the streams anymore because the commentators spend more time talking about identity politics and making LGBT jokes than they do talking about the matches.

Looks there's a new option in google to limit searching to forums. Seems like it's an attempt at a bandage due to the great poisoning of search results from SEO and AI nonsense. I'm not sure how many people will bother with this, but it replaces the "+reddit" thing in the OP.
Of course tons of information is still DoA inside discords, but it's nice that you can attempt to limit your search to "humans helping other humans for free" stuff like it's the 00s again.

>>3039
PRESS THIS BUTTON FOR HUMAN RESULTS YEAAAAHHHH
although it's not appearing for me probably one of those things they roll out with some irregular pattern

>>3040
Oh, you have to hit the More button after doing a search, and it might only be if there's forum hits inside the pre-existing results.. It's kind of hidden, like they're not sure if they want to go through with it or not.

>>3041
hmmm, i made a few broad queries like "how to install linux", "how to invest money", and "how to fix ps5" but the option was never there
when trying with jap surprisingly this different button for reddit-specific results appeared, that one i hadn't seen before
("fast" was another button shown beside it so maybe it's expanding those options, not sure)

>>3042
Hmm... maybe they're pulling a youtube and doing a slow rollout?

>>3043
Although, these results are so old that it makes me wonder if there's a problem somewhere. Surely someone has asked how to learn Japanese on reddit more recently than 2018.

>>3043
i don't see this. Interesting

I use 4get. Quora cancer also gets blocked from showing up too.

Quora is a strange erping site