Hey All,
Tl;Dr: Save Reddit technical expertise before it's lost to the sands of time and corporate shutdown.
Just wanted to get a discussion started on what would be, in my opinion, the greatest loss that we, as a society, would experience with the loss of Reddit. Proposed solutions welcome. And please don't take this as me supporting Reddit in any way shape or form.
For years Reddit acted as the Internet's foremost discussion board. As part of that it became host to a slew of subreddits which house niche information and technical expertise. I can't tell you how often I've struggled to find a solution to a particular problem only to stumble across it on a years old reddit thread.
That information is, frankly, invaluable. Reddit may not be tailored to providing technical advice akin to the likes of stack overflow but, nevertheless, it is home to some of the hardest to find answers. If Reddit was to disappear tomorrow, so would that information.
As such I think that information should be treated as a goldmine, and just like a goldmine, excavated. If Lemmy is to play host to the great Reddit migration then it might well play host to these valuable tidbits. Exactly how such an excavation could be done without a blanket copy of all data on Reddit I don't know. But I think it's definitely something worth discussing and promoting amid Reddits recent mishaps. Who knows what the future holds for the site? But it's downfall shouldn't lead to the loss of decades worth of troubleshooting efforts and technical expertise.
Wouldn't web archive already have a lot of these? And if not couldn't it just be added to it? Its an already existing well known archive. Tho I'm not sure what that would do to internet searches.
It's something I thought about. But as you said the exposure to search engines is key.