After battling third-party apps, Reddit threatens generative AI firms, WaPo reports.
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Reddit may block search if it can’t reach an AI deal with Google, Microsoft
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Long time Redditors know Google has always been the search engine of choice for reddit.
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"Polarizing" describes something that was either loved or hated by most people. "Universally reviled" is the appropriate term.
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Reddit search is also completely terrible, using Google with site:reddit.com has always been the best way to search it. So this will further enshittify the experience for actual reddit users too.
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honestly? i could see treating it like wikipedia, where it's like "i'll try wikipedia" after trying google or whatnot. this is actually a completely sane idea. i think
DDG bang syntax is optimum juncture perhaps. i wikipedia that way, often, but sometimes i've come to type in wikipedia.org just to see what the homepage has today
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I oftentimes include “Reddit” in my search to get more targeted and potentially authentic results. Mostly about the best software for a particular use.
Gotta do it that way because Reddit’s own global search function has never been good and seems to be getting worse.
Edit: ninja’d. Nice to know I’m not alone.
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Um, Reddit is not returning any of that value to their users either. They're using it to pump a stock offering. I don't see the benefit for users.
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hint: we want a ceasefire that lets reddit remain a useful site north of 2018
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If that's true, is Reddit going to start paying its users for creating the data in the first place? It's essentially being given to a big corporation for free already. I suppose that needs to stop immediately, right Huffman? Y'know, for fairness.
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In other news, this reporter has noticed a renaissance in swatch results for Slashdot and Boingboing. Corey Doctorow is said to be prepping for a second coming ...
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Screw Reddit and screw u/spez. I had a 12 year old account that I created at the time of the Digg v4 debacle. After they forced Apollo to shut down, I ran a script that deleted all my comments and posts and then deleted my account. It may not have made much of a difference to Reddit, but it felt pretty cathartic.
As an off topic, quitting Reddit and Twitter has been one of the best decisions I've made recently. Not being fed a constant stream of bad news and rage bait has done wonders for my mental health and freed up a fair chunk of time for offline activities.
As an off topic, quitting Reddit and Twitter has been one of the best decisions I've made recently. Not being fed a constant stream of bad news and rage bait has done wonders for my mental health and freed up a fair chunk of time for offline activities.
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There spez, I fixed that for you. The enshittification of Reddit continues apace, we're now at the stage where Reddit is abusing their business customers. The next stage is death.
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Fuck these guys. I deleted all my posts and account and haven’t missed it at all. If I happen to visit the site it’s behind multiple filters. Blocking Google would just accelerate the death spiral.
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I hope they got money up front otherwise they are going to find that buyers/investors are not that impressed with what is left.
Also.. I wonder with everyone mentioning deleting comments if they are actually honoring that on the back end.
Also.. I wonder with everyone mentioning deleting comments if they are actually honoring that on the back end.
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The unfortunate thing in this situation is Reddit was the alternative everyone went to when Digg went down the drain. So there isn't really a alternative everyone, including me, can jump to. I hate it. I really do.
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I'm very confused how doing this is going to cause Reddit any trouble at all.
And I can't even remotely imagine that anyone using Reddit WOULDN'T just jump to DuckDuckGo to do their general searching for Reddit content.
But there's all this discussion about how Reddit could survive without ANY search engines. Assuming I'm reading this right, that's not what Reddit is rumored to want to do. They just want to block the ones who use Reddit's content to train their AI and monetize that content for their own use without proper compensation to the owners of that content.
That means there are still a lot of other options, including one relatively well known to folks who understand the differences between search engines I mentioned above.
I don't think Reddit will suffer at all. Especially when Reddit adds their recommendation for a search engine for new and returning users. They may see some decrease in traffic at first, but if there is any, I think it will be relatively short-lived.
In that respect, I see this hurting Google a lot more than Reddit.
Opinions will likely vary, but this is apparently what Reddit is thinking the outcome will be.
Guess we'll see who's right about all that sooner or later.
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Also, for some use cases, the AI just works better. SO has it many uses, but talk to anyone about it and you'll hear of people being talked down to because they asked a question that should have been answered in the docs, or conversely a topic they opened without an answer. Search for any error message, and you might find a wasteland of unanswered or unconfirmed answers for topics.
Whereas with something like ChatGPT, you're always going to get an immediate answer on the topic being searched for that can then be clarified directly with the bot, or otherwise used as a framework to do your own work, now that you have a few ideas brainstormed. Sure, ChatGPT isn't going to provide you reliable code that you can just copy/paste without thinking about it - but you really shouldn't be doing that with SO either.
Both sites have their uses for different scenarios, but I know that I've had better luck asking ChatGPT about certain bugs or issues I've had than SO. In those cases, no matter how much they whine, SO is losing out to something that's doing a better job when asked, even if they feel the better job is based on what their users provide. In these cases, what SO needs is their own MML based chatbot to serve their users in such scenarios, not to pretend that ChatGPT is stealing.
The same thing applied here to Reddit - as many have mentioned, the search engine sucks on Reddit, and most of the outcry about the 3rd party apps is because the official one is terrible. If people are using those other sites/apps instead of what Reddit supply, that's a problem they have caused for themselves, not the companies that step in to make the content more useful and, by extension, provide what should be more monetisable traffic for Reddit at no extra cost to them.
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Block ALL reddit.com content from google? because that worked out so well for Myspace/friendster etc.
Reddit is currently a fraud anyway. They claim to have 52 million active users, but that spec was changed, so instead of 'people posting content' only, it now means "someone with an account thats not permanently banned'. The actual figures are well below 10million and falling.
Reddit's secondary upcoming plan is a premium monthly fee to see 'new' content otherwise you'll only see posts/replies more than 24hrs old. Again, thats going to end well.
Reddit is currently a fraud anyway. They claim to have 52 million active users, but that spec was changed, so instead of 'people posting content' only, it now means "someone with an account thats not permanently banned'. The actual figures are well below 10million and falling.
Reddit's secondary upcoming plan is a premium monthly fee to see 'new' content otherwise you'll only see posts/replies more than 24hrs old. Again, thats going to end well.
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Aaron Shwartz is silently spinning in his grave.
while knowledge is claimed to be some immutable force to recon with, whats left over is a coveted pile of damaged coins that becomes fodder for legal shmoes to grow their privy hordes.
while knowledge is claimed to be some immutable force to recon with, whats left over is a coveted pile of damaged coins that becomes fodder for legal shmoes to grow their privy hordes.
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The users provide the content, and in return the platform provides the hosting, and the means to organise and distribute that content. Whether that's still an equitable exchange is open for discussion, but there is at least consideration, unlike the one-way affair with the scrapers.
Still, fuck u/spez for taking away my mobile access, I've since moved to Lemmy for my doomscrolling.
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This has nothing to do with users. There is value, advertising revenue through more traffic on reddit. What he means is, more value beyond that.
Edit Abie beat me to it.
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Honestly, I'm not sure that's a great idea either. TAFKATwitter has been trying that (or at least saying they are), and all it's done is encourage the worst kind of clickbait and outrage-bait bullshit.
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That's why we have to build one.
Lemmy and Kbin have the bones of one, but both are deeply immature at this point (especially Kbin). But I think things can still move quickly in tech, so who knows where we'll be in a year.
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So, I get this, but Reddit could just use the features mentioned in the article below to block Bard and still have Google Search visibility. Why are they cutting off a significant referal source instead of just blocking the AI for Google?
https://www.mediapost.com/publicati...ended-gives-publishers-a-way-to-block-ba.html
https://www.mediapost.com/publicati...ended-gives-publishers-a-way-to-block-ba.html
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I've been using Lemmy for about 4 months ever since Reddit decided that it didn't give a damn about users, mods, 3rd party apps. And quite honestly I don't really miss it much. Lemmy gives almost exactly the same experience without all the bullshit monetization that Reddit known for.
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To be fair, if we had a functioning legislative body with a functioning regulatory regime, companies that do an abrupt self face-shoot like X, Reddit, Unity and even WOTC should all be much more sensitive to blowing off their constituent users than they are and suffer an immediate credit and capital implosion causing them to economically collapse and disappear off the face of the Internet.
Sadly most of these companies are too resilient to have their value destroyed that quickly (if only for a variety of good reasons as well) because if the market was that responsive/sensitive, indie games and social media sites would get more capital, and last longer without enshittification from sheer terror of rapid self-implosion.
This could have other implications for experimentation but at this point I'd take it over the capital allocation environment in the 00's that produced these companies to start with.
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I think Lemmy is "close enough" that anyone who signs up would feel immediately comfortable with the experience. The big issue for Lemmy and other federated systems (e.g. Mastodon) is the sign up itself. People aren't used to federated systems and it's not clear to them why they have to choose a server, or which server is the "best". It's just confusing noise to be presented a bunch of servers and expecting the user to make a choice with not having the facts to make a choice. Federated systems really need to have "pick for me" option during sign up where a trusted server is chosen to reduce the friction.
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Because site owners lie through their fucking teeth, that's why. If you aren't scraping, you aren't seeing what users will see, and you're going to firehose people into unrelated content, scams, and grifts.
It's bad enough that some sites game things by returning more content to Googlebot than they do to actual users, but at least that's something you can detect fairly easily and respond to. But blindly trusting volunteered data from sites that won't actually let you see the site content? Lolno.
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I know the official Mastodon apps have already done this, where it defaults to mastodon.social unless you specify something else.
On the Kbin side, there's Artemis (an app inspired by the Reddit app Apollo), which sets you up on artemis.camp (and currently doesn't support other servers, though that's on their roadmap). I wouldn't recommend it, though, as the app is in early beta and their server is fucking horrible.
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This is a bit like barring the gates after the horses have bolted and then attempting to charge to reopen the gate. The only leverage reddit really has is that Google's own search is so bad that it needs reddit to even be useful.
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So I guess it's the ol' circular firing squad, then? It's a well known Google "hack" to put "reddit" in your search string so you can get actual answers to your questions, and not pages upon pages of the same SEO bullshit. And people wouldn't find any of those threads-in-a-haystack without using a search engine. Google needs Reddit, and Reddit needs Google.
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Reddit apparently don't have more funding, are not a publicly traded company, and are not profitable. Total failure of the website is still a possibility.
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"We had to destroy Reddit in order to save it."
-- future spez, possibly
"And by 'save it', I mean "monetize it."
-- ibid.
-- future spez, possibly
"And by 'save it', I mean "monetize it."
-- ibid.
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Kinda but not exactly.
DuckDuckGo has several sources (especially for the sidebar "answer box" and certain niche search types), but Bing is currently the main data source, so blocking it from Reddit would harm DDG results.
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