‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
Reddit is apparently seeking to strike deals with big AI companies.
LMAO. The only time I visit Reddit any more is when it dominates the first page of search results. Spez has failed upwards for so long, he thinks he can fly.
IMO this is the best evidence yet that Spez is trying to kill the usefulness of Reddit even if it kills the platform itself in the process. Just like Musk is doing with Twitter. Free and open mass communication were in the process of turning the tide against the ruling class. Don't get me wrong, it's still very early in that process, but I've noticed a lot of things go from "you'll be ridiculed if you question this" to "some people still try to defend it, but the ridicule is going both ways now" over the years.
I think it would be more a plan to make people come to reddit to search for that kind of information. Google is destroyed by seo listicles and non advice that is referral programs.
Reddit has lots of useful data that is from users who just provide the data with no ulterior motive. That is useful to users. Currently they might search and suck in to reddit for the result but that's hard to monetise. So Google gets the benefit. They have crap search and people don't go there to search and users are down.
This is probably a play to try and encourage search on reddit and raise advertising dollars. However, it will likely make reddit less visible, lowering new users and infrequent users, all the while they keep losing existing users.
They are floundering. They have some ideas that aren't terrible on the face of it but execution is awful and hostile to users.
Same here.
Interestingly back when myself & others were moderating subs on Reddit, & we locked the subs during the protests, the majority of PMs us mods would receive were from randoms that found a link via Google or wherever & were trying to view the post. It did make me wonder how often people browse Reddit just because they stumbled into a link via Google or whatever search engine.
I can't see how Reddit would survive without the big search engines, without those random visitors the ad revenue would plummet.
Half the traffic to reddit is because someone is looking for a recommendation or solution. Reddit's internal search function is about as useful as it's video player or it's app.
So many times I saw a meme and I wanted to show it to someone else only to be sure it was lost forever to that useless excuse for a search.
its
I now hear the a Monty Python song in my head
Half of the unique visitors maybe, the traffic of the people on Google visit 1 post. The people with an account who browse it at work see 500
Even when I had a reddit account, I would use Google to search, because reddit search feature is crap. The Google search would often result in me exploring and/or subscribing to a new community. So, for me, Google searches increased my reddit interactions.
Both reddit and google will become useless if they do this.
sad and amazing how true this is.
to find anything worthwhile in Google search you often needed to add site:reddit.com
to find anything at all on Reddit you needed Google
well, glad I don't go to those websites anymore...
Reddit needs google a lot more than Google needs reddit
I doubt reddit makes much revenue from traffic generated by search queries. I suspect People endlessly scrolling their feed are more likely to click ads
if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.
There's your problem, Reddit, you think it's your data.
This sentiment sums up so much of what is wrong with modern consumer oriented tech companies
The people using Reddit for its data have the easiest time scraping it for its data since they don't need API access to post, comment, or moderate; it's unfortunate that Reddit management continues to degrade the experience of the average user just to make it slightly harder for that scraping to occur.
Exactly. A large part of the issue here is that reddit tried to sell astroturfing as a service, but everyone quickly realized you can just astroturf reddit for free.
The whole "Thanos snap" thing was reddit launching that service, I am convinced.
Next step: charging 1 dollar a year to maintain an account there
I hope they both block Google and start charging for accounts. Watching Reddit kill themselves will be so cathartic.
My schadenfreude can only get so much stronger.
I found Reddit so useful that I would have paid but only for the user experience I wanted. not the stream of vomit their app wanted to show me. Im almost 40, I've got a pretty good job I can cover another subscription. I wouldnt have liked it, but I could have.
This is what pisses me off about tech companies. Tell me "for $20 a month you get the fully customisable app with no tracking for advertising or data mining or use the free add supported, try and sell you shit app" give me the option, I will pay to not be annoyed.
Exactly this. I wasn't paying for using third party apps because I hated reddit as a website. I payed because it offered me the user experience I desired. Customization, ad-free, privacy-focus, etc. If they offered that with a paid solution to an official "pro/premium" app, I would have been interested in buying a yearly subscription. But no, the baseline experience on the official app is the same for everyone. Zero customization, doesn't even support the core moderation functions that the site's mods and maintainers need to do what they do (for free).
Spez will charge $2. Because, in the immortal words of Shel Silverstein, “two is more than one”.
Great, one of the only good uses left for both reddit and google.
This, for me, is a good example of why the assessments that I've seen lately about how much Lemmy/Kbin may or may not have caught on, and the assessments about how Reddit may or may not have been impacted by the migration, are way, way too early and kind of nonsensical to make right now.
It is important to understand that Reddit is set on becoming a public company, and for a public company, not taking any avenue that could provide additional revenue is essentially only one step below setting that money on fire. If there's a chance that something will make the company more efficient, you are kinda obligated to do it. This will constantly (and increasingly) lead to policies like this, which sacrifice user convenience or add additional friction to the experience, because an experience that is open, accessible, non-intrusive and non-restrictive inherently implies lost opportunities of revenue at each one of those unrestricted points (which is a weird paradox of digital capitalism, in which to make your product more profitable it has to become worse, which flies in the face of the traditional capitalist theory that you make the most money by making the best product, but that's another story and I don't wanna get sidetracked).
Anyway what I wanna get at, is that each person has their own points of friction (mobile becoming app-only, old reddit dissappearing, who knows) past which they would find the idea of transferring platform less intrusive than the experience they would get by staying on Reddit. And the fact that cutting Google off is even in the realms of discussion shows that Reddit is very willing to reach those points and beyond. If these changes pile up and the friction created in the experience by them becomes significantly greater than the idea of transferring platforms, then it's not outside the realm of possibility that Reddit will bleed out slowly by taking actions like this. Time will tell.
Bro wrote an entire essay to say "it's a little early to tell, let's check back later."
They pay me by the word, don't tell anybody
No it cannot lmao. It's hilarious they think otherwise.
They had a working search?
Yes, it was Google.
Have you ever used Reddit's search? If yes, did you really have a positive experience with it? Personally I found it quite terrible, UX wise in particular. Many people online seem to agree. If you're looking for something on Reddit it's actually easier to Google and restrict the site to reddit.com
About as good as Nextdoor's.
I actually used Google to search on Reddit. Reddit search sucks.
Every did.
I quit reddit and I still do.
A lot of times if you want(ed) a relevant answer to something you throw that site:reddit bit in there.
Wild they'd block Google, it's like they're actively trying to hurt themselves. There's no way they have a decent search algo built after almost two decades of having a really shitty one.
Rome didn't start putting up walls like Hadrian's until the end of the empire. The Rome of Pax Romana had no limits.
FYI
I mean I get your point but Hadrian's reign specifically (as well as his predecessor's and successor's) is considered to be the high point of the Empire
Hadrian's wall still stands... Although in most places it's easy to cross 😂
Reddit is a study in inertia. It steadily declines in quality and the users just continue to hang around and eat their shit. Reddit will be around for a long time, and stubbornly get worse every quarter. It's pathetic.
How can a platform be so narcissistic?!
Honestly after I noticed the declining users on Lemmy I started using reddit again, it just has more activity on a lot of niche communities I'm interested in.
However I still use Lemmy almost daily since I like the content and comments here more, and it's the kind of platform I enjoy, just like the Reddit of old.
Spez is a fucking idiot.
Reddit is a better platform due to the number of users it has. No amount of optimization can make Lemmy better than reddit if there's no enough users to create content and participate in the discussion.
I'm still not going back though. It's not essential for me. I already spend way too much time online so if there's one less platform to mindlessly scroll thru then that's only a good thing. I don't really experience FOMO because I don't know what I'm missing out on.
Every time I think it can't possibly get any dumber .... reddit proves me wrong. I have been a redditor for nearly ten years before I jumped ship and switched to Lemmy, and during that almost-decade I have used reddit's own search function for all of fifteen minutes before giving up and using google with the keyword "reddit + whatever I wanted to find" instead. It simply sucks.
spez walking his baby nuts around the block trying to flex on Google and Microsoft. Let's see how that goes for him.
It’s always amusing to me when people believe that just because they have a lot of money, they’re part of The Club, and they can act with impunity. Perhaps I’m wrong, but spez seems like one of those dumbasses who thinks they’re part of The Club, but isn’t.
Maybe, after reddit’s recent shenanigans, the SEC will teach him that.
MS would just buy them once public if they thought it’d be less hassle to deal with
That CEO has definitely shorted Reddit somehow.
To do that before the IPO is some next level shit.
Yeah.
It’s a good time to do it, get really high revenue and IPO before it can die out
But I don’t see how it hurts the company at all, even in this thread you find people saying “yeah but it’s popular “
Thank goodness for the Fediverse.
Main problem is finding communities.
Before if I had a problem with program XYZ, I would just search for "Reddit XYZ" and I would find and post on that subreddit.
But now that I deleted my reddit account, it's not as easy, you can't search for "Lemmy XYZ" and get the same immediate clear result.
... which doesn't have a decent search engine and barely any content other than memes.
So, to stop ai crawlers, they will block Google and Bing crawlers?
To cut off your nose to spite your face comes to mind
It's all about training language models, isn't it?
According to the article, yes. I think demanding some kind of compensation from LLM companies is reasonable but this feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Reddit's CEO is copying Twitter's CEO mindset again I see.
Is Spez mixing vodka and crack? It seems like they have no end goal except to make a small amount of money for a short period of time by not paying google, but they’ll lose money once they find a large portion of their views come from search traffic.
Imagine if they did it lmao. The backlash would be so fun to watch.
Sweet. I hope so. I'm tired of feeling tempted when they come up in queries.
Fuck you, Spez! Do it, you spineless chud!
They have already made their content almost unusable in search results. I’ve started adding Reddit to my exclusions when searching.
it's absolutely hilarious how badly they've lost whatever plot there was
Dooo iiiiit, erase any of your lingering relevance
As much as I hate Reddit, adding it to the end of nearly every google search is the only way you can get decent answers anymore, at least without having to scroll through several ad-riddled junk sites
This is gonna hurt both
