‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google

Uhhhhh....who thought that was going to be a bright idea? Google is probably the single biggest traffic draw for Reddit.

The fact that Reddit thinks all that user-generated content is theirs and that they need to protect it from AI is really fucked up.

Reddit itself produces nothing, they wouldn't exist without the users.

Absolutely pathetic that they may block search crawlers over that.

That search is the only reason a lot of people end up on reddit. This won't end well for reddit.

Lol

Literally the only time I use reddit now that my 3rd party app got fucked by spez is when I Google a problem and reddit pops up as the answer.

Will I ever go to reddit and search for my issue? Hell no because their search function is absolutely useless.

Literally the one reason I still use Reddit is because appending site:reddit.com gives me actual results. Reddits' built-in search results are utter dog shit and you cant find anything. They'd just be shooting themselves in the foot for blocking Google

It's just me or reddit is copying everything Twitter is doing? Elon Musk did this and rolled it back as soon as it was obvious it was a bad idea.

I'm at a loss for words. Surely, YouTube trying to Adwall would be the stupidest thing in social media history. Surely, Musk changing Twitter's name would be the stupidest thing. No, Steve Huffman has somehow managed to surpass the old masters. "We can survive without people being able to find our website VIA SEARCH RESULTS"! YOU. STUPID. MOTHERFUCKER.

This is the pattern dying companies follow.

I do not use a single social media site that requires me to sign in to view it.

They threaten to saw the branch they sit on.

Btw, greed and jealousy are cancers that eat the brain.

Literally the only time I ever use reddit is if it is a google result(stopped after 3rd party ban).

Jesus fucking christ. Why are they hell bent on destroying themselves.

The fact that Reddit is available from a search engine is one of the main reasons for its popularity imo.

Are spez and Musk having a race or something?

I thought the 3rd party app ban was bad but this is pure self destruction.

they're really trying to kill Reddit aren't they

do Reddit admins think they have any kind of search function without using Google and site:reddit.com?

Look they've already cut off free API access. Here's some other ideas from the Muskrat playbook:

Maybe change the name to P.com

Change the logo to ₱ (surely the Mexicans won't mind that you're using the Peso symbol).

Hmm, why not also charge money to get a blue checkmark by your Reddit username to be a verified Redditor? or maybe call them P-ers?

Oh, how about charging new users $1 to use your platform?

Isn't this an act of cutting off your face to spite your nose? I understand that Reddit wants to monetize it's for AI models. But if the content gets moved into a walled garden, and reddit's own search features don't improve dramatically, then what's the point of going to Reddit?

So Reddit would go from a social open hub, the "front page of the Internet", to a walled garden? Ridiculous.

This would be the literal death for my reddit Account. Only been using it when looking for answers online and stumbling upon reddit threads.

Alright y'all, this is the moment.

Time to go to all those Lemmy Communities about tech support and coding questions, and ask away/ give answers.

GO GO GO!!!

This is the opportunity of a lifetime!

Without google (or any other external search engine) reddit will be a worthless heap. One key feature of reddit was that one could find a lot of good information in relevant subs. A real treasure trove. But you could only find stuff with external engines.

The internal search function was a worthless waste of bits that could not find anything relevant, even if it bit the search function in the a...

Yet another stupid idea from Reddit.

are all these execs on crack ?

Idk if it's possible, but if someone with the resources to make a bot that slowly clone reddit posts to Lemmy, so instead of searching for "something + Reddit" we could search for "something + Lemmy", that would be the end of Reddit, at least for me.

I'm 100% on lemmy now, but occasionally when i need to troubleshoot my PC I still have to search on Google for Reddit posts and I hate myself for giving reddit traffic.

I miss the 2 dozens Cat Subs that flooded my feed with Cat memes and funny cat pics everyday. If anyone knows about any cat subs on Lemmy please reply here.

First Twitter, then reddit, to massive social platforms apparently trying to shoot themselves in the foot at every available opportunity. Never was a Twitter user, but sad to see reddit is likely in a slow death spiral.

Lmao my brother in christ, nobody uses Reddit search because Reddit search is complete ass

They must’ve noticed an uptick in Google traffic. I’ve stopped using reddit for fun and only as a means to find solutions through search engine.

Starting to wish yahoo answers would come back.

I could understand if Reddit's own search was somewhat competent, but it remains terrible.

Lemmy's search is far more flexible, it's just buggy/broken right now – at least for me.

this comment is aimed at those future "just passing through" visitors, who are still on the fence with regards to the fediverse.

any internet power user will know, and be able to tell you that the internet feels wrong as of late. everything that you try to use is slightly broken for some reason. why is it becoming harder to use basic services that we took for granted 5 years ago?

unfortunately, the internet is changing once again, and it's time to pick a side.

you can side with big corpo, stay in their walled ecosystems, and embrace enshittification.

or, you can side with the fediverse, break out of your silo, and take control of your own means of content participation.

the choice is yours.

if you like following concepts or "things" (reddit-style), then try here: https://join-lemmy.org/

or, if you prefer following individuals or "trends" (twitter-style), then try here: https://joinmastodon.org/

Damn still angry about that API?

It's funny seeing the corpos implode because they had record growth, which means nothing can match it in the coming quarters and therefore they're going to have to find someway to meet their stupid investor demands.

The only exemption is Twitter, which is just imploding because Elon is a dumbass and not because of greed.

"The more you tighten your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers."

Reddit is only good for solutions though search results but do it anyway. Make it worse and worse until people start looking for alternatives.

Well that's a dumb fucking idea. Do it!

I really, really hope this happens.

At first I thought this was just a bluff... Then I remembered "right! It's 2023! Our economic structures are imploding!"

But seriously, this would be great. At best, Google starts indexing cached versions and they get into a slugging match with Reddit as they both slide down the cliff, at worst Google and Reddit both become useless for all us technical folks, and after the immediate damage to knowledge, it'll become fragmented and open the door to new players still at the "don't be evil" phase of the inevitable path to "become an amoral orphan crushing machine".

Stack overflow and Reddit suck... But not intrinsically.

Especially since generative AI can spin out the basics of a site like that, making it an easy and better structured place for general reference, and draw in the expert discussion that leads to building very specific knowledge bases (and definitely not scrape that info from existing sites and rephrase everything to obscure the fact it's stolen info)

But the one thing we know for sure... Threatening Google to make a deal with all AI companies is "let's make everyone mistrust Twitter until we reach a trust underflow and everyone trusts it as a one stop financial platform + paid advertising posing as microblogging social media" levels of "gradeschoolers could have told you that makes no sense"

Reddit is the current best thing that shows up in Google searches try looking up how to convert a dvd to mp4 you've got so much shite to shift thought before you get to a result that isn't just some company trying to sell their over priced shite

How do they expect to survive without serach, if they can't even profit with search?

The original headline had Reddit "flatly deny" claims they were walling off their site to those who weren't logged in. Lmao, the company lied about the API and lied about Christian (Apollo's dev), of course they're going to lie about whether they'll wall off their site. Especially since the CEO is influenced by Elon who has walled Twitter off.

Is somebody going to tell them?

Bold move Cotton....but idk how many more "bold" moves he can afford.

Lemmy: while you are at it... could you unblock us? Every search for anything on lemmy results in Lemmy Kilmister.

DO IIIIIIIIIT

doitdoitdoitdoitdoit

Please do it. Let me make some popcorn first though.

It can't even survive with search.

Can you image how impossible it will be to search reddit WITHOUT using search engines?

The reddit search functions a joke. Everything about it frustrates me.

After 7 years I still have no idea how to search my own inbox for posts that I know I have - but no idea when or where. If Google can't help me find them - they might as well not exist.

If reddit wants to die so badly - this is the way to do it!

Ummm. What's lemmy position on this? I havn't looked to hard at sync for lemmy opinions (indeed, I only have a few dozen posts / inbox messages) but If it's the same as it was for reddit. It's also not great.

Fuck Reddit. Can’t say I miss that shithole.

fuck this bruh. google search is worthless and adding reddit to a search query was the only way to make it bearable...

anyone know any good alternatives? maybe some search catalogue with multiple sources including a reddit scrape?

The most valuable part of reddit is always in the comments, as it has over time replaced forums to become the biggest central repository of (mostly relatively high quality) human generated English text data on the internet in discussion format, and even knowing this, reddit has never attempted to have a remotely decent way to search for information in the comments, as post titles can be incredibly vague or irrelevant.

This is the reason why using Google or another external search engine for reddit, because it is the ONLY way to find information in the comments.

If reddit does block Google crawlers, then it would make sense for Google to start prioritizing alternate source of open, high quality human generated data in their search engine optimization, and that would hopefully be the various Lemmy instances, which could be a strong driving factor in Lemmy's growth in the future.

Hope they crash and burn

the company may block Google and Bing’s search crawlers, which means *new Reddit posts wouldn’t show up in search results

If something's indexed, it's indexed. If something new pops up and the crawler is blocked, then yeah, not indexed.

The vast majority of shit of relevant reddit content showing up in my ddg/google searches, has been at least a year old. And certainly nothing since 31 Jun.

So in my use case, I won't notice a goddamn difference. What a bunch of maroons.

Reddit has been commodified and monetized too much at this point. It was a great platform for niche interests for so long, but all the good internet stuff is on forums, discord servers, patreon, youtube, etc now. Twitter/X and Insta are even more productive content producers than reddit is. Reddit used to have this reputation for authenticity, but that gradually died out over the last 5-7 years and it's now just another shitty "online community." It still has activity but not much happens on reddit anymore, it's just a site where people post links to other sites and comment on them. A lot of the negatives about reddit as a platform also apply to lemmy but at least it's open source and nonprofit.

This is a terrible moment for the internet. When people look for hobby information the loss of information accessibility it might be painful, but not critical. But there is tons of information on rare diseases, drugs and supplements which can be absolutely vital for the tiny minority which is affected by rare genetic conditions.

Do it. Please. I want to watch what happens

Are search engines landed gentry?

No it can't. Which is funny

OK, well, this is simply suicidal for the site. What positives would this even bring? And even if it would, can the dumbasses who lead reddit not see how it would annihilate the site?

Tbh Reddit and Google need to disappear.

Did somebody make a backup of all reddit posts? In case Reddit comes into total cesshole, I'd like those posts that contain valuable information after self destruction of said site

Do it

Lmao! The only reason I go back to reddit is due to a search engine...

Did Elon buy Reddit?

In the bin with you Reddit

Can someone point out what kind of actual benefit reddits stands to gain from this? Although there are many, many, MANY things they've done in the past that are unpopular, I've been able to understand why they did it even though it sucked for end users. This one just seems dumb though. Since their shitty API changes 99.9% of my reddit traffic is from search sending me there. Hell there's people that have only used reddit as a search resource and nothing more.

Do it! Do it! Do it!

The only time i use reddit is when googling things

Hopefully they both shoot each other out of existence.

Good. Now search results will actually be usable again.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Washington Post reported Friday that Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.

The Washington Post’s report wasn’t just focused on Reddit — it’s about how more than 535 news organizations have opted to block their content from being scraped by companies like OpenAI to help train products such as ChatGPT.

According to the original report, Reddit is in negotiations with AI companies to get them to pay to use its data, and if it couldn’t strike those agreements, it might require logins to see content.

That could have the knock-on effect of preventing Reddit results from showing up in Google searches.

(In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he said that “we’re in talks” with AI companies about the pricing changes.

X, formerly Twitter, has also implemented new pricing tiers for accessing its API, and X owner Elon Musk blamed data scraping by AI startups as a way to justify the reading limits implemented this summer.

The original article contains 353 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This would be great for us.

Keep shooting your feet, Reddit! You got this!

Lol, no.

Man, they are going the way of Twitter. Jeez.

This isn't coping. This is cocaing.

Speaking of this, what parts of the fediverse have added the option to block training generative AI to their respective robots.txt?

https://blog.google/technology/ai/an-update-on-web-publisher-controls/ https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/28/medium-hints-at-a-nascent-media-coalition-to-block-ai-crawlers/

It looks like there's a handful of these lines you'd have to add to robots.txt

Is there anywhere that keeps a comprehensive list of these?

I hope they do. Finding irrelevant reddit threads from years ago is a constant annoyance.

This would be a huge blow. I use Google a ton to find relevant content on Reddit. It's still a useful way to find helpful comments even after the mass exodus and deleting of old comments. This seems like it would be much more harmful.

Do it, I'll just use a Bing based engine 🤣🤣🤣🤣

ChatGPT, define "delusion of grandeur" for me!

Bold move cotton

No you can't. But hey if you wanna make my search results good again, you do you.

Google also has a robots.txt rule to block Bard why not use that? I use it.

Don't tempt us with a good time

Do it

When a company does this, they aren't just making a business decision, they are making a decision for the people who use their platforms, who got to their platform from Google searches and who made content that other people see in Google searches. Abuse is abuse, and even in the US this should be grounds for the loss of fair use. The EFF should realize Reddit is not their friend.

Sure xD

The AI Wars Are Heating Up🔥🎬🥷you just love to see two Silicon Valley darlings slugging it out in the open field

Testing