https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/20/23925504/reddit-deny-force-log-in-see-posts-ai-companies-deals
Reddit is apparently seeking to strike deals with big AI companies.
Uhhhhh....who thought that was going to be a bright idea? Google is probably the single biggest traffic draw for Reddit.
That's what I thought this was about halfway through the headline.
"They've made it this long without a functional search."
For what its worth the reddit search function seemed to have functioned much better a decade ago.
The amount of spam and just downright completely irrelevant results that showed up regularly in searches there the last few years has been ridiculous. I think it changed around the time they took away being able to see how many upvotws and downvotes a comment had totally, which I do still think is a real shame they took that away.
Yeah Reddit search was fine on the original old Reddit UI, it was around the time the native app released that it really started to shit itself and not return any results and just say try again later
Funny thing, spez expressed in interviews that he liked Leon's philosophy behind a lot of decision over Twitter.
So there's a lot of truth to that
Edit: I'm gonna tear my autocorrect a new one. It's "Elon Musk" and I hope that's clear.
Noel Musk: "HERP DERP I'M AN OXYMORON!"
Greedy Pigboy: "WE OXYMORONS STAND TOGETHER! please notice me senpai Enol Musk..."
No, Steve just has no personality of his own so he mimics other people to fake it. He's latched on to Elon that way.
Not to mention the only way to go back and find something on their site. Their in house search bar is a useless piece of junk. Back when I would use reddit, I would open up google if I had to find something in reddit.
That's literally been life for me for so long when I'm looking up quite a bit of different things. "Blah blah reddit"
They seem to intend to make the content on Reddit more disposable, which is a feat unto itself. Technical forum usage will precipitously drop if no one can find it. Or they just endlessly repost it? What an odd decision.
If they cut Google, I will literally never go to Reddit again. I probably hit a couple pages a week from Google search, and that's it, but that will be zero pages if they are truly this dumb.
Tbh it probably is. I don't use Reddit much anymore for discussion or news or memes, but when I need the answer to a problem or an opinion on a product or service from actual people instead of an overly long review listicle, Reddit search results are still very useful.
I agree. Not only do they have the relevant content, it already has a numerical evaluation by a relevant user base.
But it's not even their data. They lose nothing from AI models.
It's ALL user-generated content. What harm comes to reddit the corporation by allowing AI to train off the user's activity?
Looks like it's back to game forums. ChatGPT has alslo mostly overtaken Stack Overflow for me. Reddit was just a nice to have additional source.
Spez is going full Musk. It's actually insane. Like... Holy shit.
I'm praying for Reddit's downfall here, because if companies are able to get away with this shit the internet is going to get oh so much worse in the near future.
But at the same time, it sucks. I still use Reddit for episode discussions of shows I watch (which don't exist here on Lemmy, especially for older shows). I don't want those to go away without some replacement. Even if Lemmy did suddenly start getting lots of active episode discussions, it's not really possible to backfill them for older shows and the site is still too small and hard to index, it seems.
Incidentally, google is the only way I access those, since I no longer browse Reddit normally.
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.
It should be pretty simple: the user generated content are volunteered by the users for free on reddit, therefore the content should belong to the users.
Same thing as with AI, if an AI model is trained with everyone's data, then the AI model should be open and available to everyone.
Correct and the issue with their API gating was "Well they obviously value my free content. WHERE'S MY CUT?!"
Free API: I'm not going to complain. Paid API: Guess i'll use Lemmy
There is added value in creating a web platform or an ML model too, but the value should be shared with the content makers.
Reddit administration thinks the site is too big to fail. Lemmy isn't a real competitor to them because the decentralization of federation means that joining an instance and trying to navigate the fediverse is a bit too complex for most people. The reason why massively populated social media sites took off is because people like having everything in one place where everyone else is.
What I could see happening is a well-funded startup creates a fork of Lemmy that they use as the basis for their instance and they can customize and develop as they see fit. This instance would be accessible to everyone already on Lemmy, but they could offer one centralized alternative to Reddit where new users don't have to think about what they need to do to join.
I'm sure that if Lemmy picks up critical mass, it could lower the bar for most people to be willing to jump through the extra hoops. Ultimately federation solves the chicken and egg problem that any social media startup has.
Except lemmy specifically is AGPL and it's basically impossible to monetise as a startup because they can't close the source code.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/LICENSE
Kbin too:
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
They'd have to create their own from scratch.
Which is fine, ActivityPub is an open protcol. You don't even need to cleanroom, its all there. The AGPL is a shield against corporate interests, given how things are going that's a much needed feature.
There's also strong opinions if open source instances should federate with closed source instances, for reasons of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
That's not the end of the world, though it does mean that a competitor could always start using it. I was going to say just use Lemmy but a major site would probably want to have their own fork for stability so they're not at the whims of someone else.
They could probably use an open fork for a while while also developing their own software that would be compatible and then seamlessly switched out.
Joining instances in Lemmy is very simple if you're using an app like Boost and finding other instances as well. On PC it's another matter.
Typical corporate greed in that sense. It's stupid but I'm not at all surprised by that attitude.
The part that even if they were morally right in that sense... it's already too late. This is trying to close the barn door not just after the horse left, but after the horse already ran off and made it two states over. There's definitely value to LLM in having more data and more up to date data, but reddit is far from the only source and I cannot imagine that they possess enough value there to have any serious leverage.
Reddit would/will survive being taken out of internet search results. Not without costs though: it will arrest their growth rate (or accelerate shrink rate, as appropriate) and make people less interested in using the site.
That search is the only reason a lot of people end up on reddit. This won't end well for reddit.
That's Steve emulating Elon again though, he's trying to wreck other people's toys because they're brats.
I have a feeling this is why they'll 180 the decision if they tried. Probably wouldn't even last a month. And that's being generous.
It's a catch 22.
Want search engines to see your data to serve it to users looking for your content? Needs to be open.
Want to stop businesses from "profiting" from viewing your data? gotta block all access.
You literally can't have it both ways. This is a binary choice. People are going to "steal" the data anyway, not that reddit should own ANYTHING posted by users, ever.
What if every news site blocked reddit referrals unless reddit paid $1 per click or someshit? It's the same thing. Reddit is an advertising company, nothing more. They need the clicks.
Companies need to understand what I was told as a kid. Whatever you post on the public internet, is there for anyone to find and use. Trying to fight scraping means preventing your users from accessing the website as well
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.
I don't even use Reddit for that anymore. If I've got a problem there's plenty of forums I can consult for help, or I can post the question here on Lemmy, on the fediverse, on Bluesky, you get the idea.
I managed to get a Windows XP virtual machine working with GPU passthrough thanks to a forum MattKC (tech youtuber who does repairs and reverse engineering) had set up and posted on. Even when I used Reddit, there wasn't much info on getting BIOS-only versions of Windows working.
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.
Spez expressed in interviews that he views Musk’s rampage with twitter as a positive example, so no surprises there
You do your name justice and all and I know (well, hope) you are exaggerating, but I wouldn't wish any physical harm (especially sickness) on others.
That aside: I hope both fail horribly, lose their jobs and enough money to sink into a meaningless life where they are forgotten.
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.
The YouTube ad-blocker ban isn't stupid at all.
Something isn't a bad business decision just because you don't like it. That's now how business works.
"I won't watch videos at all if I can't view them without watching ads or paying money."
....Yeah. That's the idea. From a business perspective people who don't pay or view ads are leeches they're perfectly happy to burn off.
If you view people as purely advertising receptacles then this business move is logical. But if you view people as agents that can build their own alternatives or advertise your services then this would seem to be a dumb business move.
If you view people who actively cost you money while bringing nothing to your business as assets you're bad at business.
If 100% of people who used adblockers decided to stop using YouTube entirely over this, the only result would be YouTube saving money. Video hosting is simply too expensive for anyone to make a website where anyone can host and view for free without ads.
bring nothing to your business
Well that's the contention. Your example starts and ends with people leaving YouTube. If YouTube is the limit of consideration then yes, no value exists outside YouTube and this is a silly argument.
People will find alternatives. You can't stop people witj adblockers from using YouTube by blocking adblockers - no more than you can stop piracy. People just build better, more resilient ways to bypass things. This decision has good understanding of business but not psychology.
The only real way is to make it more convenient to use YouTube with ads, so no one goes for adblockers anyway.
They absolutely can, and I suspect the day is coming soon when they do.
Instead of simply putting ad breaks in the video, they'll be able to splice in a few ads to the video and re-render it to include ads each time someone clicks on the video.
most people dont take issue with the fact that there is ads but with how intrusive they are.
Idk browsing Lemmy often makes me think that many of these people expect software devs to literally work for free.
And it costs nothing to host YouTube don't youj know. We should have a foss version and get ride of it.
I don't think polel realize how much bandwidth and storage YouTube uses.
It's called PeerTube. It's getting more content, but anything that isn't completely wacked out is poorly produced and there doesn't seem to be any sort of decent search to find the rare interesting content.
I caught the sarcasm, and don't disagree. Just saying that a FOSS version does exist.
YouTube is perfectly happy if people who block ads go away. Do you really think your traffic is beneficial to them if you don't watch ads?
I mean, I hate it too, but it's obviously not a bad business decision.
I've seen people make the argument that no matter what you do if they successfully break adblockers, Google stands to make a profit, but it could actually hurt advertisers.
Obviously, if you stop watching, then that's less overhead for them, and if you pay for premium, then that's literal money in their wallet. But if you start watching ads, Google can leverage more money from advertisers for the increased views. But people who use adblockers are unlikely to click ads, so advertisers pay more for their ads to be shown to people who weren't going to click on them anyway.
Ironically, it's in both our interest and advertisers to stop Google from breaking adblockers.
Someone that youtube blocks now is a customer for youtubes now/eventual competitor. You might say they're low quality since they won't pay or view ads, but they still share and maybe upload content.
The point being they would rather purge the userbase than give them reason to not use adblock by being more selective with their ads.
Surely, YouTube trying to Adwall would be the stupidest thing in social media history
That would be Facebook no longer requiring a college email address.
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.
Or one that makes me download their app. Reddit have tried disabling their mobile site in the past in favour of a link to open in the app, I even tried it a few times as I already had the app installed and signed in but the link just took me to the App Store instead! Thankfully the mobile site seems barely functional at the moment.
They threaten to saw the branch they sit on.
Btw, greed and jealousy are cancers that eat the brain.
Very much doubt it but they will lose a lot of causal trade page hits. A lot of finding solutions to things is why I end up.on Reddit now as it only useful result in Google.
But the vast amount of people using it as social.media will stay
It won't just be this but it'll be things like this, further monetization schemes, and eventually killing old.reddit that are gonna keep chipping away at their faithful userbase.
They can see the numbers for new shit reddit and old reddit. They haven't gotten rid of it because it probably still has a ton of traffic that can display ads. It's extremely obvious that they fucked up with the new design just because the old one has been around for so long
I literally only go to Reddit for videogame questions. I know most normal people only head there when they have specific questions.
You know, the people they can actually show ads to?
Literally the only time I ever use reddit is if it is a google result(stopped after 3rd party ban).
That's what I was going to say. Nowadays I only end up on Reddit when a search points there, and only when all other options have led nowhere.
Every time the Reddit browser experience is there to remind me why this is the last place I check.
Same here, and also only if the answer is important to me. If it doesn’t really matter whether I learn the answer, I’ll just move on. This could decimate their casual educational value, which used to be their greatest asset.
They either have a revenue stream more valuable than that or this is a comically stupid thing to do.
If on iOS you can use the free Sink it for Reddit Safari extension to remove all of the use the app garbage and make the mobile site useful. They make an extension for Twitter/X as well.
For the times I can only get an answer there it makes it decent.
Yea, me too. I kinda wanna learn to stop doing that. It’s just, a lot of the times, that’s the only place where an answer is available.
yup, especially obscure tech problems, or tech problems that started happening today because of an update (looking at you discord).
I will forever remember the time when I spent a week talking with a dipshit miscrosoft support guy who insisted my entire brand new drawing tablet was broken, despite me telling him the problem was most likely in my laptop or windows itself and after giving up on that guy I went to reddit and had my issue diagnosed and solved in like 3 comments flat
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.
Exactly, Google search itself is so enshittified you pretty much have to tag "reddit" at the end of every query to find any solution to a problem. Even my 55yr boss knows this and he's clueless about anything social media related.
Having tons of Google traffic to any company in would be a godsend, yet Reddit wants to ban it. What a fucking joke.
i never thought i would say this, but at this point bing seems to be a better search engine than google
I can not recommend duckduckgo enough. Been using it for a while now and it's so nice to not have the top 5 or so results just be ads, and the rest irrelevant.
And bangs! They make it so that ddg is the only sensible choice for default search.
If I need to search on google for some reason, I can just append !g. If I want to look for Youtube videos, I append !yt. I can even search for grocery prices directly with !appie.
I've been looking for a better search engine lately. DDG results seem to be nearly the same as Bing results. I.e. still not that great, though has better privacy policies. IDK why search engines don't de-rank listicles, extremely long recipe pages, pages with tons of ads, etc. Major search engines are so bad now, it seems like it would be relatively easy for a startup to overtake them. I guess there's a large barrier of entry due to the infrastructure needed to crawl the entire internet and store indexes.
Of they were, both sites would be gone by now. I could tank a huge site in a week. This is just incompetence.
Lonnie is a dumbass business man. Spez has no sense of (or doesn't care) what users want. That's what's happening.
Fuck these unimportant men with more power than they deserve.
That's what happens if narcissist billionaires get lauded by the media. Copycats are glory hounds and want their share of brown-nosing as well.
The best marketing they have is "I add Reddit to anything I search on Google!" This truly is 🤡 shit.
Probably not. The majority of users are just there for entertainment and commentary, they aren't the same niche that occupies Lemmy communities.
My theory is that reddit just doesn't make enough money to stay open without external funding, and as they started running out of that they desperately hired anyone they thought could make the company enough money to stay afloat.
And the dumbass ideas we keep seeing from them are the result of that. Anything to get a buck, no matter what it means to the user experience.
I think its about their plan to go public and some hedge fund bros told them if they want a sugar daddy then they have to implement more agressive ads and subscription fees to juice valuation. I hope it massively backfires.
They have is ways to socialize online (reddit, Twitter, fb) and then people realized they could use them as a tool for good. They could organize, spread the word about bad companies and people, encourage others to do good, and so on. People could even turn on the platforms when those platforms corrupted.
So yeah, the billionaires in control don't like it that we have ready ways to call them out. Elon was pissed about people tracking their flights on Twitter and bought the platform and it's running it into the ground. Why not. He loses nothing and gains everything.
I think we'll see this happen a lot more. Billionaires control everything and then we act surprised when they shut people out that expose them.
Paired up with Governments around the world realizing "oh shit, the masses can easily organize and turn against us"... Here Elon, buy this platform and toast it, we'll make sure you're compensated, bro.
I don't think that's what happened, with Twitter at least.
Elon pissed off the wrong people at the SEC and FTC playing stupid pump and dump games with stocks by using Twitter and his absurdly undeserved reputation as an unconventional super genius with his mega group of followers.
One of the biggest of these, was pumping and then dumping twitter stock by alleging that he'd buy the company. And the people he'd pissed off in government basically saw their opportunity to fuck him by literally forcing him to buy it at his stupidly overpriced valuation - that's why he played all sorts of dumb games dragging out the purchase and trying to get out of it.
And so now he's stuck with an unprofitable company he didn't want. I'm pretty sure he's running it into the ground on purpose so he'll be able to carry that loss balance forward eternally, using it to get out of paying taxes by writing off the loss.
Unfortunately reddit , twitter etc will never die. There will always be a subset that will keep using the platform no matter what. The only thing that can kill it is when company starts making huge loss without any user base but that's a slow death until the said subset stops using it.
They don't need to die, they just need to become irrelevant and for the fediverse to take over.
Yeah, however small the user base, they still have value. Even in a worst-case—Chapter 7—situation, somebody would buy the names and logos.
Even in a worst-case—Chapter 7—situation, somebody would buy the names and logos.
imagine this happens and then the Reddit codebase turns out to be too much work to maintain so it just becomes a Lemmy/Kbin/similar instance lol
Alternatively they could get bought by Google and be sunsetted within six months because the devs got bored.
I just had to check, reddit isn't publicly traded yet. My best explanation was that spez had a strawman short 200x the amount of reddit stocks and then run the site so hard into the ground that even Musk would go whoa and Malagassy geophysicists would be getting strange readings on their seismographs.
Now? No, they're not actively trying to kill reddit. It's the classic case of someone who got lucky with a startup and didn't hand it off before crashing it.
They should have IPOd in 2020, like everyone else did, but they didn't. Why is anyone's guess. Greed, skeletons in the closet, or whatever, doesn't really matter, they missed the boat
He did hand it off. Then he clawed his way back in amid the Ellen Pao stuff and it's generally been going downhill the whole time.
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?
Apparently Philippines, introduced when they were an American colony and USA thought that the $ sign was to be only theirs and Spain's.
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.
Unless you're looking for NSFW answers, then the login isn't necessary. How do I know? I've stumbled upon search results from reddit a few times these last few months, and every time I've opened the page in a private mode. My u/ is dead over there, and it's not getting counted as occasional visiting.
Update: yet!... Apparently login to view content will be forced as a part of the AI crackdown.
So it’s going to be like Facebook and Instagram. People just love sending me links that lead to the same ugly login wall I’ve already seen many times.
Well im only logged in on my browser without any deeper reason or cause... doesn't really matter whether im logged in or not to browse a thread abandoned for years.
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...
