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‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
(www.theverge.com)
Oh please do! Great way to kill your site faster
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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As much as I'd appeciate a shift away from Reddit elsewhere, I have to admit that Reddit is often among my most helpful Google results. No matter how stupid the recent management decisions are, it grew to a massive knowledge database over the years. Banning it from search engines would have a negative impact on the overall internet experience.
Because SEO made Google bad and Reddit has a higher chance for a real person's opinion, which is fantastic. Though we don't need Reddit for that, we can fully replace it with Lemmy by now. But there's a not small part of people, who want to keep Lemmy small and unimportant. Just had that conversation yesterday, there's some gatekeeping going on.
I don’t know if that’s the best way to frame the argument. It’s not about keeping this place “small and unimportant”, it’s that by now we’ve all seen what happens when websites like this get big.
Reddit started out as “it will always be free, and we’ll never mess with your personal data or shove ads down your throat” too. That’s just not sustainable when you start dealing with tens of millions of users and billions of page views a day. Hosting the servers capable of supporting the traffic alone will cost tens of millions of dollars per year.
In other words, if Lemmy gets as big or as popular as Reddit, it will get just as shitty and corporate as Reddit. Guaranteed.
The whole point of Lemmy being open source and federated is to prevent just that
So being open source and federated means server space will be free forever? Interesting hypothesis.
There is no single entity in control of Lemmy. If an instance starts showing you ads, switch to an instance that doesn't. If the developers change something in the code that makes it shit, someone will fork it. It doesn't have anything to do with how much it costs to run an instance. The more people use Lemmy, the more instances there will be and the more users an instance has, the more donations it will get.
There could come a point where the only way to sustainably host a lemmy instance would require some sort of commercialisation. Since hosts are the people who actually decide what users get served, they are in control.
Of course you can always fork the software but someone still needs to host that fork. If the popular instances all had ads or other malware to sustain themselves financially and alternative instances without malware existed, everyone would flock to those alternative instances. If those alternative instances couldn't find a way to fund that load, they'd simply die.
the more users an instance has, the more donations it will get.
I don't see this as a given. I also don't see it as a given that donations and costs would rise equally.
The problems aren't as pronounced yet because Lemmy as a whole is, in social media network terms, very small (3 orders of magnitude difference compared to the incumbents). If growth continues, the point will certainly come where we will outgrow the size that can be reasonably funded by nerd donations.
It's everybody's duty to spread information away from a centralised service.
Facts are not subject to copyright.
Facts are not subject to copyright.
Hahaha, tell that to the textbook industry.
This. I often search for results from Reddit.
As soon as the search indexing stops, Reddit will be permanently gone from my radar. Good riddance!
sure it can. since deleting all accounts the only reason I ever visit Reddit these days is because of search. so yeah make sure I never have a reason to come back
Look and see if your accounts were resurrected, they were un-deleting a ton of comments and other user-removed content when everyone first shifted to here.
i was mostly a lurker but good call. will search while it's an option!
Note that there isn't really a way to actually delete your content. You gave Reddit an irrevocable license to it.
Same here! I only visit Reddit to see some post I've saw in the search results. By not allowing the pages to be shown in search engines I'm 100% not looking at Reddit at all!
every site (well not every site obviously) has their place and their time. I remember MySpace but I do not miss it
Hahahahahahahahah
Oh wait, you're serious? Let me laugh harder
Hahahahahahahahaha
So reddit's planning on making both reddit and google useless?
Reddit is really gonna go full Digg, aren't they?
Digging their own grave, it seems, and it's so deep they can smell the Earth's core in there.
Considering pretty much every sub went back public, and they have seen no drop in users, I'd say no.
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Lemmy is declining.
Didn’t spez threaten this last week or something? Seriously, shit or get off the pot. Also, don’t threaten us with a good time.
It's the same article from 5 days ago
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.
“Nothing is changing,” Reddit spokesperson Courtney Geesey-Dorr told The Verge, adding that the Post would soon be correcting its story.
The publication now writes that if Reddit can’t get AI to play ball, the company may block Google and Bing’s search crawlers, which means Reddit posts wouldn’t show up in search results.
“In terms of crawlers, we don’t have anything to share on that topic at the moment,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge, clarifying that the company’s earlier “nothing is changing” comment only applied to logins.
(In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he said that “we’re in talks” with AI companies about the pricing changes.
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.
The original article contains 473 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Why is reddit regarded so highly this way? It's always been a second rate board to me. Like yeah there's some technical discussion there. Even notable names might post there. But it's the social media version of technical side of the internet. It's generally full of garbage that requires heavy doses of skepticism as bad info often gets visibility. There is no recourse since the nature of reddit engagement is ephemeral. The proverbial concrete sets shortly after the post/comment is made.
I suppose the state off affairs have deteriorated so far that search engines don't even index the internet properly anymore. Actual discussion boards and websites are basically darknet these days. Internet indexes for all intents and purposes don't exist today. Search engines a glorified index links to each others social media platforms. Even then the bulk of results are online shopping spam.
What a mess.
For any topic I actually want to dive into I do not use reddit for anything more than initial discovery. Social media by nature commoditizes content to serve the masses by appealing to the lowest common denominators. The bulk of the content never goes below surface level.
It varies. Reddit is/was the primary forum for a number of projects, and as each sub is community moderated, could be quite rich, even if the whole is "generally full of garbage".
Google isn’t the only search engine. Microsoft (Bing) are just as bad as Google because everyone runs off to DDG or Brave.
So Reddit isn’t wrong, but partnering with Microsoft isn’t any better.
Is reddit still a thing?