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.”
I’m pretty sure the admin response to lack of search was “just use Google.”
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.
That’s literally been life for me for so long when I’m looking up quite a bit of different things. “Blah blah reddit”
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Literally the only reason why I still bump into Reddit even when I’m not trying to.
Here’s an example from real life. When I searched for “ipados brave yutube ads adblock”, I found some Reddit posts discussing the issue.
Spoiler: Ditch brave and switch to something else.
BTW, Reddit is currently in the “hold my beer” sort of state when it comes to shooting itself in the foot.
I think you’re right. Reddit is in a really tough spot now that we’re living the early days of AI. IMO Reddit should make their own LLM and call it Snoo or something. This way, people could asks Snoo to solve all their tech issues.
Search results have gone to shit since everyone and their mothers started doing this SEO-optimization bullcrap. Google obviously has no reason to fix this situation because it makes them more money when people spend more time looking for something. site:reddit.com was one of the mitigators for this problem…
I’d gladly ditch search altogether and use ChatGPT + browsing support, but that’s similarly dogshit because it’s working off of SEO-optimized bullcrap results too.
