‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/20/23925504/reddit-deny-force-log-in-see-posts-ai-companies-dealsOpen linkView original on programming.dev1232
Comments327https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/20/23925504/reddit-deny-force-log-in-see-posts-ai-companies-dealsOpen linkView original on programming.dev
Uhhhhh....who thought that was going to be a bright idea? Google is probably the single biggest traffic draw for Reddit.
Especially since reddit search itself has always been laughably broken.
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."
I also recall that, but it’s just another instance of Reddit contradicting Reddit.
Or more realistically: Reddit from 10 years ago contradicting Reddit from today.
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
Did Elon secretly buy Reddit?
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.
Leon schmuck
Melon Tusk
Noel Musk: "HERP DERP I'M AN OXYMORON!"
Greedy Pigboy: "WE OXYMORONS STAND TOGETHER! please notice me senpai Enol Musk..."
Yep. That’s when I quit reddit
Probably working towards his own No Money Miracle.
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?
Why give it away for free when you can sell it?
Where's my share, reddit?
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
Yeah, I'm really hoping they go ahead with it for that reason.
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.
Yea, me too. Although I know wanna stop doing that as well.
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 would.
Butt cancer, both of em.
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.
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.
But but everything on the internet should be free! /s
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.
And how inappropriate some of them are and the sheer number of them
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.
That would be Facebook no longer requiring a college email address.
No I'm pretty sure that was a sound business decision.
So is disabling ad blockers on YouTube. Thats not really was I was talking about.
Facebook went downhill because they let the riffraff in.
Ah, IT for the sake of 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.
The moment they do this Reddit will collapse.
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.
I'm surprised they haven't killed old reddit after all this other BS yet, tbh.
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
That's because all the admins are using old.reddit themselves.
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?
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.
Reddit's search can't be enshitified because it's never been good.
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.
That's because DDG gets some links from Bing and Yahoo as well.
Spez is an arrogant prick.
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.
And on desktop with ublock so I give em no views.
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
Are spez and Musk having a race or something?
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.
I thought the 3rd party app ban was bad but this is pure self destruction.
The best marketing they have is "I add Reddit to anything I search on Google!" This truly is 🤡 shit.
I mean, could help Lemmy out. I’d be super okay with that.
Probably not. The majority of users are just there for entertainment and commentary, they aren't the same niche that occupies Lemmy communities.
do Reddit admins think they have any kind of search function without using Google and site:reddit.com?
they're really trying to kill Reddit aren't they
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.
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.
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?
The peso symbol is $, and it was it before it ever was the dollar symbol.
Maybe it's somebody else's peso?
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+20B1
Apparently Philippines, introduced when they were an American colony and USA thought that the $ sign was to be only theirs and Spain's.
More like charge money to be called a verified user without actually being verified.
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?
Good ol' Spiderface Spez.
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.
I believe you just exposed yourself
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...
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!
LESS GOOOOOO
How good is lemmy/google search (for searching lemmy's post)? It's not gonna be good if both are bad.
Not great. I've found this site to be useful though: https://fedi-search.com/
Yet another stupid idea from Reddit.
are all these execs on crack ?
Desperate for cash. The free money (low interest rates) is drying up and the modern mantra of business in America is sustained growth for all eternity so they got to squeeze everything until it pops.
they are fueled by the inflated egos and rage of their usersbase... lets see how long lasts..
they're at least on cocaine, could be crack cocaine!
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.
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.
I am working on a bot that clones posts from reddit to lemmy It's for a community that wants to have a backup on lemmy in case reddit goes to complete shit But wouldn't we this way end up with a lemmy that is full of shit from reddit?
Ehhhh there's pros and cons to that. r/all on any given day is just bots karma farming off eachother with maybe 1 or 2 good posts mixed in alongside the occasionally genuinely interesting news article, which obviously sucks.
But on the other side there is a TON of threads from the past decade that I know I still read once in a while and I'm sure others do too. Hell just yesterday I was looking for some info on mettalurgy and found a reddit thread where some guy asked my exact question and got good answers like 5 years ago. Having those be more accessible would be great... Plus a lot of niche communities are unfortunately just too small on Lemmy to produce the level of content they do on Reddit
I would love communities like r/asksience to thrive on Lemmy as it does on reddit, that's for sure.
https://lemmit.online/
This can be done by periodically scraping a subreddit. I have a working script that can do this for a subreddit that I follow. There's a few more things that I need to do before I can open source it
It exists its called lemmit
That is a good way to get sued for copyright infringement
Aaah yes, the Internet where all info is closed behind steel doors and can't be shared.
Exactly what the inventors planned.
I think it would be a good thing if social media platforms had a field to put a (free) license for one's posts. I would immediately put mine under one. We do not live in that world.
Aren't all reddit comments under CC?
Not to my knowledge. There are websites where that is the case, like most wikis and Stack Exchange, but not reddit.
Lmao my brother in christ, nobody uses Reddit search because Reddit search is complete ass
its really absurd how bing/ddg are better for searching for shit on reddit/amazon/etc than their own built in search engines are.
socialgrep provides better reddit search than actual reddit
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.
Google has started adding a Reddit search filter to some searches.
That’s because it’s so impossible to find anything I’d use on a normal Google search that you have to add “Reddit” to your search to find anything relevant.
Of course, post-API debacle, a fair amount of the responses you’d have needed are deleted, but ya know…
No way, is this real? Seems like it would be a huge news story. Has Google ever had a specific search filter for a third-party website?
It's absolutely real. "Adding Reddit to Google searches to actually find useful information" isn't a meme, it's what people are really doing. And since Google has (allegedly) killed search operators, it's the only way to cut through the uselessness that Google search has become. Although, I do have a sneaking suspicion it's actually added by whatever AI they have on their backend that generates "useful" filters, not something Google itself directly added.
If only we knew how good we had it back then.
Fuck, I miss trolling in Yahoo answers.
Those were probably genuine, clueless people being clueless. For trolling you don't ask "am I pregnant?", you ask "I'm pregnant and [my brother | my dog | I don't know who] is the father, what should I do?".
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.
Today is my first day on Lemmy because of the API thing lol. I've been on reddit for over a decade, always used RES/apolo. res still works but theres not really an option on iphone mobile. I will never pay for reddit and I hate ads with a passion, so here I am!
Welcome to Lemmy. It’s a bit smaller than Reddit, and we’re not as content oriented as Reddit, but we have more engagement.
Its exactly what i'm looking for so far! Its hard to recreate that magic that reddit had in the 2000-2010s but this is decent!
I was a bit scared at first due to the lack of content but: 1. There is content on Lemmy, and 2. It’s up to us to create this content.
I don’t miss Reddit so far.
I'm on the same boat. I was on reddit for over a decade, and switched to lemmy when they shutdown Apollo but so far, I'm liking lemmy more n more everyday
It's not even just the engagement but the quality of engagement seems vastly superior by every measure.
Reddit is only good for solutions though search results but do it anyway. Make it worse and worse until people start looking for alternatives.
"The more you tighten your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers."
Ah, the tao of internet
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"
new players still at the “don’t be evil” phase of the inevitable path to “become an amoral orphan crushing machine”.Ann I think you mean how enshitification happens. Yes: there is an official, agreed-upon word for this exact thing that keeps happening
Oh for sure, it's my favorite word of 2023. I've taught everyone I know - I've been using it enough I'm now trying to avoid saying it directly
Overuse is how you turn a specific term into a meaningless buzzword after all - and enshittification is a wonderfully precise explanation of a nebulous process of capitalism self-cannibalizing around us, a system based on growth that ran out of profitable markets to colonize
Doctorow fan?
Don't worry, there's three end conditions for the capitalism game.
Full automation wins capitalism. Meaning robots that can create and maintain more robots from an entirely automated supply chain. Having money to buy a replicating robot, a junkyard, and pay the power bill for a year means that in a couple years, you could have an army of worker robots who built their own factory, sustainable power source, and be well on your way to harvesting the methane wafting off to fuel the rockets you're building. And once you mine your first asteroid outside the gravity well, within decades you can be building super structures. It's essentially infinite ROI. Once it's bootstrapped, it means a defacto monopoly over every physical good, forever - the game is over, we have the winners
Super intelligence (sentient or just a bigger faster tool like LLM, anything that can solve complex systems like the stock market or complicated systems like the stock trading software stack) breaks capitalism. One person (digital or sitting at a keyboard) can control the system by exploiting the rules by operating on a different timescale. They can also do a hell of a lot more important things, but again, capitalism as we know it has to end
Both of those situations are pretty closely related - one can quickly give you the other - but the other similarity is that you get a VERY small group of winners... And there's this giant army that would dogpile the winners, because the .01% isn't going to smile and offer handshakes as a few members of the .1% are busy gaining the power to rule over everyone like godkings... The board will get flipped and the rules rewritten once again... But with the slightest bit of luck, the same technology will fall into hobbiest hands and be shared freely
And finally, shit just keeps getting worse. We have pretty much constant protests at this point, monthly events where cities get demolished, and people are getting both pissed and desperate. The clock is ticking fast for stuff like ubi or free housing to push it back further, but humanity as a whole is getting ready to flip the table.
So don't worry... Soon the homes will be worthless, one way or another, and then you won't have to worry about crazy nonsense like a mortgage (that for no real reason, "creates" 90% of it's value - repeating. Meaning when all is said and done, one mortgage of $N creates almost $10N in new money if everyone uses banks)
Try looking into new builds. Part of the reason for the sky high housing market is that we haven't been building enough new housing for the last 30 years or so. Not saying that a new build house would be any cheaper, but most people just look at the cost of buying something that has already been built.
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
I'll save you the trouble. MakeMKV and ffmpeg
handbrake and anydvd has been my go-to tools in the past. But MakeMKV doesn't charge for dvd decryption? Have you tried it at blu-ray? I'm looking to backup our collection
BluRay works excellent, and if you unlock your drive via LibreDrive (also on makemkv's site) you can do discs from all regions and up to 4k.
I will buy foreign films off eBay and copy them into my media server. Also like to go to the library and find films that can be hard to obtain off Usenet or torrents
As for paying, it's actually free if you keep checking the beta form, and getting a new key. The keys last a few months
I recommend that combo constantly nothing is better
FYI, Duckduckgo uses the same syntax, e.g. "{keyword} site:reddit.com"
Download the movie faster and easier.
I do but a lot of rips online don't tend to have extras or other audio tracks
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.
Bold move Cotton....but idk how many more "bold" moves he can afford.
Is somebody going to tell them?
Luci?
Lemmy: while you are at it... could you unblock us? Every search for anything on lemmy results in Lemmy Kilmister.
To be fair, lemmy is a metal god who deserves top result lol
Use “site:lemmy.world” or any other website, without the quotes.
It can't even survive with search.
Please do it. Let me make some popcorn first though.
"Popcorn tastes good."
Apologies for linking to reddit. Seems relevant to the hate they've earned.
Ngl I miss the early days with much fewer users. I loved it.
Now it's a pile of social media trash. I still browse it on my PC cuz I'm weak like that, but I managed to dodge it on my mobile.
This feels like a fairly desperate attempt to get Google to pay them something
Ding ding ding ding!! It’s telling that this announcement came out after it was disclosed that Google pays Apple 18-20 BILLION A YEAR to be the default search engine on IOS. Spez is trying to tap into that.
I don't wanna be a buzzkill, but if the FTC/DOJ kill the Apple/Google deal that's going to impact Mozilla too, which really needs the money from Google as well.
Boy oh boy, think about how valuable being the default on iPhones must be if Google is willing to pay that much money.
That's a lot of profit off selling people's data.
He's a greedy little shit who'd rather run the entire platform into the ground for a buck than do anything useful with his life.
He could've done great things. He could've gone down in history shoulder to shoulder with some of the big guys, instead, he's been a snivelling backstabbing little fungus from day 1.
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 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?
https://kagi.com/
It's not free, but not expensive. You are not the product. They have catalog-like search and curated results.
Kagi is goat.
My favorite feature is their universal summarizer. It can even do videos and podcasts
I just learned last month about Kagi and I'm never going back to Google.
It allows you to search a collection of sources for information. Maybe you want to search a group of 20 tech blogs that you trust, just as one example.
Before Google, this was a common technique used by search engines to direct users to trusted content sources.
I am really liking Kagi.
Honestly sometimes duck duck go gives me better results
I use duck as my first choice, but unless I'm just looking up one word, it doesn't find much useful. If I look for a specific question, duck doesn't work at all and I have to go back to google. google is way worse than it used to be, but it's still better than any other I have found yet.
I very rarely go back to google but at least it's very easy to do with bangs "!g [search Query]"
I guess the times duckduckgo works better for me is when I'm looking for answers Google is able to identify, but chooses to filter out, like in psychedelic trip reports
The only thing google search is good for anynore is recipies. Thebonly good product they make anymore is maps.
Duckduckgo isnt much better.
Even their recipe search is abysmal
Look up something like schnitzel and you'll have 7 paragraphs of AI slop, telling you about the author, the history of the dish, the weather, a new cookbook for sale, before you get to the actual recipe
I use a search aggregator, searxng.
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
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.
All those Discord communities are gonna have a bad time once their investors start wanting some of that money back.
Well the CCP are the biggest single investor with tencent owning over 40% of discord, which is why it has zero encryption or security, they are getting their money's worth by now having access to shit loads of data to mine, manipulate and train ais with, and we have done jack shit to prevent it, I think discord is the second largest social media platform now.
Discord doesn't have e2e but they have standard ssl/tls, "zero encryption or security" would be completely unusable.
They already are. Some projects used Discord a file host even if they have a page on GitHub or similar services that allows you to package up releases, and Discord is now making it so you can't just hotlink to them anymore.
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?
No
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
Yes they did
Who is they and is it publicly accessible?
I bet there are multiple copies of various depth by various groups including reddit themselves,. But how they will use it, wether they share it we cant really know.
Large chunks are contained within dataset for ai, we may be able to obtain or reverse engineer those.
The internet archive waybackmachine is probably the best most valid source for the public for now.
I think /r/datahoarder did
Here is one version:
https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd879ddee4d0eba08aaee
How do you access old archived reddit content? I've seen downloads but wondered if there is something more easily accessible.
Lmao! The only reason I go back to reddit is due to a search engine...
Do it
Did Elon buy Reddit?
Spez has been pretty openly trying to emulate Elon for a while now.
I turned my back on the site so I've probably missed most of it. The most I learn of it comes from here.
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.
did you even click the link? it says the point literally in the first sentence... lol they don't want Google training their AI search results with their data and making less incentive to actually click into reddit
I think it's the realization the the community content is valuable, specifically to generative AI companies. Big tech companies with AI ambitions are extracting that value for free. I think reddit is somewhat justified in wanting to prevent that from happening to try to capture that value they have as being the forum for all of this content. My guess is there the same pipe that feeds search is also the same pipe that feeds generative AI tech.
The only time i use reddit is when googling things
Do it! Do it! Do it!
Hopefully they both shoot each other out of existence.
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!
Man, they are going the way of Twitter. Jeez.
Good. Now search results will actually be usable again.
Lol, no.
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've been trying to find a list as well to no avail. The ones I do know are on my own robots.txt, at volcanolair.co/robots.txt
Someone should make a github just to make it easier for people to find them all in one place with sources and update the list as we get new ones.
This isn't coping. This is cocaing.
Where’s Jeeves when you need him? 🤡
I only use HotBot.
ChatGPT, define "delusion of grandeur" for me!
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.
Bold move cotton
Don't tempt us with a good time
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.
Do it
Sure xD
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.
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