1227
‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
(www.theverge.com)
The only time i use reddit is when googling things
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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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!
Man, they are going the way of Twitter. Jeez.
This would be great for us.
Keep shooting your feet, Reddit! You got this!
Good. Now search results will actually be usable again.
Lol, no.
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
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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?
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(2 replies)
This isn't coping. This is cocaing.
I hope they do. Finding irrelevant reddit threads from years ago is a constant annoyance.