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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.
Lmao! The only reason I go back to reddit is due to a search engine…
Do it
The only time i use reddit is when googling things
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.
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?
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…
Starting to wish yahoo answers would come back.
Fuck, I miss trolling in Yahoo answers.
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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?”.
Starting to wish yahoo answers would come back.
If only we knew how good we had it back then.
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
How do you access old archived reddit content? I’ve seen downloads but wondered if there is something more easily accessible.
Who is they and is it publicly accessible?
I think /r/datahoarder did
Here is one version:
https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd879ddee4d0eba08aaee
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
There is added value in creating a web platform or an ML model too, but the value should be shared with the content makers.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I hope they do. Finding irrelevant reddit threads from years ago is a constant annoyance.
Don’t tempt us with a good time
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?
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
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.
catalog-like search what’s that?
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.
I use a search aggregator, searxng.
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 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
I very rarely go back to google but at least it’s very easy to do with bangs “!g [search Query]”
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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.
