Reddit reportedly threatens to block Google

#1

Reddit initially denied a report from The Washington Post that it might force users to log in to see content — but the Post says it may still block search crawlers.

“Reddit can survive without search,” said the Post’s anonymous source.

Reddit isn’t denying that it might block crawlers. “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.

To be clear, this article is more like a, “they didn’t say they wouldn’t!” type deal. There’s not much news to this article.

I used to be an avid redditor (can you tell?), but I haven’t used the site regularly in several years. I especially avoid it now that libreddit instances have been essentially killed. If they started requiring logins, I would avoid the site entirely in the future, but they don’t seem to be going in that direction yet.

For now, the new site design is awful enough compared to the very clean old.reddit.com so it’s never my first choice when searching with Mojeek.

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#2

Yeah it sounds a lot more like posturing, also:

“Reddit can survive without search,”

I don’t pretend to know their internals on this but I would wager that the word survive there is doing a lot of work. They must have a very good quantity of traffic coming from search.

This is one of those things that I’ve never seen someone say the opposite of, clearly not a great move if my small sample is representative. I agree with the old site design being better too.

#3

I think they will require logins.

This is part of the economic moats that Warren Buffet talks about.

For example, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter hoover up information and then put a login in front of it. This forces you to participate in their platform which gives them leverage. They can use that to build an advertising profile of you. Or, they can charge a fee.

One problem here is that the internet was meant to be an open platform. The more these companies gobble up our content and put that behind paywalls, the more fractured the internet will become.

Another problem is the antisocial nature of moats.

Anti-competitive businesses are not trying to make the best product or improve your life. Instead, they are trying to create a monopoly so they can do less and charge more.

@ Microincentives and Enshittification (Re: Google)

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#4

I have to believe that too. The amount of times I’ve heard people saying, “these days most of my searches are ‘question + reddit’ tacked on the end”…

This is one of those things that I’ve never seen someone say the opposite of, clearly not a great move if my small sample is representative. I agree with the old site design being better too.

It’s horrible! It’s slow and clunky and no, I’m not going to download the bloody app!

Also, the video player is a travesty.

A good time to move to Lemmy…

I think so too. But I also think we’re a few years out from that. Reddit is nonetheless in its death throes…

Cheers for the link to the Moats essay by Doctorow; it was interesting, if…uh, depressing.

I’m in two minds about this. I would prefer webmasters make money from their customers instead of ad revenue. On the other hand, I completely avoid most sites that force you to have an account, and I will always use an RSS feed instead of signing up with my email address.

It’s going to be sad (but inevitable) if the five giant websites, each filled with screenshots from the other four, aren’t even accessible without an account.

There’s also the suggestion that the internet will be “de-globalized” in the near-future; that it will become the “Splinternet”. The internet was meant to be global, and it has largely achieved this. Of all things, I think it might be overzealous copyright holders that drive de-globalization of the internet…

Well, ain’t that the dream?

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