Google search results are literally the only time I read Reddit content these days, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard. They’re going to lose so many views if they block their content on Google.
True, but Google search is such garbage now that it would suffer quite a bit from not being able to present Reddit threads to answer questions. So not sure who’d be worse off here
It’s a Lose-Lose situation. Reddit has a fetish for that…
Google can index other forums, like our own. Or stuff like Wikipedia. If Reddit doesn’t want to be indexed by external search engines, then they gotta build their own or be unsearchable. Their existing search system is abysmal.
Reddit becoming unsearchable would really damage their usability as a forum site.
You can say that even if Reddit’s value as a forum falls off, they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, they can still sell access to their existing forum archives for AI training, but those have been archived and are downloadable online, at least up until early in this year. I mean, there are gonna be companies running AIs trained on that in jurisdictions that Reddit cannot sue them in and don’t care about honoring US IP rights, like Russia.
The one thing Reddit is great for, and for which substitutes do not yet exist, is its crowdsourced information. Especially product reviews. And finding those from within Reddit is impossible because their search simply does not work.
Appending “Reddit” to a Google search remains the best first-past method for making certain kinds of decisions where you need concrete, good-quality answers. Even for that, it’s a bit of a minefield. Especially post-mod-purge, a lot of the once-great enthusiast subs have gotten pretty blase. Still better than all those consumer advertorial “BEST OF 2024” lists that you find everywhere full of extremely mediocre and likely corrupt reviews, but nothing compared to the straightforward buying guides you used to find.
On top of that, the “new” sight is a million times less usable than old.reddit.com and search engines shoot you in through that terrifically terrible gateway to experience confusingly-organized and incomplete content. Orders of magnitude worse on mobile, too.
If Reddit is de-indexed, I’ll simply never be there at this point. Though I admit, I’m already there extremely rarely.
Still better than all those consumer advertorial “BEST OF 2024” lists that you find everywhere full of extremely mediocre and likely corrupt reviews, but nothing compared to the straightforward buying guides you used to find.
The SEO spam that I find that Google is absolutely unable to filter out is all the AI-generated sites. They generally have a page with a long list of questions and poorly-generated answers.
It don’t know if it’s one company doing it at mass scale or if there are hordes of copycats, but it swamps Google search results these days.
Yeah. I only ever read reddit posts when they’re about a technical issue I’m facing.
Besides, Reddit’s search is crap. When I was on Reddit, I used to use Google to search posts.
I’m guessing with the API dead it’s the only way to find content on Reddit anymore, too. I can’t imagine the Reddit searches that worked weren’t using the API, and Reddit’s search is a dumpster fire.
Literally the single prominent technical problem that has spanned Reddit’s entire life is the lack of a decent search engine. In general, people fell back to Google because Reddit’s was abysmal.
So is Reddit gonna finally build something decent? Because if they don’t let Google index them, and they disabled Pushshift access, it’s gonna be hard to search the content.
I doubt Reddit builds a decent search engine, that doesn’t actually help them at all.
If users can search, they find a previous post pertaining to what they want to see/know and they move on.
If there’s no search, users can’t find old posts or comments so they make new posts about a previously posted topic and more comments are made as other users react. That’s more content, even if low quality from a user perspective, that shows engagement which can be sold to advertisers.That’s before considering the engineering effort it takes to make a good search engine, constantly fine tune that algorithm, and try to outpace those that are trying to game the search algorithm.
They’re probably going to try to use GPT to build a quick and dirty search engine
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.
On the one hand I really hope this happens. On the other hand, it would be devastating to the communities. But this shows how Reddit has the last say and can hold the content hostage on their platform. People need to stop using Reddit and switch to open and free alternatives, that is not controlled by a single entity / company. The problem is, there is lot of good legacy content and solutions that would be not available for most people searching the web.
But for the search engines who do not respect robot files, would still be able to index. Right? Ironically an AI could also write summaries…
Me to my little program for scraping some stories: “Hm, ‘Ignore robots.txt’? Sure, let’s do that by default please :D”
From people that don’t use Reddit regularly, the only way they have ever heard about it is from Google results. So good luck with unloading a whole clip into your foot guys 🙄
Yeah that’s a bluff. Google searches surely make up a huge portion of their traffic.
Does Reddit not realise that their own internal search is so bad most people will search for answers on Reddit via Google. They’re gonna shoot themselves hard-core in thd foot pulling that move.
And vice versa! Google search results are so terrible, but if you add “reddit” to the end you get a relevant community with a conversation almost always addressing literally the exact question you have. Both are pretty useless by theirselves (is that a word?) now, but together they’re actually really powerful. What a dumb move.
I was a reddit user for ages. Reddit search always sucked. Heck, Reddit could barely make their own data available to the users (which is why their user histories are so limited and why the GDPR takeouts take a week). Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, used external search engines.
Do they want to block external searches? Literally enshittify their shit further? Are they willing to hold back progress?
Just today I was thinking of Reddit Gold - back when I actually paid for it, the marketing spin was “you get to test new features before we add them to everyone else!” Literally none of the Gold features I’ve ever used made to the unwashed masses. I take it back, saving comments did.
So yeah, they will hold back progress. In fact, progress isn’t on the cards. It’s just regress. AND you can be a premium user and PAY for it.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
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.
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Whelp with that I guess my leaving Reddit will go from 99% to 100%. Literally the only reason I’ve ever on that site is because I have a Google search result now. It was the last useful thing about it. Google has terrible results now and Reddit search is useless. They only work when together.
I will believe that Google can figure out a way to filter the spam – I mean, beating the spammers was their core value-add that made them what they are today. The spammers have pulled well ahead for maybe a year, but Google can maybe figure out a way to pull ahead again.
But there is no way that Reddit is going to be a reasonable forum site without a way to search it. Maybe it doesn’t have to be Google, but they have to have something sane.
Even aside from people searching, some people contribute specifically so that the information they provide can be found by people searching down the line. If it’s just going to a black hole…
I just don’t think Google cares anymore. They don’t have any legitimate competition. Their web browser dominates, their search is literally a verb now, and nobody’s changing anytime soon. The search has been terrible for a solid two years now and I just don’t see it getting any better. They have incentivized an entire industry designed to push low effort noise to the top for over a decade. It would take an unbelievable amount of work and dismantling said industry, or at least heavily augmenting it, to right the ship again.
Dear Investors to Reddit’s upcoming IPO
We have been making some exciting changes to ready the company for our public offering. Please read on for the exciting details.
First, we want to reassure investors that we’ve worked hard since June, 2023 to alienate our most active users, who have been cluttering Reddit with non-profitable, straightforward discussion and help for years, and ensure that users cannot access our platform with reliable, convenient smartphone apps.
And we know it’s not enough to merely insult the people who have donated substantial parts of their lives to make our platform valuable; we’re also planning for the future. As you may have recently heard, we’re introducing a system to directly pay users who reliably produce the most attention-grabbing clickbait content. We are confident this will ensure that if those long-time users ever feel like returning, they will only find a hellscape of low-effort, reheated viral content and memes, accompanied by consistent, reliable comment sections of karma-farming bots and users.
But there’s more! We today announce that search engine users eventually will not be able to locate anything on the site, consistent with the existing experience for current on-site Reddit users. We know that a curated, managed experience is what most reliably leads to happy investors, so rest assured, we will be slowly cutting off all avenues for users to direct their own experience on Reddit. Yay!
As the IPO day nears, remember: when we are finished only the worst content will be available by an audience who can’t find us. Our core audience will be the users who remain trapped, Clockwork Orange-style, in an endless cycle of stimulation triggers structured to maximize ad viewing, in order to ensure our investors capture the maximum proportion of the site’s rapidly diminishing value. In other words, get ready to maximize ARPU, investors!
With these changes, invest with confidence. With geniuses like us at the helm, you can be sure line goes up.
Reddit who?
Ill get my popcorn, this will be fun
