‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google

LMAO. The only time I visit Reddit any more is when it dominates the first page of search results. Spez has failed upwards for so long, he thinks he can fly.

Half the traffic to reddit is because someone is looking for a recommendation or solution. Reddit's internal search function is about as useful as it's video player or it's app.

Both reddit and google will become useless if they do this.

if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.

There's your problem, Reddit, you think it's your data.

Next step: charging 1 dollar a year to maintain an account there

This, for me, is a good example of why the assessments that I've seen lately about how much Lemmy/Kbin may or may not have caught on, and the assessments about how Reddit may or may not have been impacted by the migration, are way, way too early and kind of nonsensical to make right now.

It is important to understand that Reddit is set on becoming a public company, and for a public company, not taking any avenue that could provide additional revenue is essentially only one step below setting that money on fire. If there's a chance that something will make the company more efficient, you are kinda obligated to do it. This will constantly (and increasingly) lead to policies like this, which sacrifice user convenience or add additional friction to the experience, because an experience that is open, accessible, non-intrusive and non-restrictive inherently implies lost opportunities of revenue at each one of those unrestricted points (which is a weird paradox of digital capitalism, in which to make your product more profitable it has to become worse, which flies in the face of the traditional capitalist theory that you make the most money by making the best product, but that's another story and I don't wanna get sidetracked).

Anyway what I wanna get at, is that each person has their own points of friction (mobile becoming app-only, old reddit dissappearing, who knows) past which they would find the idea of transferring platform less intrusive than the experience they would get by staying on Reddit. And the fact that cutting Google off is even in the realms of discussion shows that Reddit is very willing to reach those points and beyond. If these changes pile up and the friction created in the experience by them becomes significantly greater than the idea of transferring platforms, then it's not outside the realm of possibility that Reddit will bleed out slowly by taking actions like this. Time will tell.

Great, one of the only good uses left for both reddit and google.

No it cannot lmao. It's hilarious they think otherwise.

DO IT.

I actually used Google to search on Reddit. Reddit search sucks.

How can a platform be so narcissistic?!

Rome didn't start putting up walls like Hadrian's until the end of the empire. The Rome of Pax Romana had no limits.

FYI

Reddit is a study in inertia. It steadily declines in quality and the users just continue to hang around and eat their shit. Reddit will be around for a long time, and stubbornly get worse every quarter. It's pathetic.

Honestly after I noticed the declining users on Lemmy I started using reddit again, it just has more activity on a lot of niche communities I'm interested in.

However I still use Lemmy almost daily since I like the content and comments here more, and it's the kind of platform I enjoy, just like the Reddit of old.

Spez is a fucking idiot.

spez walking his baby nuts around the block trying to flex on Google and Microsoft. Let's see how that goes for him.

Every time I think it can't possibly get any dumber .... reddit proves me wrong. I have been a redditor for nearly ten years before I jumped ship and switched to Lemmy, and during that almost-decade I have used reddit's own search function for all of fifteen minutes before giving up and using google with the keyword "reddit + whatever I wanted to find" instead. It simply sucks.

That CEO has definitely shorted Reddit somehow.

Thank goodness for the Fediverse.

So, to stop ai crawlers, they will block Google and Bing crawlers?

To cut off your nose to spite your face comes to mind

It's all about training language models, isn't it?

Reddit's CEO is copying Twitter's CEO mindset again I see.

Is Spez mixing vodka and crack? It seems like they have no end goal except to make a small amount of money for a short period of time by not paying google, but they’ll lose money once they find a large portion of their views come from search traffic.

Imagine if they did it lmao. The backlash would be so fun to watch.

Sweet. I hope so. I'm tired of feeling tempted when they come up in queries.

Fuck you, Spez! Do it, you spineless chud!

Dooo iiiiit, erase any of your lingering relevance

it's absolutely hilarious how badly they've lost whatever plot there was

They have already made their content almost unusable in search results. I’ve started adding Reddit to my exclusions when searching.

As much as I hate Reddit, adding it to the end of nearly every google search is the only way you can get decent answers anymore, at least without having to scroll through several ad-riddled junk sites

This is gonna hurt both

ha ha ha, the only reason I even visit Reddit anymore is because something popped up on Google search. Good luck with that, Reddit.

Bcj