Absolutely hilarious that they think they can remove 3rd party search engines when reddit itself can't be navigated for shit, especially with their atrocious search feature. Blocking 3rd party search engines just ensures no one will be able to find any specific posts/content.

Literally the only time I've gone back to reddit in months is to find an answer for a game-related issue from a search engine query. Forcing a log-in or disabling search engines is just going to ensure less traffic/none from me.

Just like with Twitter, it seems like the reddit team is purposefully tanking their platform. I understand that much of it is for short-sighted payout, but even then, their decisions have been asinine and self-sabotaging.

Appending “site:reddit.com” to a Google search has become a popular trick for weeding SEO farms and other attention-seeking websites out of Google results, but if this change goes through, you might not be able to access Reddit from search at all.

Even this article knows.

If this goes through then my reddit usage will officially reach 0, as Google results are how I end up there nowadays anyway.

Interesting that

can survive

is now the goal

Do it, /u/spez. I dare you.

The irony is that Reddit thinks their internal search can in any way, shape or form compete with Google or other actual search engines. People use Google to find stuff on Reddit because Reddit's own search is hopeless.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, reddit aims to become more profitable by selling "its" data to companies that are training AI. Google et al are currently "scraping" this data and thus getting for free what reddit considers valuable.

Spez is out of his good goddang mind.

Google is too big to care what reddit does. They'll scrape elsewhere or "accidentally" steal the data rather than pay a dime.

Haha, that’s amazing! Reddit doesn’t know their analytics and metrics. They don’t realize how many people add “Reddit” to their searches to get the opinion of the people, not affiliate marketing blogs.

I know that everyone and their mom are in the hype train of AI, but we still don't know if its here to stay or not. Basing your whole strategy on a tech hype trend to the point of antagonising google... seems a bit too far fetch.

sure today Reddit results are still a thing that makes sense, but is it really too big to fail? if they're not in Google no significant amount of new users will sign up. between that, the exodus and other stuff wouldn't the content rot relatively quickly?

on the other hand social sites have huge inertia (still surprises me how many people are in twitter), reddit bros probably just wants to sell high to retire and the stock market bros are the dumbest people with a gambling addiction anyway... so the move might work..

Man, I wish economy didn't depend that much on the stock bros... reddit? IDGAF, they can succeed or fail, I don't use it anyway, but the power these dumbs have globally is so scary.

This is the main reason I no longer am active on Reddit. I object to them monetizing content I create. They can monetize many aspects of the site and that’s fine but whatever I create is either free to all, or monetizanle by me but not by the host of that content.

Why is content collection for generative AI so much worse than for search indexes?