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‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
117 points (89.3% liked)
Technology
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It will block Google and broker deals with firms that are already enabling shitty AI accounts.
...Because Reddit sells ads.
They don't want you to be able to find what you need and leave, they want to you go to the front page, see ads, preferably on their shitty mobile app, hunt for the appropriate sub, search that, see ads, get frustrated, have you ask a question, go away, get a notification, go back, see ads, the reply was an AI bot, mixed results depending on whether you realized it or not, see more ads, then fuck off.
And this is a company that will soon IPO, and become beholden to shareholders. They have only begun to squeeze their users.
Reddit internal search engine is trash, googling it is the only good way to find a thread on this platform
There used to be some decent third party tools that used the api to find stuff.
My go to research technique is googling "question reddit". This would ruin me
So they're still concerned with AI training from the data on their site which funny enough was the supposed reasoning behind the whole API price change that started 3rd part app shutdown shit show. It's almost like they where being disingenuous about why they needed to suddenly start charging a massive sum for a formerly free service...
Appending reddit to google search has become the only way to get meaningful search results, without it it's a shitshow of clickbait garbage, I can't imagine what it will become if it's not allowed anymore to index reddit data.
I understand companies not wanting data to be scraped for AI training for free, it's not only reddit according to the article, also news sites, I think it's a legit concern.
I believe at this point governments should wake up and regulate the matter of AI training globally, leaving it to individual companies will only damage users all over the world.
Interesting thought: Google wants (needs) reddit's content, and reddit wants to IPO. Why doesn't Google just buy reddit? It's pocket change to Google, really, gets them what they want (content), gets reddit what they want (money).
And on the plus side, it would likely be shutdown in short order. Cause that's just what Google does.
Unexpected Win for lemmy I guess.
If you regulate AI, you kill any open source or small time endeavors and turn the whole thing into a shit show. You need vast amounts of data to train models and only a few companies either have it or can afford what they are missing.
Our whole economy is going to be AI driven soon, google and Microsoft would literally own us.
I also think Reddit just aggregated that content. Us, the consumer, don't deserve to get shafted and see AI costs explode just so spez can make a fat pay day off the content we created.
Regulating doesn't mean blocking, AI needs to be regulated, it should have been already done, look at stuff like deep fakes, some done even with dead people, fakes with actors faces and voices without their consent, and so on, it's not just about training, it's also about how the results are effectively used.
And the fact the training is expensive doesn't mean everyone should have free reign about it, especially when noone cares about the reliability of the datasets they're using, of the ethical aspects of it.
As for reddit, we've been already shafted, that's why we're on lemmy now.
You mentioned regulating right after scraping so I thought it pertained to that.
Also when I say expensive, I mean prohibitively so in a way that creates a soft monopoly. And when you couple that with the very real possibility that AI replaces most desk work in the coming decades, its bleak.
That being said, I totally agree deepfakes and all that need to be regulated but only on the platforms distributing it imo. Most seem to want to regulate how the technology itself works, gimping it and forcing filters on the user. All of which can really only be done by stopping users from running it locally.
I think anything other than the lightest touch would be disastrous for both us and the product.
I'm curious where you would start. I have some thoughts but mainly only a strict opt out policy for individuals.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
“Nothing is changing,” Reddit spokesperson Courtney Geesey-Dorr told The Verge, adding that the Post would soon be correcting its story.
The publication now writes that if Reddit can’t get AI to play ball, the company may block Google and Bing’s search crawlers, which means Reddit posts wouldn’t show up in search results.
“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.
(In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he said that “we’re in talks” with AI companies about the pricing changes.
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.
The original article contains 473 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
But can search survive without Reddit?