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The fact that Reddit thinks all that user-generated content is theirs and that they need to protect it from AI is really fucked up.
Reddit itself produces nothing, they wouldn’t exist without the users.
Absolutely pathetic that they may block search crawlers over that.
It should be pretty simple: the user generated content are volunteered by the users for free on reddit, therefore the content should belong to the users.
Same thing as with AI, if an AI model is trained with everyone’s data, then the AI model should be open and available to everyone.
Correct and the issue with their API gating was “Well they obviously value my free content. WHERE’S MY CUT?!”
Free API: I’m not going to complain. Paid API: Guess i’ll use Lemmy
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There is added value in creating a web platform or an ML model too, but the value should be shared with the content makers.
Reddit administration thinks the site is too big to fail. Lemmy isn’t a real competitor to them because the decentralization of federation means that joining an instance and trying to navigate the fediverse is a bit too complex for most people. The reason why massively populated social media sites took off is because people like having everything in one place where everyone else is.
What I could see happening is a well-funded startup creates a fork of Lemmy that they use as the basis for their instance and they can customize and develop as they see fit. This instance would be accessible to everyone already on Lemmy, but they could offer one centralized alternative to Reddit where new users don’t have to think about what they need to do to join.
I’m sure that if Lemmy picks up critical mass, it could lower the bar for most people to be willing to jump through the extra hoops. Ultimately federation solves the chicken and egg problem that any social media startup has.
Except lemmy specifically is AGPL and it’s basically impossible to monetise as a startup because they can’t close the source code.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/LICENSE
Kbin too:
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
They’d have to create their own from scratch.
Which is fine, ActivityPub is an open protcol. You don’t even need to cleanroom, its all there. The AGPL is a shield against corporate interests, given how things are going that’s a much needed feature.
There’s also strong opinions if open source instances should federate with closed source instances, for reasons of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
That’s not the end of the world, though it does mean that a competitor could always start using it. I was going to say just use Lemmy but a major site would probably want to have their own fork for stability so they’re not at the whims of someone else.
They could probably use an open fork for a while while also developing their own software that would be compatible and then seamlessly switched out.
Joining instances in Lemmy is very simple if you’re using an app like Boost and finding other instances as well. On PC it’s another matter.
Typical corporate greed in that sense. It’s stupid but I’m not at all surprised by that attitude.
The part that even if they were morally right in that sense… it’s already too late. This is trying to close the barn door not just after the horse left, but after the horse already ran off and made it two states over. There’s definitely value to LLM in having more data and more up to date data, but reddit is far from the only source and I cannot imagine that they possess enough value there to have any serious leverage.
Reddit would/will survive being taken out of internet search results. Not without costs though: it will arrest their growth rate (or accelerate shrink rate, as appropriate) and make people less interested in using the site.
Lol
Literally the only time I use reddit now that my 3rd party app got fucked by spez is when I Google a problem and reddit pops up as the answer.
Will I ever go to reddit and search for my issue? Hell no because their search function is absolutely useless.
I don’t even use Reddit for that anymore. If I’ve got a problem there’s plenty of forums I can consult for help, or I can post the question here on Lemmy, on the fediverse, on Bluesky, you get the idea.
I managed to get a Windows XP virtual machine working with GPU passthrough thanks to a forum MattKC (tech youtuber who does repairs and reverse engineering) had set up and posted on. Even when I used Reddit, there wasn’t much info on getting BIOS-only versions of Windows working.
Yea, me too. Although I know wanna stop doing that as well.
Literally the one reason I still use Reddit is because appending site:reddit.com gives me actual results. Reddits’ built-in search results are utter dog shit and you cant find anything. They’d just be shooting themselves in the foot for blocking Google
Literally the only reason why I still bump into Reddit even when I’m not trying to.
Here’s an example from real life. When I searched for “ipados brave yutube ads adblock”, I found some Reddit posts discussing the issue.
Spoiler: Ditch brave and switch to something else.
BTW, Reddit is currently in the “hold my beer” sort of state when it comes to shooting itself in the foot.
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I think you’re right. Reddit is in a really tough spot now that we’re living the early days of AI. IMO Reddit should make their own LLM and call it Snoo or something. This way, people could asks Snoo to solve all their tech issues.
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…was the search actually misspelled that badly?
Missing one letter is a severe misspelling?
And that’s on a good day. Can you imagine how my spelling looks like in the morning before having coffee and/or when I’m standing in a train during the rush hour? It’s so far from human readable, that I’m inclined to call it a type of encryption.
The MD algorithm does make text hard to parse.
Oh wow … You think one letter is the only problem with that?
Let’s run this through one word at a time
ipados - name of a product, trademarked, spelled correctly
brave - normal English word, spelled correctly
yutube - missing the letter “o”
ads - normal English word, spelled correctly
adblock - name of a product, spelled correctly. Not an extension available for the browser in question as far as I can tell, but that’s the kind of thing you find out when you google it
Search results have gone to shit since everyone and their mothers started doing this SEO-optimization bullcrap. Google obviously has no reason to fix this situation because it makes them more money when people spend more time looking for something. site:reddit.com was one of the mitigators for this problem…
I’d gladly ditch search altogether and use ChatGPT + browsing support, but that’s similarly dogshit because it’s working off of SEO-optimized bullcrap results too.
SEO should have been immediately dealt with years ago by having search engines permanently blacklist domains that pull that shit, no questions asked.
I’m at a loss for words. Surely, YouTube trying to Adwall would be the stupidest thing in social media history. Surely, Musk changing Twitter’s name would be the stupidest thing. No, Steve Huffman has somehow managed to surpass the old masters. “We can survive without people being able to find our website VIA SEARCH RESULTS”! YOU. STUPID. MOTHERFUCKER.
The YouTube ad-blocker ban isn’t stupid at all.
Something isn’t a bad business decision just because you don’t like it. That’s now how business works.
“I won’t watch videos at all if I can’t view them without watching ads or paying money.”
…Yeah. That’s the idea. From a business perspective people who don’t pay or view ads are leeches they’re perfectly happy to burn off.
If you view people as purely advertising receptacles then this business move is logical. But if you view people as agents that can build their own alternatives or advertise your services then this would seem to be a dumb business move.
If you view people who actively cost you money while bringing nothing to your business as assets you’re bad at business.
If 100% of people who used adblockers decided to stop using YouTube entirely over this, the only result would be YouTube saving money. Video hosting is simply too expensive for anyone to make a website where anyone can host and view for free without ads.
bring nothing to your business
Well that’s the contention. Your example starts and ends with people leaving YouTube. If YouTube is the limit of consideration then yes, no value exists outside YouTube and this is a silly argument.
People will find alternatives. You can’t stop people witj adblockers from using YouTube by blocking adblockers - no more than you can stop piracy. People just build better, more resilient ways to bypass things. This decision has good understanding of business but not psychology.
The only real way is to make it more convenient to use YouTube with ads, so no one goes for adblockers anyway.
They absolutely can, and I suspect the day is coming soon when they do.
Instead of simply putting ad breaks in the video, they’ll be able to splice in a few ads to the video and re-render it to include ads each time someone clicks on the video.
But but everything on the internet should be free! /s
most people dont take issue with the fact that there is ads but with how intrusive they are.
Idk browsing Lemmy often makes me think that many of these people expect software devs to literally work for free.
And it costs nothing to host YouTube don’t youj know. We should have a foss version and get ride of it.
I don’t think polel realize how much bandwidth and storage YouTube uses.
It’s called PeerTube. It’s getting more content, but anything that isn’t completely wacked out is poorly produced and there doesn’t seem to be any sort of decent search to find the rare interesting content.
I caught the sarcasm, and don’t disagree. Just saying that a FOSS version does exist.
And how inappropriate some of them are and the sheer number of them
YouTube is perfectly happy if people who block ads go away. Do you really think your traffic is beneficial to them if you don’t watch ads?
I mean, I hate it too, but it’s obviously not a bad business decision.
I’ve seen people make the argument that no matter what you do if they successfully break adblockers, Google stands to make a profit, but it could actually hurt advertisers.
Obviously, if you stop watching, then that’s less overhead for them, and if you pay for premium, then that’s literal money in their wallet. But if you start watching ads, Google can leverage more money from advertisers for the increased views. But people who use adblockers are unlikely to click ads, so advertisers pay more for their ads to be shown to people who weren’t going to click on them anyway.
Ironically, it’s in both our interest and advertisers to stop Google from breaking adblockers.
The point being they would rather purge the userbase than give them reason to not use adblock by being more selective with their ads.
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Surely, YouTube trying to Adwall would be the stupidest thing in social media history
That would be Facebook no longer requiring a college email address.
No I’m pretty sure that was a sound business decision.
So is disabling ad blockers on YouTube. Thats not really was I was talking about.
Facebook went downhill because they let the riffraff in.
Ah, IT for the sake of IT.
This is the pattern dying companies follow.
I do not use a single social media site that requires me to sign in to view it.
They threaten to saw the branch they sit on.
Btw, greed and jealousy are cancers that eat the brain.
The moment they do this Reddit will collapse.
It won’t just be this but it’ll be things like this, further monetization schemes, and eventually killing old.reddit that are gonna keep chipping away at their faithful userbase.
I’m surprised they haven’t killed old reddit after all this other BS yet, tbh.
They can see the numbers for new shit reddit and old reddit. They haven’t gotten rid of it because it probably still has a ton of traffic that can display ads. It’s extremely obvious that they fucked up with the new design just because the old one has been around for so long
That’s because all the admins are using old.reddit themselves.
I literally only go to Reddit for videogame questions. I know most normal people only head there when they have specific questions.
You know, the people they can actually show ads to?
Jesus fucking christ. Why are they hell bent on destroying themselves.
The fact that Reddit is available from a search engine is one of the main reasons for its popularity imo.
Exactly, Google search itself is so enshittified you pretty much have to tag “reddit” at the end of every query to find any solution to a problem. Even my 55yr boss knows this and he’s clueless about anything social media related.
Having tons of Google traffic to any company in would be a godsend, yet Reddit wants to ban it. What a fucking joke.
Reddit’s search can’t be enshitified because it’s never been good.
i never thought i would say this, but at this point bing seems to be a better search engine than google
I can not recommend duckduckgo enough. Been using it for a while now and it’s so nice to not have the top 5 or so results just be ads, and the rest irrelevant.
And bangs! They make it so that ddg is the only sensible choice for default search.
If I need to search on google for some reason, I can just append !g. If I want to look for Youtube videos, I append !yt. I can even search for grocery prices directly with !appie.
I’ve been looking for a better search engine lately. DDG results seem to be nearly the same as Bing results. I.e. still not that great, though has better privacy policies. IDK why search engines don’t de-rank listicles, extremely long recipe pages, pages with tons of ads, etc. Major search engines are so bad now, it seems like it would be relatively easy for a startup to overtake them. I guess there’s a large barrier of entry due to the infrastructure needed to crawl the entire internet and store indexes.
That’s because DDG gets some links from Bing and Yahoo as well.
Spez is an arrogant prick.
Are spez and Musk having a race or something?
Of they were, both sites would be gone by now. I could tank a huge site in a week. This is just incompetence.
Lonnie is a dumbass business man. Spez has no sense of (or doesn’t care) what users want. That’s what’s happening.
Fuck these unimportant men with more power than they deserve.
That’s what happens if narcissist billionaires get lauded by the media. Copycats are glory hounds and want their share of brown-nosing as well.
Literally the only time I ever use reddit is if it is a google result(stopped after 3rd party ban).
That’s what I was going to say. Nowadays I only end up on Reddit when a search points there, and only when all other options have led nowhere.
Every time the Reddit browser experience is there to remind me why this is the last place I check.
Same here, and also only if the answer is important to me. If it doesn’t really matter whether I learn the answer, I’ll just move on. This could decimate their casual educational value, which used to be their greatest asset.
They either have a revenue stream more valuable than that or this is a comically stupid thing to do.
If on iOS you can use the free Sink it for Reddit Safari extension to remove all of the use the app garbage and make the mobile site useful. They make an extension for Twitter/X as well.
For the times I can only get an answer there it makes it decent.
And on desktop with ublock so I give em no views.
Yea, me too. I kinda wanna learn to stop doing that. It’s just, a lot of the times, that’s the only place where an answer is available.
yup, especially obscure tech problems, or tech problems that started happening today because of an update (looking at you discord).
I will forever remember the time when I spent a week talking with a dipshit miscrosoft support guy who insisted my entire brand new drawing tablet was broken, despite me telling him the problem was most likely in my laptop or windows itself and after giving up on that guy I went to reddit and had my issue diagnosed and solved in like 3 comments flat
I thought the 3rd party app ban was bad but this is pure self destruction.
The best marketing they have is “I add Reddit to anything I search on Google!” This truly is 🤡 shit.
I mean, could help Lemmy out. I’d be super okay with that.
Probably not. The majority of users are just there for entertainment and commentary, they aren’t the same niche that occupies Lemmy communities.
they’re really trying to kill Reddit aren’t they
My theory is that reddit just doesn’t make enough money to stay open without external funding, and as they started running out of that they desperately hired anyone they thought could make the company enough money to stay afloat.
And the dumbass ideas we keep seeing from them are the result of that. Anything to get a buck, no matter what it means to the user experience.
I think its about their plan to go public and some hedge fund bros told them if they want a sugar daddy then they have to implement more agressive ads and subscription fees to juice valuation. I hope it massively backfires.
They have is ways to socialize online (reddit, Twitter, fb) and then people realized they could use them as a tool for good. They could organize, spread the word about bad companies and people, encourage others to do good, and so on. People could even turn on the platforms when those platforms corrupted.
So yeah, the billionaires in control don’t like it that we have ready ways to call them out. Elon was pissed about people tracking their flights on Twitter and bought the platform and it’s running it into the ground. Why not. He loses nothing and gains everything.
I think we’ll see this happen a lot more. Billionaires control everything and then we act surprised when they shut people out that expose them.
Paired up with Governments around the world realizing “oh shit, the masses can easily organize and turn against us”… Here Elon, buy this platform and toast it, we’ll make sure you’re compensated, bro.
I don’t think that’s what happened, with Twitter at least.
Elon pissed off the wrong people at the SEC and FTC playing stupid pump and dump games with stocks by using Twitter and his absurdly undeserved reputation as an unconventional super genius with his mega group of followers.
One of the biggest of these, was pumping and then dumping twitter stock by alleging that he’d buy the company. And the people he’d pissed off in government basically saw their opportunity to fuck him by literally forcing him to buy it at his stupidly overpriced valuation - that’s why he played all sorts of dumb games dragging out the purchase and trying to get out of it.
And so now he’s stuck with an unprofitable company he didn’t want. I’m pretty sure he’s running it into the ground on purpose so he’ll be able to carry that loss balance forward eternally, using it to get out of paying taxes by writing off the loss.
Unfortunately reddit , twitter etc will never die. There will always be a subset that will keep using the platform no matter what. The only thing that can kill it is when company starts making huge loss without any user base but that’s a slow death until the said subset stops using it.
They don’t need to die, they just need to become irrelevant and for the fediverse to take over.
Yeah, however small the user base, they still have value. Even in a worst-case—Chapter 7—situation, somebody would buy the names and logos.
Even in a worst-case—Chapter 7—situation, somebody would buy the names and logos.
imagine this happens and then the Reddit codebase turns out to be too much work to maintain so it just becomes a Lemmy/Kbin/similar instance lol
Alternatively they could get bought by Google and be sunsetted within six months because the devs got bored.
I just had to check, reddit isn’t publicly traded yet. My best explanation was that spez had a strawman short 200x the amount of reddit stocks and then run the site so hard into the ground that even Musk would go whoa and Malagassy geophysicists would be getting strange readings on their seismographs.
Now? No, they’re not actively trying to kill reddit. It’s the classic case of someone who got lucky with a startup and didn’t hand it off before crashing it.
They should have IPOd in 2020, like everyone else did, but they didn’t. Why is anyone’s guess. Greed, skeletons in the closet, or whatever, doesn’t really matter, they missed the boat
He did hand it off. Then he clawed his way back in amid the Ellen Pao stuff and it’s generally been going downhill the whole time.
do Reddit admins think they have any kind of search function without using Google and site:reddit.com?
They think they have a great app without third party developers, so probably. :/
oof
The reddit search was broken for years
Are they using their own search function to find a fix?
Did it ever work?
I see people in this thread say they never had a problem with the search feature but honestly personally I always used Google
It was good for certain situations, such as obscure subreddits and google was good for others.
They both had their benefits and drawbacks.
Look they’ve already cut off free API access. Here’s some other ideas from the Muskrat playbook:
Maybe change the name to P.com
Change the logo to ₱ (surely the Mexicans won’t mind that you’re using the Peso symbol).
Hmm, why not also charge money to get a blue checkmark by your Reddit username to be a verified Redditor? or maybe call them P-ers?
Oh, how about charging new users $1 to use your platform?
More like charge money to be called a verified user without actually being verified.
So Reddit would go from a social open hub, the “front page of the Internet”, to a walled garden? Ridiculous.
Isn’t this an act of cutting off your face to spite your nose? I understand that Reddit wants to monetize it’s for AI models. But if the content gets moved into a walled garden, and reddit’s own search features don’t improve dramatically, then what’s the point of going to Reddit?
Good ol’ Spiderface Spez.
