that is awesome but I can't open old.reddit.com in my browser so its a non-issue.
Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
101–110 of 379 posts
Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
#102I don’t understand how this isn’t anti-competitive behavior. It seems like reddit has to offer this deal with similar terms to google’s competitors.
Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if google has exclusive deals My comment said, show me that the Google deal with Reddit is exclusive. You haven't done that. And there's no reason to think it would be, because of antitrust. The DOJ doesn't have to act "immediately", the point is that obvious antitrust violations come with fines that make it unprofitable to attempt in the first place. And this would be black-and-white obvious antitrust violation, g…
clearly some deal was reach between the two parties or we wouldn't be here. whether or not the deal is exclusive OR companies have to pay to index reddit it's still bad for competition. money has a barrier to entry preventing newcomers. I can blame reddit for creating the deal and I can blame google for accepting the deal if the effect is bing, ddg and others cannot display reddit results without reaching some deal.
I'm not saying it's not bad for competition.
I'm saying the blame is 100% with Reddit.
Blaming Google for accepting it makes no sense. That's like if a shopper goes to grocery store and buys an expensive $20 piece of cheese, and other shoppers can't afford cheese that pricey, and you're blaming that one shopper for buying it because it means other shoppers can't also get the cheese without paying for it. That doesn't make any sense. The store set the price, and they're the one to blame if other shoppers can't afford it.
If Bing, DDG and others can't reach a deal with Reddit, that has nothing to do with Google.
Again, blame here is 100% on Reddit, and 0% on Google. To assign blame to a purchaser in a case like this doesn't make any sense.
Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
#104They changed robots.txt a month or so ago. For the first 19 years of life, reddit had a very permissive robots.txt. We allowed all by default and then only restricted certain poorly behaved agents (and Bender's Shiny Metal Ass(tm)) But I can understand why they made the change they did. The data was being abused. My guess is that this was an oversight -- that they will do an audit and reopen it for search engines aft…
> But I can understand why they made the change they did. The data was being abused. Depends how you see it - if you see it as 'their' data (legally true) or if you see it as user content (how their users would likely see it). If you see it as 'user content', they are actually selling the data to be abused by one company, rather than stopping it being abused at all. From a commercial 'lets sell user data and make a p…
> if you see it as 'their' data (legally true)
Is that actually true? Reddit may indeed have a license to use that data (derived from their ToS), but I very much doubt they actually own the copyright to it. If I write a comment on Reddit, then copy-paste it somewhere else, can Reddit sue me for copyright infringement?
Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
One (in this case, 2) company's incentive for profit should not take priority over the usability/well being of the internet as a whole, ever, and is exactly why we are where we are now. This is an absolutely terrible precedent.
I know people will hate to hear this, but Reddit it's not important to the A well being of the Internet.
I think it's the other way around, in that people don't like to hear how Reddit has become important due to the death of independent forums and the degree to which information has become concentrated on the site.
Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
#106This is great. It means I won't see Reddit content popping up all over search results in other engines. Can Medium do the same? And perhaps Quora?
What a weird thing to say. Reddit has for a long time been a place where real people hang out and have real conversations, unlike quora and medium.
Yeah, but each sub to a greater or lesser degree, has its own hivemind you'll be run out of town (or possibly even banned) for challenging. And the average member of Reddit is quite willing to spout off confidently incorrect BS and downvote people into the ground who actually know what they're talking about.
Not exactly always a reliable source of info outside uncontroversial niche topics or places like /r/AskHistorians that actually moderate. And even there I've seen the occasional humdinger.
Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody who wants to be successful obeys robots.txt. And I do mean nobody.
They changed it to disallow so that scrapers can't just claim the robots.txt gave them permission.
Independent scrapers can launder the data between Reddit and AI consumers. The only folks this hurts is users seeking info via search engines and folks willing to kowtow to rules that are potentially low impact to evade. Next steps would be (from an adversarial perspective) browser extensions that stream back data for ingestion similar to Recap for Pacer [1].
[1] https://free.law/recap/faq
(full disclosure: assisting someone pursuing regulatory action against reddit in the EU for a separate issue from scraping, it's a valuable resource, but the folks who own and control it are meh)
Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
#108I don’t understand how this isn’t anti-competitive behavior. It seems like reddit has to offer this deal with similar terms to google’s competitors.
They do offer that deal to others; a big news story was when OpenAI bought Reddit's data they were selling: https://openai.com/index/openai-and-reddit-partnership/
Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
#109I don’t understand how this isn’t anti-competitive behavior. It seems like reddit has to offer this deal with similar terms to google’s competitors.
Most business deals are anti-competitive in some way. What makes you think this specifically rises to the level where they'd legally have to offer similar terms to competitors?
Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
#110They changed robots.txt a month or so ago. For the first 19 years of life, reddit had a very permissive robots.txt. We allowed all by default and then only restricted certain poorly behaved agents (and Bender's Shiny Metal Ass(tm)) But I can understand why they made the change they did. The data was being abused. My guess is that this was an oversight -- that they will do an audit and reopen it for search engines aft…
> But I can understand why they made the change they did. The data was being abused. Depends how you see it - if you see it as 'their' data (legally true) or if you see it as user content (how their users would likely see it). If you see it as 'user content', they are actually selling the data to be abused by one company, rather than stopping it being abused at all. From a commercial 'lets sell user data and make a p…
Enough cash or enough data on hand to show the majority of traffic comes from the search monopoly