121–130 of 379 posts
It's funny in the context of Google's past motto of "don't be evil". I feel the right thing for Google here would have been to decline any deal regarding exclusivity, then Reddit wouldn't have pulled the trigger with its robots.txt update. The entire manoeuvre required both parties.
site:reddit.com works for kagi for new posts this week?
From the second paragraph of the article: > Searching for Reddit still works on Kagi, an independent, paid search engine that buys part of its search index from Google.
Wow, reddit found a way to make themselves even less useful somehow. After the API fiasco, that seemed like it'd be pretty hard to do.
But, apparently, they did finally find a way to make money.
The most recent 10-K financial results 2024-03-31 (filed 2024-05-08) shows they actually lost money: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=1713445
(For 2024-Q1, Reddit lost -$575 million on revenue of $242 M.)
If the quoted "$60 million deal"[1] from Feb 2024 is accurate, that small amount from Google may not be enough for Reddit to turn a profit. It remains to be seen what the Q2 or Q3 financials will show.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the issue is that it isn’t just the web, but the inevitable american corporate shareholder model. Even businesses could be mom and pop ified and made way more popular overnight: quit raising prices and cutting corners and it would actually stand for itself like a massive $7 burrito. However the expectation is that shareholders get returns. Costs must be cut. Prices must be raised. Margins must be improved. It…
My rant above and your response reminded me of all those tons of MMO games out there that are ancient, with a tiny playerbase, that remain profitable nonetheless simply because if you have a product that people like using, putting it into maintenance mode and doing the bare minimum to keep it running is a perfectly valid business strategy. The companies that buy these service games and run them effectively just buy c…
I hadn't really thought about that topic in that way before. Really explains why some of those older MMOs have no desire to really make any improvements, the owners are happy to just keep them powered up and collect a check but have no incentive to invest in making them better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The network effects are too strong. Remember, the only reason Reddit "won" was because Digg destroyed itself with a radical upgrade that everyone hated. Reddit would have to do something similarly self-inflicted, and I can't even guess where people would go. Reddit was already an alternative to Digg -- what's the alternative to Reddit? I mean, it's certainly not Quora.
It was already dead by then. Really, it was the various Slashdot exoduses... sites like K5 got large initial boosts, but stumbled and started to deteriorate. If the Digg exodus is what sent you to Slashdot, chances are you're the kind of user everyone else was trying to escape. >what's the alternative to Reddit? I mean, it's certainly not Quora. If it was deliberate I certainly can't tell, but one of the characterist…
It's like what happened to personal websites when things like Blogger, Tumblr and Facebook popped up.
It's hard to beat something that is easy to set up and pays for hosting but still let's you control moderation. It's a no brainer.
Managing your own domain where users post content is a minefield of problems these days even if you didn't mind the cost of running it.
Something like this might also explain the move to things like Discord over IRC.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, what is the antitrust concern about Reddit blocking crawlers that aren’t paying them? Surely you don’t think Reddit has a monopoly on anything? Or are you somehow suggesting that it’s google’s fault that Reddit took this step? I don’t see any indication that’s the case.
not that reddit has a monopoly, but that google has. google is using their power to prevent others from competing. the problem here is of course that if reddit would be in financial trouble (i don't know if they are but let's imagine they need this money), they'd be between a rock and a hard place. google should not be allowed to make exclusive deals, and reddit could not survive without the deal, then what would be…
let assume apple is forced to allow people to make a choice of the default search engine in safari then google might stop paying apple, and ...
I wonder if this might affect redis, as in slowly kill it's user base especially when it comes to user providing (and often also looking for) high quality content, because who of such users would want to use google search?
This 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?
Honestly, that makes those other engines way less valuable because for many topics, telling the engine to specifically narrow the results down to reddit comments is the only way to get a decent answer to what you're looking for. I'd definitely support blocking Quora from everything though.
This is an interesting development. How many other sites might have leverage to charge to be indexed? I don't want to live in a world where you have to use X search engine to get answers from Y site - but this seems like the beginning of that world. From an efficiency perspective - it's obviously better for websites to just lease their data to search engines then both sides paying tons of bandwidth and compute to get…
Kagi uses at least Google and Mojeek edit: > Realistically, there are only 2 search engines now. https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
From the article:
Many alternatives to GBY [Google, Bing, and Yandex] exist, but almost none of them have their own results;
(they could crawl but never ever return those results == more odd).Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think Reddit lost that kind of authenticity a while ago. Advertisers know the "search:reddit.com " trick, and when you look at the number of upvotes, it costs _pennies_ to get your product trending in the comments.