251–260 of 379 posts
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Basically all 'independent' search engines piggyback off Google or Bing https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm... >Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide
>Basically all 'independent' search engines piggyback off Google or Bing Incorrect: https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek
I wonder how Aaron Swartz would react to this
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I personally feel that this kind of "exclusive search only by Google deal" should result in an anti-trust case against Google. This is the kind of abuse of monopoly power that caused anti-trust laws to be passed in the 1890s.
if i create a vacuum cleaner and decide to only sell it at Walmart you can't get mad at me for not wanting to sell it at costco you can always buy a competitor's or make your own vacuum cleaner if you hate buying at Walmart maybe what you are really mad about is Reddit monopolising content
Similarly, if you start a vacuum cleaner company, you can make whatever exclusive deals you want. But if you control 80% of the market for vacuum cleaners, then you might need to be more careful about leveraging your market share in unfair ways.
If a company is part of a robust, competitive market (like Reddit), it's usually wiser to let customers vote with their wallets, and leave the government out of it. If a company becomes massively dominant (like Google or TicketMaster), and if it starts pushing exclusive contracts, it's much harder for customers to switch away.
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it's even worse. it's not theirs (it's the users'), they are merely hosting it and using it (ToS gives them a fancy irrevocable license I guess). so they can do whatever they want with it and the actual owners/authors have no chance to really influence Reddit at all to make it crawlable. (the GDPR-like data takeout is nice, but ... completely useless in these cases where the value is in the composition and aggregatio…
> the GDPR like data takeout is nice Is there a way to export my history? How?
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> There is nothing preventing search companies paying the same $60 Million to license content. Yes, actually, there is - having $60m to throw around. "Barriers to entry often cause or aid the existence of monopolies and oligopolies" [0]. Monopolies and oligopolies are definitionally the opposite of free market forces. This is quite literally Econ 101. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry
Having a Monopoly != Anti-Competitive. Having Barriers to Entry != Anti-competitive Yes, large players have advantages of Economies of Scale. Just because you can't run an Airline because you don't have money to buy an Airplane isn't anti-competitive. Today Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI, Google, Amazon all can afford those piddly $60m to license from reddit. Not Anti-competitive at all. But saddened by how much corporate-…
"Because barriers to entry protect incumbent firms and restrict competition in a market, they can contribute to distortionary prices and are therefore most important when discussing antitrust policy."
Antitrust policy then links to a page on competition law: "Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies." [0]
So yes, I'd downvote you if I could, but HN doesn't allow downvotes - which is honestly pretty fitting in the context of this conversation.
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> There is nothing preventing search companies paying the same $60 Million to license content. Yes, actually, there is - having $60m to throw around. "Barriers to entry often cause or aid the existence of monopolies and oligopolies" [0]. Monopolies and oligopolies are definitionally the opposite of free market forces. This is quite literally Econ 101. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry
And yet "free market forces" are often the reason why monopolies and oligopolies arise...? Monopolies are entirely consistent with free market economics. After all, if there's clearly a "best product" for a particular niche, it's entirely rational (free market actor) behavior for everyone to use the same product, leading to its monopoly in that market segment. I don't understand why people think this isn't/won't be/s…
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Anyone can ask for licensing deal. I'm sure NY Times, Conde Nest all have licensing deals. Mr. Beast signed a deal with Amazon. Joe Rogan with Spotify. Why is it hard to understand? Even HN can get a licensing deal if they want to. If you are producing content, you have every right to do what you want to with the content.
Reddit is not producing any content; its users are.
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> There is nothing preventing search companies paying the same $60 Million to license content. Yes, actually, there is - having $60m to throw around. "Barriers to entry often cause or aid the existence of monopolies and oligopolies" [0]. Monopolies and oligopolies are definitionally the opposite of free market forces. This is quite literally Econ 101. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry
And yet "free market forces" are often the reason why monopolies and oligopolies arise...? Monopolies are entirely consistent with free market economics. After all, if there's clearly a "best product" for a particular niche, it's entirely rational (free market actor) behavior for everyone to use the same product, leading to its monopoly in that market segment. I don't understand why people think this isn't/won't be/s…
This is a fair critique. I'm approaching this from an admittedly American perspective in which "free market" colloquially implies competition - but I recognize that competition is not inherently a free market concept.
Good callout!
Makes sense that Google did this deal since their search quality tanked and they became an de facto front end UI for Reddit.
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> # Reddit believes in an open internet, but not the misuse of public content. Calling it "public" content in the very act of exercising their ownership over it. The balls on whoever wrote that.
it's even worse. it's not theirs (it's the users'), they are merely hosting it and using it (ToS gives them a fancy irrevocable license I guess). so they can do whatever they want with it and the actual owners/authors have no chance to really influence Reddit at all to make it crawlable. (the GDPR-like data takeout is nice, but ... completely useless in these cases where the value is in the composition and aggregatio…
When I am answering some random dude on reddit with a problem I want that dude to read my solution. I don't want this to be crawled and forever stored (probably deanonymized) or enshrined in a dozen commercial LLMs. There is substack for that stuff.