Narrators voice: Reddit absolutely cannot survive without search.

"Survive" is one thing. "Attract and retain users who create quality content" is quite another. I mean, Truth Social is "surviving."

Search is the only reason I visit Reddit.

Excuse me while my sides go into orbit!

Reddit traffic is 54% from organic search, and it has been slowly declining. With users complaining about the uptick of bot spam. Blocking search crawlers might increase short-term engagement, as users feel forced to registre to see the junk there, but the site will die after that.

Reddit is definitively not too big to fail.

Since the APIcalypse I've been mentioning that Reddit Inc. is really pissed at businesses (mostly the GAFAM) using Reddit content to train large "language" models with, without giving Reddit Inc. a single penny in the process. And it seems to me that Reddit is really hoping that those businesses would pay Reddit for API access. Well... what could go wrong? A thousand things - including LLM tech being superseded, or GAFAM deciding "why bother giving Reddit API bucks? We're going to access it through fake browsers".

We got a taste of what Google without Reddit might look like when many subreddits went dark to protest the company’s API pricing changes — at that time, many Reddit results took you to private communities, which was a pain.

Personal anecdote on that: I've been uBlacklist-ing Reddit from web search results for a few years. The main two tricks to avoid SEO-infested sites, without relying on Reddit, are 1) include negative search terms, and 2) "quotation marks" to "force" results "everywhere".

I'd be fascinated to know how the senior management at Reddit actually conceptualise the site.

To me, Reddit is essentially "PHPbb as a service" - Reddit itself provides the hosting infrastructure, the software, and sets some standards for the types of communities they are willing to host, community admins do the whole community things. Does Reddit's management think they are running Facebook or something?

Reddit could survive with nothing but bots posting AI generated drivel and memes, and more bots endlessly responding with variations on "This," "Don't threaten me with a good time" and "That's what she said."

Just so long as the zombies have enough "content" to scroll through, inertia alone will keep it going.

I get that Reddit data is useful for AI, but I'm not this massively unique treasure trove they seem to think it is. It's gone to shit anyway now either way.

What's a reddit?

Lmmfao!

Wow, that makes the API removal look tame by comparison. Like what are they trying to accomplish? Cause that literally the only way I find stuff on Reddit? ~~Footgun~~...Foot bazooka 🤪

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.

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.

According to the original report, Reddit is in negotiations with AI companies to get them to pay to use its data, and if it couldn’t strike those agreements, it might require logins to see content.

That could have the knock-on effect of preventing Reddit results from showing up in Google searches.

(In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he said that “we’re in talks” with AI companies about the pricing changes.

X, formerly Twitter, has also implemented new pricing tiers for accessing its API, and X owner Elon Musk blamed data scraping by AI startups as a way to justify the reading limits implemented this summer.

The original article contains 353 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

We do not need Google because people will always look on Reddit before anywhere else.