Reddit says Microsoft’s Bing, Anthropic, and Perplexity have scraped its data without permission. “It has been a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Ok, now I’m miffed that Google caved to Reddit’s demands and paid up.

    Because this set a dangerous precedent.

    Earlier, Google got a lot of demands from various publications to pay up for indexing the publicly available news sites. And they always responded with “Ok, guess you leave us no other choice than just exclude you from indexing altogether.” Let the site simmer for a while until they went “oh shit, not being indexed by major search engines sucks. we didn’t really mean it please come back”

    It’s especially jarring because Reddit doesn’t even produce their own news content anyway. That search engine money isn’t going to the content creators. News sites at least could say they need to pay for their content to be written by their employees.

    • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      I am guessing Google paid for access to their internal archives on posts and comments. Will give them a unique dataset for all the stuff that was deleted during the many exodus runs over the years.

    • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I don’t see why you should be miffed at all, Google can bully publications and unindex them and it will work. Reddit according to this: https://www.semrush.com/blog/most-visited-websites/ is the third most visited website after google and youtube, so they have a bit more power, lots of people google with “site:reddit.com” because it still has some useful content like that and I am going go out on a limb and say that US visitors are the most important for selling ads for Google.

      Microsoft will have to make it’s own value calculation whether it’s worth it and they will likely payup, although more and more of reddit is just bots posting stupid shit.

    • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
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      2 months ago

      At this point I think Google needs Reddit more than Reddit needs Google. Google search kind of sucks these days. How often do you add site:reddit.com to the end of the query to get any sort of useful result for a specific question? For me it’s pretty often. If Reddit cuts off Google, that goes away and Google search suffers significantly. And that might mean the one thing Google cannot abide- a situation where people in large numbers start actively seeking out other search engines.

      Don’t get me wrong, they’re both being super shitty.
      Google needs to quit obsessing over AI and a million different cloud products and fix the one product that people actually care about. Reddit needs to stop acting like they own everybody.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Steve “Spaz” Huffman has been trying to milk money out of the site that Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz, and pigboy Steven Spaz kinda created collaborating with each other. Aaron was shoved out first by The Spaz, though one could claim rightfully so in that case since Aaron was basically done with the site, and had moved on to his next project, essentially leaving Alexis and Spaz in the lurch as neither of them understood the code that Aaron had written to make the site functional.

      In many ways, the users made this possible. Most of us aren’t users in this case. The users that make up the vast majority of the population don’t give one thought to their own personal privacy, after all they have “nothing to hide,” not knowing that they really need to hide almost all of their data.

      If the users were to be educated about how much money the various companies like Reddit, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and almost every single other “disruptive tech company,” has stolen from them, the socialist revolution would have started in the 1980s