Uhhhhh…who thought that was going to be a bright idea? Google is probably the single biggest traffic draw for Reddit.
Especially since reddit search itself has always been laughably broken.
That’s what I thought this was about halfway through the headline.
“They’ve made it this long without a functional search.”
I’m pretty sure the admin response to lack of search was “just use Google.”
I also recall that, but it’s just another instance of Reddit contradicting Reddit.
Or more realistically: Reddit from 10 years ago contradicting Reddit from today.
For what its worth the reddit search function seemed to have functioned much better a decade ago.
The amount of spam and just downright completely irrelevant results that showed up regularly in searches there the last few years has been ridiculous. I think it changed around the time they took away being able to see how many upvotws and downvotes a comment had totally, which I do still think is a real shame they took that away.
Yeah Reddit search was fine on the original old Reddit UI, it was around the time the native app released that it really started to shit itself and not return any results and just say try again later
Did Elon secretly buy Reddit?
Funny thing, spez expressed in interviews that he liked Leon’s philosophy behind a lot of decision over Twitter.
So there’s a lot of truth to that
Edit: I’m gonna tear my autocorrect a new one. It’s “Elon Musk” and I hope that’s clear.
Leon schmuck
Melon Tusk
Noel Musk: “HERP DERP I’M AN OXYMORON!”
Greedy Pigboy: “WE OXYMORONS STAND TOGETHER! please notice me senpai Enol Musk…”
Yep. That’s when I quit reddit
Probably working towards his own No Money Miracle.
No, Steve just has no personality of his own so he mimics other people to fake it. He’s latched on to Elon that way.
Not to mention the only way to go back and find something on their site. Their in house search bar is a useless piece of junk. Back when I would use reddit, I would open up google if I had to find something in reddit.
That’s literally been life for me for so long when I’m looking up quite a bit of different things. “Blah blah reddit”
They seem to intend to make the content on Reddit more disposable, which is a feat unto itself. Technical forum usage will precipitously drop if no one can find it. Or they just endlessly repost it? What an odd decision.
If they cut Google, I will literally never go to Reddit again. I probably hit a couple pages a week from Google search, and that’s it, but that will be zero pages if they are truly this dumb.
They want the data all to themselves because they think it’s AI training gold
Tbh it probably is. I don’t use Reddit much anymore for discussion or news or memes, but when I need the answer to a problem or an opinion on a product or service from actual people instead of an overly long review listicle, Reddit search results are still very useful.
I agree. Not only do they have the relevant content, it already has a numerical evaluation by a relevant user base.
But it’s not even their data. They lose nothing from AI models.
It’s ALL user-generated content. What harm comes to reddit the corporation by allowing AI to train off the user’s activity?
Why give it away for free when you can sell it?
It is theirs though; that was the cost of having a “free” service to use…
Well they lost all of my data , tell you that much.
Where’s my share, reddit?
Looks like it’s back to game forums. ChatGPT has alslo mostly overtaken Stack Overflow for me. Reddit was just a nice to have additional source.
Spez is going full Musk. It’s actually insane. Like… Holy shit.
I’m praying for Reddit’s downfall here, because if companies are able to get away with this shit the internet is going to get oh so much worse in the near future.
But at the same time, it sucks. I still use Reddit for episode discussions of shows I watch (which don’t exist here on Lemmy, especially for older shows). I don’t want those to go away without some replacement. Even if Lemmy did suddenly start getting lots of active episode discussions, it’s not really possible to backfill them for older shows and the site is still too small and hard to index, it seems.
Incidentally, google is the only way I access those, since I no longer browse Reddit normally.
The fact that Reddit thinks all that user-generated content is theirs and that they need to protect it from AI is really fucked up.
Reddit itself produces nothing, they wouldn’t exist without the users.
Absolutely pathetic that they may block search crawlers over that.
It should be pretty simple: the user generated content are volunteered by the users for free on reddit, therefore the content should belong to the users.
Same thing as with AI, if an AI model is trained with everyone’s data, then the AI model should be open and available to everyone.
Correct and the issue with their API gating was “Well they obviously value my free content. WHERE’S MY CUT?!”
Free API: I’m not going to complain. Paid API: Guess i’ll use Lemmy
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Typical corporate greed in that sense. It’s stupid but I’m not at all surprised by that attitude.
The part that even if they were morally right in that sense… it’s already too late. This is trying to close the barn door not just after the horse left, but after the horse already ran off and made it two states over. There’s definitely value to LLM in having more data and more up to date data, but reddit is far from the only source and I cannot imagine that they possess enough value there to have any serious leverage.
Reddit would/will survive being taken out of internet search results. Not without costs though: it will arrest their growth rate (or accelerate shrink rate, as appropriate) and make people less interested in using the site.
That search is the only reason a lot of people end up on reddit. This won’t end well for reddit.
That’s Steve emulating Elon again though, he’s trying to wreck other people’s toys because they’re brats.
I have a feeling this is why they’ll 180 the decision if they tried. Probably wouldn’t even last a month. And that’s being generous.
It’s a catch 22.
Want search engines to see your data to serve it to users looking for your content? Needs to be open.
Want to stop businesses from “profiting” from viewing your data? gotta block all access.
You literally can’t have it both ways. This is a binary choice. People are going to “steal” the data anyway, not that reddit should own ANYTHING posted by users, ever.
What if every news site blocked reddit referrals unless reddit paid $1 per click or someshit? It’s the same thing. Reddit is an advertising company, nothing more. They need the clicks.
Companies need to understand what I was told as a kid. Whatever you post on the public internet, is there for anyone to find and use. Trying to fight scraping means preventing your users from accessing the website as well
Yeah, I’m really hoping they go ahead with it for that reason.
Lol
Literally the only time I use reddit now that my 3rd party app got fucked by spez is when I Google a problem and reddit pops up as the answer.
Will I ever go to reddit and search for my issue? Hell no because their search function is absolutely useless.
Yea, me too. Although I know wanna stop doing that as well.
Literally the one reason I still use Reddit is because appending site:reddit.com gives me actual results. Reddits’ built-in search results are utter dog shit and you cant find anything. They’d just be shooting themselves in the foot for blocking Google
Literally the only reason why I still bump into Reddit even when I’m not trying to.
Here’s an example from real life. When I searched for “ipados brave yutube ads adblock”, I found some Reddit posts discussing the issue.
Spoiler: Ditch brave and switch to something else.
BTW, Reddit is currently in the “hold my beer” sort of state when it comes to shooting itself in the foot.
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I think you’re right. Reddit is in a really tough spot now that we’re living the early days of AI. IMO Reddit should make their own LLM and call it Snoo or something. This way, people could asks Snoo to solve all their tech issues.
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…was the search actually misspelled that badly?
Missing one letter is a severe misspelling?
And that’s on a good day. Can you imagine how my spelling looks like in the morning before having coffee and/or when I’m standing in a train during the rush hour? It’s so far from human readable, that I’m inclined to call it a type of encryption.
The MD algorithm does make text hard to parse.
Oh wow … You think one letter is the only problem with that?
Let’s run this through one word at a time
ipados - name of a product, trademarked, spelled correctly
brave - normal English word, spelled correctly
yutube - missing the letter “o”
ads - normal English word, spelled correctly
adblock - name of a product, spelled correctly. Not an extension available for the browser in question as far as I can tell, but that’s the kind of thing you find out when you google it
Search results have gone to shit since everyone and their mothers started doing this SEO-optimization bullcrap. Google obviously has no reason to fix this situation because it makes them more money when people spend more time looking for something. site:reddit.com was one of the mitigators for this problem…
I’d gladly ditch search altogether and use ChatGPT + browsing support, but that’s similarly dogshit because it’s working off of SEO-optimized bullcrap results too.
SEO should have been immediately dealt with years ago by having search engines permanently blacklist domains that pull that shit, no questions asked.
It’s just me or reddit is copying everything Twitter is doing? Elon Musk did this and rolled it back as soon as it was obvious it was a bad idea.
Spez expressed in interviews that he views Musk’s rampage with twitter as a positive example, so no surprises there
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I’m at a loss for words. Surely, YouTube trying to Adwall would be the stupidest thing in social media history. Surely, Musk changing Twitter’s name would be the stupidest thing. No, Steve Huffman has somehow managed to surpass the old masters. “We can survive without people being able to find our website VIA SEARCH RESULTS”! YOU. STUPID. MOTHERFUCKER.
The YouTube ad-blocker ban isn’t stupid at all.
Something isn’t a bad business decision just because you don’t like it. That’s now how business works.
“I won’t watch videos at all if I can’t view them without watching ads or paying money.”
…Yeah. That’s the idea. From a business perspective people who don’t pay or view ads are leeches they’re perfectly happy to burn off.
But but everything on the internet should be free! /s
most people dont take issue with the fact that there is ads but with how intrusive they are.
Idk browsing Lemmy often makes me think that many of these people expect software devs to literally work for free.
And it costs nothing to host YouTube don’t youj know. We should have a foss version and get ride of it.
I don’t think polel realize how much bandwidth and storage YouTube uses.
It’s called PeerTube. It’s getting more content, but anything that isn’t completely wacked out is poorly produced and there doesn’t seem to be any sort of decent search to find the rare interesting content.
I caught the sarcasm, and don’t disagree. Just saying that a FOSS version does exist.
And how inappropriate some of them are and the sheer number of them
YouTube is perfectly happy if people who block ads go away. Do you really think your traffic is beneficial to them if you don’t watch ads?
I mean, I hate it too, but it’s obviously not a bad business decision.
Someone that youtube blocks now is a customer for youtubes now/eventual competitor. You might say they’re low quality since they won’t pay or view ads, but they still share and maybe upload content.
The point being they would rather purge the userbase than give them reason to not use adblock by being more selective with their ads.
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Surely, YouTube trying to Adwall would be the stupidest thing in social media history
That would be Facebook no longer requiring a college email address.
No I’m pretty sure that was a sound business decision.
So is disabling ad blockers on YouTube. Thats not really was I was talking about.
Facebook went downhill because they let the riffraff in.
Ah, IT for the sake of IT.
This is the pattern dying companies follow.
I do not use a single social media site that requires me to sign in to view it.
Or one that makes me download their app. Reddit have tried disabling their mobile site in the past in favour of a link to open in the app, I even tried it a few times as I already had the app installed and signed in but the link just took me to the App Store instead! Thankfully the mobile site seems barely functional at the moment.
Jesus fucking christ. Why are they hell bent on destroying themselves.
The fact that Reddit is available from a search engine is one of the main reasons for its popularity imo.
Exactly, Google search itself is so enshittified you pretty much have to tag “reddit” at the end of every query to find any solution to a problem. Even my 55yr boss knows this and he’s clueless about anything social media related.
Having tons of Google traffic to any company in would be a godsend, yet Reddit wants to ban it. What a fucking joke.
Reddit’s search can’t be enshitified because it’s never been good.
i never thought i would say this, but at this point bing seems to be a better search engine than google
I can not recommend duckduckgo enough. Been using it for a while now and it’s so nice to not have the top 5 or so results just be ads, and the rest irrelevant.
And bangs! They make it so that ddg is the only sensible choice for default search.
If I need to search on google for some reason, I can just append !g. If I want to look for Youtube videos, I append !yt. I can even search for grocery prices directly with !appie.
I’ve been looking for a better search engine lately. DDG results seem to be nearly the same as Bing results. I.e. still not that great, though has better privacy policies. IDK why search engines don’t de-rank listicles, extremely long recipe pages, pages with tons of ads, etc. Major search engines are so bad now, it seems like it would be relatively easy for a startup to overtake them. I guess there’s a large barrier of entry due to the infrastructure needed to crawl the entire internet and store indexes.
That’s because DDG gets some links from Bing and Yahoo as well.
Spez is an arrogant prick.
Literally the only time I ever use reddit is if it is a google result(stopped after 3rd party ban).
And on desktop with ublock so I give em no views.
Yea, me too. I kinda wanna learn to stop doing that. It’s just, a lot of the times, that’s the only place where an answer is available.
yup, especially obscure tech problems, or tech problems that started happening today because of an update (looking at you discord).
I will forever remember the time when I spent a week talking with a dipshit miscrosoft support guy who insisted my entire brand new drawing tablet was broken, despite me telling him the problem was most likely in my laptop or windows itself and after giving up on that guy I went to reddit and had my issue diagnosed and solved in like 3 comments flat
Are spez and Musk having a race or something?
Of they were, both sites would be gone by now. I could tank a huge site in a week. This is just incompetence.
Lonnie is a dumbass business man. Spez has no sense of (or doesn’t care) what users want. That’s what’s happening.
Fuck these unimportant men with more power than they deserve.
That’s what happens if narcissist billionaires get lauded by the media. Copycats are glory hounds and want their share of brown-nosing as well.
they’re really trying to kill Reddit aren’t they
My theory is that reddit just doesn’t make enough money to stay open without external funding, and as they started running out of that they desperately hired anyone they thought could make the company enough money to stay afloat.
And the dumbass ideas we keep seeing from them are the result of that. Anything to get a buck, no matter what it means to the user experience.
I think its about their plan to go public and some hedge fund bros told them if they want a sugar daddy then they have to implement more agressive ads and subscription fees to juice valuation. I hope it massively backfires.
They have is ways to socialize online (reddit, Twitter, fb) and then people realized they could use them as a tool for good. They could organize, spread the word about bad companies and people, encourage others to do good, and so on. People could even turn on the platforms when those platforms corrupted.
So yeah, the billionaires in control don’t like it that we have ready ways to call them out. Elon was pissed about people tracking their flights on Twitter and bought the platform and it’s running it into the ground. Why not. He loses nothing and gains everything.
I think we’ll see this happen a lot more. Billionaires control everything and then we act surprised when they shut people out that expose them.
Paired up with Governments around the world realizing “oh shit, the masses can easily organize and turn against us”… Here Elon, buy this platform and toast it, we’ll make sure you’re compensated, bro.
I don’t think that’s what happened, with Twitter at least.
Elon pissed off the wrong people at the SEC and FTC playing stupid pump and dump games with stocks by using Twitter and his absurdly undeserved reputation as an unconventional super genius with his mega group of followers.
One of the biggest of these, was pumping and then dumping twitter stock by alleging that he’d buy the company. And the people he’d pissed off in government basically saw their opportunity to fuck him by literally forcing him to buy it at his stupidly overpriced valuation - that’s why he played all sorts of dumb games dragging out the purchase and trying to get out of it.
And so now he’s stuck with an unprofitable company he didn’t want. I’m pretty sure he’s running it into the ground on purpose so he’ll be able to carry that loss balance forward eternally, using it to get out of paying taxes by writing off the loss.
I just had to check, reddit isn’t publicly traded yet. My best explanation was that spez had a strawman short 200x the amount of reddit stocks and then run the site so hard into the ground that even Musk would go whoa and Malagassy geophysicists would be getting strange readings on their seismographs.
Now? No, they’re not actively trying to kill reddit. It’s the classic case of someone who got lucky with a startup and didn’t hand it off before crashing it.
They should have IPOd in 2020, like everyone else did, but they didn’t. Why is anyone’s guess. Greed, skeletons in the closet, or whatever, doesn’t really matter, they missed the boat
He did hand it off. Then he clawed his way back in amid the Ellen Pao stuff and it’s generally been going downhill the whole time.
Look they’ve already cut off free API access. Here’s some other ideas from the Muskrat playbook:
Maybe change the name to P.com
Change the logo to ₱ (surely the Mexicans won’t mind that you’re using the Peso symbol).
Hmm, why not also charge money to get a blue checkmark by your Reddit username to be a verified Redditor? or maybe call them P-ers?
Oh, how about charging new users $1 to use your platform?
The peso symbol is $, and it was it before it ever was the dollar symbol.
Maybe it’s somebody else’s peso?
Apparently Philippines, introduced when they were an American colony and USA thought that the $ sign was to be only theirs and Spain’s.
I thought the 3rd party app ban was bad but this is pure self destruction.
The best marketing they have is “I add Reddit to anything I search on Google!” This truly is 🤡 shit.
I mean, could help Lemmy out. I’d be super okay with that.
Probably not. The majority of users are just there for entertainment and commentary, they aren’t the same niche that occupies Lemmy communities.
do Reddit admins think they have any kind of search function without using Google and site:reddit.com?
The reddit search was broken for years
Did it ever work?
I see people in this thread say they never had a problem with the search feature but honestly personally I always used Google
Are they using their own search function to find a fix?
