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.

    • 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

  • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    "Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used,” Huffman said in an interview this week

    It’s not your data.

    Fuck off.

    • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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      2 months ago

      My only regret was not deleting all my comments before deleting my reddit account :P

      • elephantium@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Don’t regret too much. I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit’s “delete” function was really just "move to the “suckers-wanted-to-delete-this” file.

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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          2 months ago

          I “deleted” all my posts, then randomly had someone reply to a 3 year old post that wasn’t showing up in my profile but still showed on the page.

          Don’t delete your comments, edit them to be useless.

  • Freefall@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I don’t think the content on Reddit is their to sell…unless resistors are getting a cut. That site is a dumpster and needs to die already.

  • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used

    It’s the users’ data, not yours, you rent seeking fuck

  • Hot Potato@lemmy.worldOP
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    2 months ago

    “It has been a real pain in the ass to block these companies.” makes me regret ever using Reddit in my life. Get your profit whatever, but this is just beyond greed.

  • hightrix@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    lol. That’s not how any of this works.

    If you have content freely and publicly accessible, it will be read freely by humans and bots.

  • braindefragger@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Member when the web was starting out? We had dreams and ideas. Standards being written. Concepts about how to build out the web for maximum efficiency of sharing information. It was frowned upon to not include source. Low effort screenshots didn’t cut it. Best practices were always available and encouraged.

    I’m sure many of us remember those forks in the road as the web progressed. It was so clear when corporations starting having “ideas” where it was going to lead if we didn’t stand up for the “correct” way to internet.

    And now here we are. Ugh.

    • snooggums@midwest.social
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      2 months ago

      When the internet was new I thought that the spread of knowleege would raise up people’s awareness of things they had not been exposed to under the false assumption that the vast majority of people where reasonable, but uninformed.

      Nope, I was wrong. At best a slight majority are reasonable with varying levels of ignorance and the rest are willfully ignorant.

      • Crismus@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        In the early years, I learned a lot of new things. The late 90’s had so much hope for the web and learning new things. I remember falling I to rabbit holes a lot more often back then because it wasn’t about video essays and persuasive videos.

        I miss all of those old text based chatting and the friends I made on Yahoo local chat rooms. Somedays I wish the social media sites run by algorithms didn’t surpass those old forums and chat rooms.

  • BurnSquirrel@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    This must be how they plan to raise revenue, since people don’t buy enough gold and badges to support the site

    • tempest@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      That isn’t how it works for publicly traded companies. There is no such thing as enough only more

      • MeaanBeaan@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Plus they don’t even need to be profitable. They just have to convince some rich losers that they might be profitable at some undetermined time in the future.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Microsoft paying Reddit to pay Microsoft to pay Reddit to pay…

      Stock prices absolutely skyrocketing with the news of this infinite revenue stream.

  • Nougat@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    “Let’s see … how do we get more people to visit our site? I know! We’ll prevent search engines from sending people to it!”

    • Sweetpeaches69@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Completely. Lemmy is far too small to have the value Reddit does.

      I left Reddit due to their API bullshit, but I so miss all of the hobby communities I was part of, that has like-minded members, and a plethora of resources. It’s not easy to impossible to start communities such as reeftanks, homesteading, literature, bookcirclejerk, etc. on a platform as small as Lemmy. And beyond starting one, the quality and quantity will never match Reddit’s because Lemmy just doesn’t have the same reach.

      Lemmy is great if you like Linux, like Star Trek, or are trans, but other than that, it’s missing so, so many demographics that make a wholistic platform.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        trans

        I feel this so hard, the sheer number of openly LGBTQ+ people here really skews the demographics of the site. I’m not saying it’s a problem, just saying that LGBTQ+ people are dramatically over-represented here. It’s an interesting contributor to lemmy culture, and I wonder how much that impacts homogeneity here (e.g. upvotes and downvotes for certain types of content).

        But yeah, it’s missing a lot of demographics.

        That said, I’m really into Linux (been using for >15 years), so that’s cool I guess.

        • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          As a cis straight man I’m taking this as a learning opportunity until the demographics level out. An inherently inclusive bias will be more helpful early on than more niche communities anyways.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            Sure. Again, I’m not saying it’s bad, just that the bias seems to exist.

            There are certainly worse biases that exist, such as very little representation from people on the right side of the spectrum, so hate against half the population seems to get a pass and downvotes silence constructive comments/posts just due to political bias. That’s incredibly frustrating, and I think the high focus on supporting LGBTQ+ people goes along with that (i.e. the message that conservatives “hate” LGBTQ+ people, which is only true for the more extreme end of conservatism).

            That said, I do like the support LGBTQ+ people get, I just wish the demographics were a bit more diverse without sacrificing the culture. I live and work in a conservative area, but my company has built a pretty inclusive culture (at least for the area), so I think it’s totally possible.

            • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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              2 months ago

              Oh man I don’t miss that at all. Moderating out a pervasive delusion isn’t bias, any more than we’re biased in favor of a round Earth. On Reddit there were constant “enlightened centrists” who kept making appeals to moderation.

              There’s nothing of value to be gained from conservatives. The “good” ones who don’t say the homophobia out loud are still voting for politicians who do. If it was just the extreme end, then Trump wouldn’t be their nominee. Hate is their normal now.

              “If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, then you got a table with 11 Nazis.”

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                2 months ago

                This is exactly what I’m talking about: casually dismissing half of the population based on little more than association. That drives division and pushes people into echo chambers.

                • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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                  2 months ago

                  Understood. I am disagreeing with you. If that wasn’t obvious, then I fear you may have missed my point.

                  Half of America supporting fascism is reason to create somewhere - anywhere - where that shit is shut down. You’re free to go associate with freeze peach Nazis on X, Facebook, Nostr, wherever. I don’t want any part of that and prefer a server that moderates them out. Paradox of tolerance and all that.

                  If you all believed the Earth was flat, then I would prefer the “echo chamber” of people saying “no, we checked, it’s round”. There simply being a lot of believers doesn’t imply an idea has merit, and we don’t have infinity time for BS.