Reddit blocks search engines
Bookmarked Reddit is now blocking major search engines and AI bots — except the ones that pay - The Verge by Emma Roth.
It’s a bold move for a massive website like Reddit to block some of the most popular search engines, but it’s not all that surprising. Over the past year, Reddit has become more protective of its data as it looks to open up another source of revenue and appease new investors. After making its API more expensive for some third-party developers, Reddit reportedly threatened to cut off Google if it didn’t stop using the platform’s data to train AI for free.
As the movement to bring the open web back to the fore, BigTech's walled gardens predictably become ever more siloed. This hack to circumvent the trend, as mentioned by Roth in the article:
With AI chatbots filling the internet with questionable content, finding things written by a fellow human has never been more important. I, like many others, have started appending “Reddit” to many of my searches just to get human answers, and it’s pretty frustrating to know that I’ll now only be able to do that on Google (or search engines that rely on it)
was only ever going to be a temporary workaround. And you can be sure that Reddit, like Facebook and other aggregators, will be using AI to generate more "interesting" content. For appearances and monetisation. The only lasting solution is to bring back the open web, based on human curation, integrity, reputation and trust.