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Blocking AI bots from Microsoft, others has been “pain in the a**”: Reddit CEO | Huffman says companies must pay to scrape Reddit data even though Reddit itself relies on free, user-generated content (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is standing by Reddit’s decision to block companies from scraping the site without an AI agreement.

Last week, 404 Media noticed that search engines that weren't Google were no longer listing recent Reddit posts in results. This was because Reddit updated its Robots Exclusion Protocol (txt file) to block bots from scraping the site. The file reads: "Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content." Since the news broke, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, which can show recent Reddit results.

The change came a year after Reddit began its efforts to stop free scraping, which Huffman initially framed as an attempt to stop AI companies from making money off of Reddit content for free. This endeavor also led Reddit to begin charging for API access (the high pricing led to many third-party Reddit apps closing).

In an interview with The Verge today, Huffman stood by the changes that led to Google temporarily being the only search engine able to show recent discussions from Reddit. Reddit and Google signed an AI training deal in February said to be worth $60 million a year. It's unclear how much Reddit's OpenAI deal is worth.

Huffman said:

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 been] a real pain in the ass to block these companies,” Huffman told The Verge.

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[–] ChadCMulligan@lemm.ee 24 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Reddit is dying anyway.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In all the ways that matter, it's already dead. Once something enshittifies beyond a certain point, is its zombified, shambling corpse really considered "alive" anymore?

[–] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months ago

It’s Digg v…5 6? v5 would be when they inflated all post scores and stopped showing upvotes and downvotes separately.

v6 is… gestures to the all of it

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's easy to say this as someone who is "on the other side". But the data doesn't really back up that statement.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I don't have data, but the quality of the content certainly seemed to be declining, even as the quantity went up.

[–] _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think autocorrect might've gotten you: You posted "quality" twice in a contradictory way.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 5 points 3 months ago

Fixed.

[–] li10@feddit.uk 7 points 3 months ago

It’s awful. Politics is unavoidable at this point, and the amount of general anger on the platform is crazy.

People love watching their videos of people getting TBIs… Or getting too excited about a “justice served” post where a woman gets hit.

It’s kinda nice to see someone get their comeuppance, but then you look in the comments and there are just weirdos saying stuff like “glad that bitch got hit”, like… wtf?