Let’s two of them die together
Blocking other search engines will hurt Reddit, all else held equal. But not by that much. Google is seriously dominant in the search engine market.
kagis
Yeah.
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
According to this, Google has 91.06% of the search engine market. So for Reddit, they’re talking about cutting themselves off from a little under 9% of people searching out there. Which…I mean, it isn’t insignificant, but it isn’t likely gonna hurt them all that badly.
It’s also worth noting that the 9% they cut off was probably the group more inclined to already be using alternatives to Reddit anyways.
Hi, I’m new here. Because of the bullshit with Reddit. Greetings fellow Lemmy people.
Welcome to our shithole.
Federated shithole(s)
Welcome! Genuine advice for a newcomer: look around, figure out what instances you like, and shift away from lemmy.world to an instance that requires a sign-up request and which comports with your values. There is an account migration feature to make this as easy as possible.
It’s different to what people are used to, but in my experience a huge number of the worst people migrating from reddit went straight to one of the open instances. A lot of them were banned over there for quite legitimate reasons.
They know that they can’t operate their own asshole instances for long because they’ll get defederated, and they don’t want to deal with being known to an admin who has actual principles, so open sign up is their thing, and those instances are filling up with them.
Honestly I would like to see a feature that flags if a user’s instance has open sign up.
It’s getting to the point that if someone is still on an open instance, they’re a little sus to me. It’s easier to trust people who come from instances whose policies I agree with.
Bro… What?!? I’ve only been here a day and I have no clue what any of that means lol
Lemmy isn’t one service like Reddit. It’s a piece of software where anybody can run their own lemmy instance. Lemmy.world is the most popular, but there are many others. And those choosing to run an instance can “federate” with other instances, which means as a user you can see posts and comments from the other instance even though you are logged into the one you have an account on.
So the commenter is recommending you look at posts or comments from users on other instances that have more stringent sign up policies, and migrate your account there. Since your account is new, you likely don’t need to spend the effort on migrating your account and instead can just set up an account on another instance/server.
But it’s also fine to stay on lemmy.world. Just be respectful, voice your opinions like you would in person with other humans, and you’ll be fine. And if you’re just here for the memes, that’s ok too! Enjoy them! And welcome to lemmy.
Hey, thanks for the detailed explanation! That certainly helps, but it’ll probably take me a while to fully get it. I signed up using voyager and it didn’t tell me anything like that. I’m sure it’ll make more sense as I get used to it. So can I not see all posts from other instances?
Yeah, there are many instances, and many that have purposefully been defederated by lemmy.world. Often for good reason (CSAM, an abundance of spam accounts, violent or hateful rhetoric, etc). But generally lemmy.world and its federated instances are pretty great.
Ok, sounds like I’ll just stick with .world for a while until I get my “sea legs”
FUCK u/spez
Reddit responded: “Only google pays us”. The content is not yours. You built this of naive user base that just wanted to share now these fuckers are taking it as their entitlement. As early an reddit user - fuck that place, I’m still angry.
Legally speaking, the content is theirs.
If someone posts a copyright violation on YouTube, YouTube can go free under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. (In the US.) YouTube just points a finger at the user and says “it’s their fault”, because the user owns (or claims to own) the content. YouTube is just hosting it.
I don’t know of any reason to think it’s not the same for written works. User posts them, Reddit hosts them, user still owns them. Like YouTube, the user gives the host a lot of license for that content, so that they can technically copy and transmit it. But ultimately the user owns it. I assume by the time Reddit made the AI deal they probably put in wording to include “selling a copy of the data” to active they want in the TOS.
Now, determining if the TOS holds up in court is of course trickier. And did they even make us click our permission away again after they added it, it just change something we already clicked? I don’t recall.
No, I don’t think so. Just because you put a clause in ToS doesn’t make it legally binding and most precedent is in favor of the original copyright owner.
I’m kind of curious to understand how they’re blocking other search engines. I was under the impression that search engines just viewed the same pages we do to search through, and the only way to ‘hide’ things from them was to not have them publicly available. Is this something that other search engines could choose to circumvent if they decided to?
Search engine crawlers identify themselves (user agents), so they can be prevented by both honor-based system (robots.txt) and active blocking (error 403 or similar) when attempted.
Thank you, I understand better now. So in theory, if one of the other search engines chose to not have their crawler identify itself, it would be more difficult for them to be blocked.
This is where you get into the whole webscraping debate you also have with LLM “datasets”.
If you, as a website host, are detecting a ton of requests coming from a singular IP you can block said address. There are ways around that by making the requests from different IP addresses, but there are other ways to detect that too!
I’m not sure if Reddit would try to sue Microsoft or DDG if they started serving results anyway through such methods. I don’t believe it is explicitly disallowed.
But if you were hoping to deal in any way with Reddit in the future I doubt a move like this would get you in their good graces.All that is to say; I won’t visit Reddit at all anymore now that their results won’t even show up when I search for something. This is a terrible move and will likely fracture the internet even more as other websites may look to replicate this additional source of revenue.
It’s still possible to search with “site:reddit.com …”
Has it been implemented yet or are they blocking non-flagged searches? Which seems odd.
You shouldn’t be getting any new results if you do that, older posts will/may remain indexed.
Aha. I was wondering about that possibility.
