cross-posted from: https://feddit.ch/post/1794418
Narrators voice: Reddit absolutely cannot survive without search.
“Survive” is one thing. “Attract and retain users who create quality content” is quite another. I mean, Truth Social is “surviving.”
Search is the only reason I visit Reddit.
Excuse me while my sides go into orbit!
Reddit traffic is 54% from organic search, and it has been slowly declining. With users complaining about the uptick of bot spam. Blocking search crawlers might increase short-term engagement, as users feel forced to registre to see the junk there, but the site will die after that.
Reddit is definitively not too big to fail.
Since the APIcalypse I’ve been mentioning that Reddit Inc. is really pissed at businesses (mostly the GAFAM) using Reddit content to train large “language” models with, without giving Reddit Inc. a single penny in the process. And it seems to me that Reddit is really hoping that those businesses would pay Reddit for API access. Well… what could go wrong? A thousand things - including LLM tech being superseded, or GAFAM deciding “why bother giving Reddit API bucks? We’re going to access it through fake browsers”.
We got a taste of what Google without Reddit might look like when many subreddits went dark to protest the company’s API pricing changes — at that time, many Reddit results took you to private communities, which was a pain.
Personal anecdote on that: I’ve been uBlacklist-ing Reddit from web search results for a few years. The main two tricks to avoid SEO-infested sites, without relying on Reddit, are 1) include negative search terms, and 2) “quotation marks” to “force” results “everywhere”.
This is just more of spez parroting Elon and thinking that the harder he makes it to use the site, the more money they will make.
It’s also spez parroting Elon in saying that all of that content his users generated for free so that he could monetize it by hosting it shouldn’t be made available for free to companies that want to monetize it by hosting it in their LLMs.
Yup. And Spez is 2x of an idiot as Musk, not realising that Musk and Twitter are in a completely different situation than himself and Reddit. Twitter is not too big to fail, but it can endure some beating, and Musk can throw enough money at the problems until they go away; neither applies to Spez+Reddit.
And due to how network effect works in both platforms, Reddit Inc. will only notice the problem when it’s too late. In Twitter if you get “anchor” people leaving, you see some exodus that you can address; but in Reddit it’s all about the content, and actions lowering the overall content quality and diversity will be only noticed after months of being implemented.
I’d be fascinated to know how the senior management at Reddit actually conceptualise the site.
To me, Reddit is essentially “PHPbb as a service” - Reddit itself provides the hosting infrastructure, the software, and sets some standards for the types of communities they are willing to host, community admins do the whole community things. Does Reddit’s management think they are running Facebook or something?