‘Nothing is changing’ — Reddit is denying a report from The Washington Post that it might force users to log in to see content if it can’t reach deals with AI companies

www.theverge.com ‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google

Reddit is apparently seeking to strike deals with big AI companies.

‘Nothing is changing’ — Reddit is denying a report from The Washington Post that it might force users to log in to see content if it can’t reach deals with AI companies::Reddit initially denied a report from The Washington Post that it might force users to log in to see content. However, the Post says it may still block search crawlers, and Reddit didn’t deny to The Verge that it may do so.

65 comments

Nothing is changing says company that keeps changing everything
- After saying they won’t
  
  Yeah, Reddit lies constantly. About everything. I guarantee they just weren’t ready to announce this yet but they will by the end of the year. It’s not the first time they’ve pulled this routine.
If they haven’t reached deals with AI companies by limiting the API, then why haven’t they returned access to third party app developers? They obviously see how far their engagement and quality has dropped.

I won’t use their official app, ever.
- Even if they return to the old standard, they have shown to be too unreliable and ready for scummy corporate decisions.
- I have an account for hockey. Laptop only via Firefox, eat my donkey spez
- It's fine for porn tho
- I have never understood this reasoning. Obviously the few determined actors for training data will just start scraping for content.
Didn't Steve Huffman praise Elon Musk and say that his handling of Twitter was an example for him? Perfectly natural for him to think it would somehow be a good idea to make account creation mandatory on Reddit.
- "I'm also a CEO that can really shake things up" Immediately tanks the companies value and user base like Elon
- The little bug-eyed, recessed-chin pedophile is so out of touch.
Narwhal just went behind the paywhal for me to today. So, I guess I’m finally done with Reddit now? I’ve been in there at least 14 years. It’s just wild to me that I lost Twitter and Reddit after so much time.
- I still use RedReader for general stuff, and rss feeds of subs for porn, and I'll check the bird once a week for people I follow for the same reason. But for reddit, my few hours a day has become a fraction, and even a decent amount of the people I watch on both platforms are either shifting elsewhere (yay) or just closing up shop (very not yay).
  
  I was ~11 years in for reddit, and like 9 or so with birdy.
  
  I've been using Firefox Nightly with the the old.reddit redirect addon and Ublock. It's not great having to navigate around the desktop site on a mobile screen, but it's better than the app.
- I went with Narwhal for a while too. I've been using Lemmy on browser but still ended up on Reddit on mobile because I don't know if Lemmy has any apps. One day I opened up Narwhal with a message about some date it'd end up being paid and I immediately uninstalled. Reddit isn't at all worth paying for as a user. There's literally nothing I've regretted about not going on Reddit; Lemmy still has plenty of pages of content to mindlessly scroll through.
  
  Heaps of reddit app ports are on Lemmy. Not sure about iOS, but on Android there is sync and boost which we're two of the bigger ones.
  
  If Relay came to Lemmy I would happily pay $ to access.
  
  Lemmy has a bunch of good apps.
  
  Voyager for Lemmy is essentially Apollo
  
  I really like the customizability on Jerboa for Lemmy on Android. Smaller font with list view gives me strong old school Alien Blue vibes.
  
  Edit: Here's my frontpage on Jerboa.
  
  I’ve been using Liftoff! app, it’s pretty good with a few bugs
- Reddit, Twitter, Netflix, YouTube all in a short time enshitificated.
- Oh Narwhal was still going? Relay went paywal on the 1st.
  
  I've been using the Geddit app on Android to keep an eye on a handful of subs. It loads RSS feeds and shows them sort of like a 3rd-party app of yore. Obviously there's no participation, and it only shows a small subset of comments. But it's good for staying up to date with news and generally weaning myself off the platform.
- Man, narwhal was fucking trash, before and after the redesign. Would freeze and get stuck inside videos and posts, just awful
  
  And now it’s pay walled lmao. I used it to follow a few communities that haven’t migrated but when I got the pop up asking me if I’d start paying in a few weeks or whatever and I said fuck your and uninstalled that piece of shit
- Same, got the prompt to pay for narwhal, I’m not gonna do it. Will only Reddit on a pc now.
- I was done as soon as the Boost port was available to download. Reddit has sucked for a long time. The spez bullshit was just the last straw.
I’ll tell ya one thing that’s changed. I deleted my posts and comments, along with my account last night after being inactive since June. Idiots
- Did you use a program to scrub that? I haven't been on since June, but I wouldn't mind twisting the knife a bit.
  
  Redact. I will say, I was on there over 11 years and it took almost 2 hours for it to wipe my comments
  
  Use ViolentMonkey/GreaseMonkey scripts in Firefox.
  
  It will rewrite your comments with gibberish, and then deletes them automatically. Just open your reddit account comments page, turn on the script, and watch, or walk away.
  
  Completely free.
  
  I still use RedReader on occasion on mobile, and then every few days turn the script on from my PC, and repeat as needed
- Check via Google, Reddit is known for recovering deleted comments against user consent.
people talk about how big AI is but, It'll crash like everything else as enshittification hits. I tried to use Bing AI the other day for the first time in a few months, it didn't even let me do more then a handful of entries before locking me out saying I used too many queries in 24h. How is that supposed to be helpful to a consumer as a valid feature of you lock it down.
- Yeah, hasn't anyone else noticed that there hasn't been a single profitable product to come out of it? Even copilot is biting the dust already as they try to reduce computing costs. I also haven't heard of a single person actually paying for chatgpt access either...
  
  There are a lot of companies using ChatGPT believe me. Plus some users are also paying for getting access to GPT4. I am also using it a lot. It helps but it is not exactly the silver bullet to everything and you should always check what the result is because sometimes it is complete garbage.
  
  I paid 20 bucks plus VAT last week for a month of access to try the new dalle in chatgpt, it has just dropped.
  
  I work in healthcare tech and can guarantee there are exciting things coming down the pipeline in that domain
  
  I and many of my coworkers pay for ChatGPT. It’s super useful at work and can be used to save a considerable amount of time.
- Those companies learned their lesson from search engines. They gave it away for free for far too long and with too few strings attached. It became impossible to realistically gate features and charge for them.
  
  But chatbots, on the other hand, just need a little big money razzle dazzle and, boom, now it is AI and people are conditioned to accept any limits thrown at them.
  
  Google made a very profitable ad business fromt heir search engine.
- I get why some limits are necessary, a company doesn't want a Microsoft Tae repeat...but after Chat GPT was made available to the public, the rapid addition of a whole range of guardrails made it nearly immediately unusable.
  
  You ask it about anything which is controversial in the slightest regard and it shuts down, which for me at least, removes any interest in using it.
It would be pure foolishness to trust Reddit and its management.

In the future, they will be seen by all in a somewhat similar light of failure emitted by Twitter
Dude this would kill the only reason I ever visit this site.
Reddit: Nothing's changing. Also Reddit: It's changing.
I wonder if AI companies can use Lemmy's content for training their models?
- They 100% are. Without anyone's consent. Lemmy instances will even send all the data to your own instance's db! No scraping required even!
  
  I haven't had a close look at lemmy.world recent TOS, but I'd be adding a revenue share clause to any posts used to train models originating from their instance's community
  
  I don't really care if they use my data in the slightest. I'm putting it out publicly on the internet, so w/e
The securest way to know reddit will do something is if they claim they will not do something. Spez is constantly lying.
DOOOO IT!!!!
Too bad builtin reddit search completely sucks.
- This will actually make search more viable in the long run because at the moment too much of the solutions for small technical problems are on reddit. The main driver from new users will be gone.
If this had been what they did to start with, I'd still be there. I was always logged in
Fuck Huffman
This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Washington Post reported Friday that Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.

The Washington Post’s report wasn’t just focused on Reddit — it’s about how more than 535 news organizations have opted to block their content from being scraped by companies like OpenAI to help train products such as ChatGPT.

According to the original report, Reddit is in negotiations with AI companies to get them to pay to use its data, and if it couldn’t strike those agreements, it might require logins to see content.

That could have the knock-on effect of preventing Reddit results from showing up in Google searches.

(In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he said that “we’re in talks” with AI companies about the pricing changes.

X, formerly Twitter, has also implemented new pricing tiers for accessing its API, and X owner Elon Musk blamed data scraping by AI startups as a way to justify the reading limits implemented this summer.

The original article contains 353 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
That will never happen, it would destroy their search engine results that lead traffic to their site more than what they get from regular users.
- Lol yeah, sure. Because as we all know, Reddit definitely doesn’t have a well deserved decade+ reputation for half-baked decisions and dealing self-inflicted blows to its own business.
  
  Hey guys, we should let the most dedicated and toxic moderators, moderate even more with multiple subs!
  
  Hey guys, let's like, buy an app, and like, ruin it!
  
  Hey guys, let's redesign the site to be less space and data efficient.
  
  Hey guys, let's roll our own video player! Who here knows anything about video players? Anyone?
  
  Hey guys, let's add random coins and gifts and avatars and let's dive into the crypto scene! We can't lose!
  
  Hey guys, let's go public! What could go wrong?
  
  Hey guys, we should shun all our porn communities!
  
  Hey guys, let's force all apps except ours to pay us or gtfo!
  
  [you are here in the timeline]
  
  Hey guys, let's stop showing up in Google results! Who needs search?
  
  Hey guys, let's force logins like X!

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