The irony is that Reddit thinks their internal search can in any way, shape or form compete with Google or other actual search engines. People use Google to find stuff on Reddit because Reddit’s own search is hopeless.

So if I’m understanding this correctly, reddit aims to become more profitable by selling “its” data to companies that are training AI. Google et al are currently “scraping” this data and thus getting for free what reddit considers valuable.

Spez is out of his good goddang mind.

Google is too big to care what reddit does. They’ll scrape elsewhere or “accidentally” steal the data rather than pay a dime.

Do it, /u/spez. I dare you.

Appending “site:reddit.com” to a Google search has become a popular trick for weeding SEO farms and other attention-seeking websites out of Google results, but if this change goes through, you might not be able to access Reddit from search at all.

Even this article knows.

If this goes through then my reddit usage will officially reach 0, as Google results are how I end up there nowadays anyway.