People who posted on Reddit ( speaking in the past tense, because who would continue to do so now that we have better things? ) never intended for it to be of limited access. Reddit was a publicly accessible place, and people shared their thoughts and comments on it because it was the frontpage of the internet, so the place of choice to share things with the world. That being scraped should not be a problem. But clearly Reddit didn't want to give you a platform to share your thoughts with the world, they wanted you to donate your thoughts and take it as their property so that they can capitalize on it.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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Fuck Reddit
In the lieu of an IPO u/spez has actively destroyed everything that made Reddit good! Gate keeping the API thinking it'll help with making some bigshot LLM some day lol
This is huge blow to archivism, thanks to corporate greed and enshittification of reddit. Worst MBA filled POS.
That place is becoming more and more of a shithole. Bots, Ads, trolls, garbage mods… deleted the app last month.
So reddit will become even less valuable
Nice of them to protect their (users') content from AI scrapping. So that they can charge AI companies for it instead.
They aren’t doing that. They are protecting content from being scraped for free. Reddit is perfectly happy to charge for AI access to user-generated content.
No, that's not what's happening. They're preventing scrapers from accessing the content at no charge. They're totally willing to make deals for access to their content in exchange for money.
Almost, but they are really making it so they can charge ai companies for user data and not allow scrappers to get the data for free.
They can keep their shit for themselves, stopped caring a long time ago.
If you can't archive something, did it ever really exist?
In a causal sense, yes. In a 'the average person is fucking stupid' sense, no.
When reddit has mutated a few more times. They start erasing stuff themselves. It will be lost to time and that fills me with hope.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
Good plan. Keep locking down your big tech platforms, and we'll all be over here letting folks know where they can find freedom.
Careful. Lemmy is too small to draw the attention of sophisticated, persistent abuse. As a company, Reddit has struggled with revenue and we've all seen those struggles quite publicly. Lemmy instances with those same challenges would probably just fold and close up.
Federated networks give you freedom but the potential for abuse is proportional to that freedom while at the same time, federation is far more expensive taken as a whole.
Lemmy instances with those same challenges would probably just fold and close up.
Can confirm. I set up a pixelfed instance for my city with the goal of moving people from Insta to this version. After about three months, user accounts went from 1-10 signups a week to a hundred a week.
No way did that many business owners sign up. And yep, all spam.
After a while, my random weekend project in Spring became a full time job. I closed it last month.
I've thought of doing something similar, and think, while the federated spam is hard to deal with, signup spam is manageable if you somehow restrict signups to the actual community you want to support. Open signup on the web is a nightmare.
For a city, an interesting idea might be to only allow signups on a dedicated, physical wifi AP placed somewhere strategic in your city. People would literally have to go to a physical location to sign up. Piggy-backing on a library system would be another option if you could somehow get them to buy-in.
I'm sure it would persist even after an event of malicious activity. It may just turn out like email with servers needing to be added to an allowlist at worst and more moderation. I think scalability might be the limiting factor at some point though and as a result we could end up with several disconnected islands of server clusters instead of globally meshed servers.
Or... let them stay on Reddit. I like lemmy much better, and it's possibly due to the people that are not present and the lack of commercial interest.
I think if the fediverse was ever to become more mainstream, it would naturally splinter. For example, the corporate stuff would be big, and those people who value the small-instance experience we have now would probably de-federate from it. There would always be small fediverses, even if the big fediverses got REALLY big.
Gate them in their own space.
No harm in that. To each their own. :-) Everyone gets to decide at least.
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Another nail in the coffin.
It’s another move to protect against AI scraping that isn't paying them for access.
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As somebody who often ends up using Reddit like Stackoverflow and in some cases needing the Internet Archive (IA) to find the original post after it’s been deleted or garbled, I think this is a wakeup call for those go to Reddit both to get technical help and to post it. More than ever, Reddit is becoming an unreliable place to find answers for old obscure issues and if they are going to lockout places like the IA then I think it’s time people stopped contributing their solutions to Reddit.
Searching anywhere in general is getting shittier and shittier by day. Web searches are riddled with hallucinated AI generated garbage pages. Finding the right answer for difficult problems is getting worse and worse. We are sliding rapidly into Idiocracy.
Not to mention so many projects putting their support in walled garden chat services like Discord that you can’t even search via search engine. Even if you can figure out who asked the right question and when, you have to trawl through a sea of inane garbled chat to get to the developer/expert response.
Specialised topic forums really need to make a resurgence but I doubt they will.
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yup. continuing to feed them traffic after their repeated attacks on the userbase is just sad. stop using them. yeah it sucks the info is gone, but acting like they'll wake up and change is absurd.
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Is that even possible?
Technologically no. Reddit sends out the data to 10s of millions of users as part of their normal operations. They need to try to block those who collect that data for the IA. Reddit has the very short end of the stick.
The problem is that evading such counter-measures may be criminal in the US. Obviously, EU laws are much harsher.
Not to mention all of Asia, South America, Africa...
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AI can scrape books and journals for info, but can't scrape Reddit?
Reddit can be scraped just as much as online books and journals.
So what's the point of this?
Other sites, eg with books and journals, are doing the same thing. They hope that they can extract more money by reducing the availability of their content.
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And I will block reddit.
what's a reddit?
You use it too scratch your butt I think.
This company limited search crawlers to google, why are you surprised?
Given that the Internet Archive is the de facto standard way to cite material as seen on a given date
they're a trustworthy party that will probably persist for a long time
that's going to make it harder to cite content on Reddit.
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