‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 1223 points –
‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
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Uhhhhh....who thought that was going to be a bright idea? Google is probably the single biggest traffic draw for Reddit.

Especially since reddit search itself has always been laughably broken.

That's what I thought this was about halfway through the headline.

"They've made it this long without a functional search."

I'm pretty sure the admin response to lack of search was "just use Google."

I also recall that, but it’s just another instance of Reddit contradicting Reddit.

Or more realistically: Reddit from 10 years ago contradicting Reddit from today.

For what its worth the reddit search function seemed to have functioned much better a decade ago.

The amount of spam and just downright completely irrelevant results that showed up regularly in searches there the last few years has been ridiculous. I think it changed around the time they took away being able to see how many upvotws and downvotes a comment had totally, which I do still think is a real shame they took that away.

Yeah Reddit search was fine on the original old Reddit UI, it was around the time the native app released that it really started to shit itself and not return any results and just say try again later

Did Elon secretly buy Reddit?

Funny thing, spez expressed in interviews that he liked Leon's philosophy behind a lot of decision over Twitter.

So there's a lot of truth to that

Edit: I'm gonna tear my autocorrect a new one. It's "Elon Musk" and I hope that's clear.

Noel Musk: "HERP DERP I'M AN OXYMORON!"

Greedy Pigboy: "WE OXYMORONS STAND TOGETHER! please notice me senpai Enol Musk..."

No, Steve just has no personality of his own so he mimics other people to fake it. He's latched on to Elon that way.

Not to mention the only way to go back and find something on their site. Their in house search bar is a useless piece of junk. Back when I would use reddit, I would open up google if I had to find something in reddit.

That's literally been life for me for so long when I'm looking up quite a bit of different things. "Blah blah reddit"

They seem to intend to make the content on Reddit more disposable, which is a feat unto itself. Technical forum usage will precipitously drop if no one can find it. Or they just endlessly repost it? What an odd decision.

If they cut Google, I will literally never go to Reddit again. I probably hit a couple pages a week from Google search, and that's it, but that will be zero pages if they are truly this dumb.

Looks like it's back to game forums. ChatGPT has alslo mostly overtaken Stack Overflow for me. Reddit was just a nice to have additional source.

Spez is going full Musk. It's actually insane. Like... Holy shit.

I'm praying for Reddit's downfall here, because if companies are able to get away with this shit the internet is going to get oh so much worse in the near future.

But at the same time, it sucks. I still use Reddit for episode discussions of shows I watch (which don't exist here on Lemmy, especially for older shows). I don't want those to go away without some replacement. Even if Lemmy did suddenly start getting lots of active episode discussions, it's not really possible to backfill them for older shows and the site is still too small and hard to index, it seems.

Incidentally, google is the only way I access those, since I no longer browse Reddit normally.

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