When questioned by Engadget about the issue Reddit committed to banning anyone who did not agree to reduce the use of the website to train AI.
Reddit reviews its data policy: the who is the founder of the right to privacy?
What has happened is that the Reddit – the forum beloved by millions of Internet users has apparently changed its mind and decided to intensify regulation of the information posted by its members. Today it aims at preventing the unauthorized “scraping” of the data.
A war against the giants?
After Google closed a deal of approximately $60,000,000 per annum with Reddit, the latest appears to have had Reddit ban other search engines. It also belongs to the list of the privileged people who can interact with its data. This, according to the American media outlet Engadget, through a statement by the social media platform representative, Reddit. The argument put forward is rather surprising: in fact, it would be a decision based on disagreement with the demands of these competing companies concerning the training of artificial intelligence.
Prone to such transformation, search leaders like Bing or DuckDuckGo can no longer present results from the forums like Reddit. Although a few links are given on DuckDuckGo, none of them has any description as if the site’s information is not willing to be provided to users.
An update to the robots exclusion protocol
Necessary to note that currently Reddit has changed its “Robots Exclusion Protocol”. Anyone who has read the very first couple of lines of this article knows about the automatic data scraping, to which this update supposedly is designed to put a stop to, particularly companies like Perplexity and its notorious ‘response engine’.
Reddit now apparently has permission for only Google to index its pages and provide the results on the ‘‘front page of the internet.’’
A commercial strategy?
Thus, brands like Reddit, who adjusted their financial model primarily based on data, need to safeguard it and restrict access to non-paying clients. What could thus be observed with Reddit today would therefore correspond to preventing the “AI race” from encroaching on such achievements.
Colin Hayhurst, CEO of Mojeek – the only search provider that does not use user’s data for its profit – said, Reddit is doing all in its power to prevent any kind of search excepting that in Google; he tried to get in touch with Reddit regarding this problem – to no avail.
However, it can be said that this blocking strategy is not without risk for Reddit it can become the target of users’ anger such as Christian Selig with his Apollo application. However, it is yet to be determined whether the ‘‘bet’’ is wise, and if the users of these systems will remain loyal with such radical changes afoot.