All reddit ever needed to do was leave it's users alone and build a functional in house search...

Like, there was a solid decade when I needed to figure something out, I'd search Google and tell it to only provide results from reddit.

If they had licensed a search engine like Google, they'd really have been "the front page of the internet".

It was that fucking easy, instead they did the opposite and let Google use their data without anyone going to reddit or probably understanding the info came from reddit.

We must cannibalise long term sustainability for short tern quarterly growth! It is the only way.

Spez thought he could make it relevant on its own before the clock ran out on the deal.

I may seem full of myself but requiring a login drastically reduces educated people existing in reddits ecosystem. I'm completely done with it and have moved back to forums for most things. This shift is the final nail in reddits decade old coffin imo.

Short-term profits were great tho! Who cares about the future? Certainly not the asshole called spez

If spez would've started an askreddit thread about the pros and cons of licensing user content to google he probably would've gotten a preview of how much he'd be on the short end of the stick

To be fair the other options was Google just using reddit content without there permission, like every other service, and not getting payed at all.

I dunno, we already knew the reddit answer without clicking in and it was "why don't you google this yourself".

Those summaries frequently give wrong answers.