this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 113 points 4 months ago (1 children)

but not the misuse of public content

HA

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

but not the misuse of public content

Is that an admission that they don't own the content others posted on their site?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

you would be a good lawyer

[–] [email protected] 70 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I am confused, does this mean Reddit is not going to be searchable on search engines anymore?

[–] [email protected] 66 points 4 months ago (4 children)

oh no, Reddit is like, the only way to have google still be useful.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 4 months ago

Funnily enough, google is also the only way to have Reddit be useful.

Their own search function has been nothing but garbage.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That's the catch, Google made a deal with Reddit and remains the only search engine allowed to access its data for indexing. It cuts off every other search engine

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Tell me that there is an anti trust suit over this.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago

There's a suit over google in general so this may well be part of it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

really? ddg will show me reddit links, did they have to make a webscraper or something

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

There's a cutoff date, anything indexed before the robots.txt was changed stays in the index

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (1 children)

We fucked the internet. It’s proprietary now.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

we fucked the internet

kinky

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

cat5-o-nine-tails

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Good news! Google paid up and still has access I'm pretty sure.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's bad news, that means the internet is dying

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, the /s was sort of implied.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Ah, sorry. I have trouble with that sometimes :P

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Perhaps, likely depends on the crawler though

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

Yeah i dont think ignoring robots.txt is even illegal. They can ofcourse just block your crawlers IP but that would be a cat and mouse game that they would lose in the end.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not gonna lie this seems like ultimately a win for the Internet. The years of troubleshooting solutions Reddit Provided can be archived (hopefully) but the less people rely on the site itself, the better. At least in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I disagree, kinda. Stackoverflow is the other option for questions which is a lot less user friendly, and Lemmy has never shown up in search results for me. If something comes along and makes it simple, great! however I just see a lot more of ad filled hellhole sites in the meantime.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 4 months ago

I remember finding Google's robots.txt when they first came out. It was a cute little text ASCII art of a robot with a heart that said, "We love robots!"

[–] [email protected] 50 points 4 months ago (1 children)

An ancient text from the before-fore.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 4 months ago (1 children)

this is actually quite recent. the old one was much funnier and clearly had actual soul put into it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

my shiny metal ass

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (4 children)

As annoying as this is, it's to prevent LLMs from training themselves using Reddit content, and that's probably the greater of the two evils.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's all well and good, but how many LLMs do you think actually respect robots.txt?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

from my limited experience, about half? i had to finally set up a robots.txt last month after Anthropic decided it would be OK to crawl my Wikipedia mirror from about a dozen different IP addresses simultaneously, non-stop, without any rate limiting, and bring it to its knees. fuck them for it, but at least it stopped once i added robots.txt.

Facebook, Amazon, and a few others are ignoring that robots.txt, on the other hand. they have the decency to do it slowly enough that i'd never notice unless i checked the logs, at least.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago

I thought major LLMs ignored robots.txt

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

It’s to prevent LLMs from training themselves using reddit content, unless they pay the party that took no part in creating said content

FTFY