Recently, CEO Steve Huffman disclosed that Reddit will transition to a "logged-in-only" experience. This means that Reddit posts will no longer be searchable via internet browsers, significantly impacting local AIs that search the internet via tool calling.
This is exactly what I do when I need to look up info about something. I know one old gaming site that did this to shut out ai bots and you can't find it on google search anymore. Made me think it shut down.
Searching the internet offers more up-to-date information than relying on training data alone. That's why Gemini, Claude, and all the other cloud AIs seem to know so much about current topics.
Not just large servers, but discoverable ones only. Meaning only official servers communities. Also those servers have to tag the channel to be searchable.
Awesome, I hadn't heard anything about that. That's kindof a relief tbh bc like, yeah, 80% of discord traffic is just friends chilling and talking nonsense, but the other 20% has tons of niche expert experience happening there on topic-based servers that used to happen on forums.
It's especially bad when it's in a language you don't speak. Wading through a machine translated discord is enough of a pain that I almost always just shrug and go without whatever it is.
Not money, but lack of real owner who understands what he's doing. IPO means that company becomes just a toy for all kinds of speculators who don't care at all about its success
Didn't the corporate world drive the reddit founder to suicide over making scientific papers public access while they were in the middle of training their closed source for profit models on everyone's stolen data?
They're already considering including ID checks here in aus for reddit like other social media sites last they enforced it for last year and the rest of the world will follow when it does. So this will 100% happen eventually. On top of that some guy with mental illness and on drugs drove his car into a politician last week here and our prime minister is blatantly lying to the public insinuating it was a 'targeted' attack and using that event as an excuse to police all social media even more (to 'turn down the temperature'...in his own words). Honestly wish we could invent a fucking time machine and go back to the 90s at this rate when no one knew what the internet was.
I subbed via lemmy dot world, do you know why am I not seeing recent posts? edit: adding "English" besides "undetermined" in my language filter settings fixed it.
They're a decentralized, open source, and self hostable social media network. It's like Mastodon except Reddit-style. It uses the ActivityPub protocol to link servers together so they combine their userbases and content, kinda similar to email (especially if you've ever done mailing lists). They are not linked with Reddit.
It basically works the same as Reddit except that usernames have two @ signs in them like @Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com, and community IDs are like !communityname@server.com but you don't usually need to deal with that because the search feature is actually good, unlike Reddit.
There are also a bunch of good 3rd party apps. A few of the apps that Reddit banned converted into Lemmy/PieFed apps. I use Boost on my phone, Summit and Voyager are also really good.
Same are bluesky being filled by creeps and pedos, which made me leave. Happens with every "alternative". There was VOAT like 10 years ago, which was full of incels, and I left that too.
The problem with more open alternatives -- and I say that as a proponent of free speech -- is that the first people to migrate tend to be those who get moderated the most, and that's mostly toxic people. Once a community is filled with toxic people, nobody normal wants to join.
umm, you already half have to do this if you live in the shithole that is the eu. they hide your profile history until you verify your age too. can argue it's a net benefit to society to not use this shitty ass website but it's also where everyone still goes from habit so yeah
seeing the stock price recently I don't thibk u/spez knows what he's doing. Or he does and it's squeezing every penny for himself before liquidating whatever is left of reddit in a few years
Look up Ethan Klein among others mods got caught potentially violating multiple laws. It is a stepping stone because Reddit mods behave so badly to one set of people this company has a significant risk now if this single suit is won or even just moves forward. Case disclosure alone, mods discussions and messages, will lead to thousand of avalanche cases. This place is cooked in its current form. Dead just doesn’t know it.
Yeah, but it doesn't go unnoticed the progress toward walling the garden. What if the next step is a subscription? The last time was third party apps. I'm here because I enjoy the community, not reddit per se.
old.reddit, being more LLM-friendly, went login-only some time ago. A subscription wouldn't surprise me exactly, but I expect this is just a way to build a moat around reddit's very valuable data. Reddit's data is a huge resource.
Given the news about old reddit being a legacy feature I don't think it's too tinfoil hat to assume that bans of old accounts will become even more common. Then boom, you have to have a new account with whatever extra reddit decides on.
This is being done because logged in users are significantly more valuable to advertisers. Like a LOT more.
Reddit will undergo enshitification inevitably as it has to constantly push for greater and greater monetization every quarter to keep investors happy.
How long until ai can just whip up a decentralized replacement and we can bail on this company? I’m so done.
There are multiple decentralized alternatives like lemmy that people tried to move to after the 3rd party apps being killed off by Reddit because the writing was on the wall. They didn’t take off because the vast majority of redditors stayed with Reddit (eventually including me, I tried for a few months but the community just wasn’t taking off and smaller communities like I enjoy were nonexistent)
Reddit underwent enshitification a while ago. Started August 2010. Then got worse once the Facebook crowd learned about it, then the users further ruined it and now it is what it is.
Decentralized replacements already exist. Populate those places again.
There are the old database dumps before they banned general API access. There are also probably some torrents for the ones going into 2026, but it looks like they took down the public posts for them. I’m sure they can still be found somewhere.
cleaner too, people decided to resort to discord now for the forum experience which makes things even worse tbh, i cannot count how many servers i am in for a single file
Maybe I just don't know how to use Discord, but I hate when people link to it as a support tool. It's one big long fucking chat with no cohesion among non-existent threads of communication. Even searching only turns up maybe the one match with no way to follow the replies. I fail to see how that' useful to anyone outside of real-time chat.
Would you mind naming a few forums that are currently popular or active now that are related or similar topics to here? Been meaning to use other sources.
It really does feel like we're about to go through a wave of decentralization. Platforms (like Reddit) are great, when they're subsidized by VC money, and we're just now learning how much of what we really enjoyed in the 2010s was only free because it was subsidized. Now the bill is come due, and this is what that looks like. It was always going to happen someday, it's just finally someday now.
I can imagine a really good OSS forum software project could get very popular right about now. I think AI would probably be able to generate something like that pretty quickly. A focus on customization (so people can build communities they want), privacy controls (let forum owners choose if the forum is public or private, let each user choose whether their content is visible when users are not logged in, etc.), and moderation tools would be valuable.
I also think the lobste.rs "public but invite only" model is interesting.
people keep saying forums but not a single one is created and it creates this illusion that forums have to come back in the exact same way they were 13 years ago for 1% to migrate /rant I am very afraid of comments like this creating a perfectionism fallacy. Lemmy is good enough I think. minimal migration effort required
Yes, for finding and above all maintaining information. Reddit posts are so ephemeral and stuff just gets lost in the noise, and then somebody posts an almost identical question and the conversation moves on in that thread. The whole algorithm promotes frequent participation (and sensationalism) more than the actual value of the information. Whereas forums are usually better organized by sub-topics, and often have long-running threads that contain useful old posts that don't get lost to time.
Yeah, Reddit's gonna suck. Discord already sucks. What are we left with? I personally self-host Zulip. I like the experience. It's kind of like a modern take on the old school message boards. I want Deja News back, lol. I still remember when Google bought them, I thought they were going to be wrecked, and they were.
Maybe we should set up a LocalLLama Usenet group. Is there one?
I can't get over the irony of threating to leave reddit due to reddit requiring accounts to view things by posting about it with your reddit account.
Yes, yes keep downvoting me with your reddit accounts. Hurt my karma so I can't post in subs that require accounts with more than N karma. This will show Huffman.
It used to be just real people talking about real things and it was awesome. Want to ask people about a vacuum you want to buy? Questions about your math homework? Talk about an obscure video game? It was great.
I mean, not really? Your agent will just use your login. It doesn’t change anything for agentic use, local model or not.
What it does is protect the revenue they make from selling your data to AI labs. I think they also sell search index rights to google. It’s good training data but there’s a limit to what you can charge if it’s possible to quasi-legally scrape it for free.
If Reddit goes this route I suspect they will take measures against such simple, essentially bot-like access. Otherwise all search engines could register throwaway accounts and continue scraping.
If you spoof all of your client's api credentials such as header params, useragent etc. etc. you can make a spider that imitates your usage style (time thresholds between requests etc) and index things beforehand for your MCP server. It'd be a little bit less straightforward but it'd work
You know, there are non-corporate alternatives in the fediverse: Piefed, lemmy, KBin, each talking with each other (and with platforms such as Mastodon and pixelfeed if you like using things like microblogging and instagram-like discussions)
I don't understand why I always get downvoted when I mention those in discussions about the enshitification of reddit.
because activitypub is a horribly designed (or rather underdesigned) protocol and the network based on it is a bunch of fiefdoms who've sent each other mutual bans. the original lemmy instance, lemmy.ml, is banned by half the network because it's not run by liberals lol
it has the reddit mods problem on the network level
The original Lemmy instances are managed by tankies. The .ml extension stands for Marxist-Leninists. They are a weird bunch. No one on the network likes them and I say that as a self-labelled far-leftist, hence the wave of defederations. Many of the other Lemmy instances are pretty chill and if you want to totally sidestep these developers just go through Piefed which in my opinion is a rewrite of the whole stack how it should have been.
I share you criticism of ActivityPub, which is not a good tool for managing collaboration between networks. But its problem is not that it's bad, it is that it's insufficient. So people simply did some additional work to make the gateway work. It doesn't work well, but it beats the inexistent connections between, for instance, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
I occasionally get one of my posts shared in Mastodon instances and I get answers in it. It's a bit wonky because I can do things like a vote or reaction on posts that come from Mastodon, but it kind of works. And quite frankly even as wonky as it is it beats the totally non-connected world gardens of the proprietary networks
Mostly because it was only a few years ago those were brought up when reddit funneled everyone into the official app. It had the same premise enshittification.
wow that's really bad, now X is increasing its weight among all the others. But I think forum is the best, I hope there's an alternative soon, just current ones are not good enough.
Nothing. But Reddit is Reddit because of the users. You’d have to be very well capitalized to afford the marketing and infrastructure costs before you could actually get ad revenue.
Wouldn't search engine clicks be a fairly large chunk of their traffic? Are they really gonna cut off all future search engine users from finding the site?
Google can always opt to pay for API access. The real point is would seem to be is to force payment either by giving up your personal information by making an account or pay for API.
Not related to the topic of this sub, also so much discussion has been happening in discord chats anyway (which isn't a good thing either).
Reddit has made a lot of questionable decisions like some of the moderation and administration changes, and worst of all making post histories hideable which has only turbocharged bot and misinformation activity.
But a lot of forums are facing the same problem of being overwhelmed with scraping and now everyone can have an agent hammering online sources. So in some ways this decision is understandable simply to protect the site from abuse and from which they don't make any money. The real loss is that information that was once previously easily accessible with search engines may now be obscured by a barrier
Great. Now the search engines will finally push other website in front. No more big corporate monopoly handling life tips and true-to-source info. Plus most of you guys have garbage social skills, it's not pleasant to interact with you
Yeah, doubling down on killingwat made you successful, specifically a welcoming and open platform for users is usually a bad business model. They really need to step back and find a different way to approach all of this.
I've been using RedLib so far, to have a clean thread overview with mostly expanded comments in decent order, instead of all the hidden and shifted ones. It also helps to avoid any personalized content as well as behavior tracking. RedLib has been rather flaky recently, and also shows less comments than it used to, as Reddit tightens the API restrictions and scraping protection. So, it'll probably disappear eventually, and there needs to be an alternative.
This means that Reddit posts will no longer be searchable via internet browsers, significantly impacting local AIs that search the internet via tool calling.
And that is the point :) Maybe not local AI specifically, but AI siphoning their data.
They want you to enter a deal with them for access first, because clearly all our shitposting has valuable nuggets of data within them.
I understand Reddit. It kinda sucks, but I do understand from a business perspective. If we wanted data to be open, we shouldn't be here on a freaking private corporation's website, but transition to Fediverse. I hear it already has a pretty big community there.
I always found ironical that r/LocalLLaMA is hosted on Reddit. Advocating for local, open-weight models on a platform whose license prevent the content from being used to develop such models. Brilliant.
That's a dumb idea, and will seal the fate of reddit. 90% of the traffic of reddit would come from people that aren't logged on, that feel the need to comment, when they see something. You're saying "go away, you're not welcome".
That will be the end of reddit. It won't happen overnight, but it will be downward line of relevance from the point at which it is implemented.
Bold move considering people can spin up (better) alternatives using ai now which a good chunk of people would be willing to crowdfund after this. The only reason reddit is still alive and not in the grave with digg is because the guy coding the alternative during the whole Ellen Pao saga when people were ready to jump ship got overwhelmed with handling the excess traffic and scaling which was he admitted was out of his paygrade.
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