Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Reddit is now blocking major search engines and AI bots - except the ones that pay

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Reddit, whuch is a very popular online discussion platform, has started blocking search engines from scraping user content unless they pay for the right to use their content. As a result, "Google is now the only mainstream search engine that yields recent Reddit results." It's hard not to see this as an instance of commercial media companies carving up the web into proprietary domains. These may be free for now but this won't last; as soon as the open web can be extinguished the commercial web will get very expensive to use.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 04, 2024 10:43 p.m.

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