- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Reddit says Microsoft’s Bing, Anthropic, and Perplexity have scraped its data without permission. “It has been a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”
Reddit says Microsoft’s Bing, Anthropic, and Perplexity have scraped its data without permission. “It has been a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”
“Let’s see … how do we get more people to visit our site? I know! We’ll prevent search engines from sending people to it!”
…
It’s phase three of the enshittification cycle. In phase one, you attract users by providing a good service. Once they’re locked in, you squeeze them for all they’re worth by switching focus to business customers. Once they’re locked in, you squeeze them by threatening to deny them access to the users on whom they now depend.
I had also described it elsewhere as the “suck all the value out before it’s dead” phase. They’re clearly no longer interested about growing the site; they’re just getting as much money as possible from their traffic and engagement history as possible now, because they know traffic and engagement is already declining.
They won’t get the Nougat! The Nougat is here with us!
Spez doesn’t get to profit from me anymore.
Big profit now is better than our long term image
~ Reddit shareholders
As if there was any hint of an “image” left to lose.
God, that’s like the mantra for all shareholders everywhere.
It does make a certain amount of sense. Big profit now means you get a chunk of cash to invest in other quick profit schemes, and your wealth just keeps snowballing. It works as long as you don’t care that you never build anything that lasts.
So greed is basically ushering in Dark Ages 2.0 lol. Nice.