The reports originate from a Washington Post report claiming that Reddit might remove the ability to log in to the site using Google credentials, as well as block the tech giant’s web crawlers from scraping the site. The news post cited Reddit’s recent struggles with reaching an agreement with AI companies, such as Google, to pay for the data they get off the site.
What is happening with data scraping?
Recently, AI startups and the manner in which their chatbots are trained, has become a subject of controversy with news websites such as Reddit, X, etc. This has resulted in several news organizations having to block these attempts via API blocks and limits. X CEO, Elon Musk, has famously criticized AI startups for scraping his platform’s data and blaming this issue for the recent API changes he implemented on the site.
AI startups have traditionally relied on publicly available web data to train their chatbots and other AI models. This allows them to avoid the costly and time-consuming process of creating their own datasets. However, news organizations and other content creators have increasingly expressed frustration with this practice, arguing that AI startups are profiting from their work without paying for it.
However, blocking search engine crawlers from accessing its website, would mean that Reddit content would no longer appear in Google and Bing search results. This would be a significant setback for Reddit, as search engines are a major source of traffic for the website.
