Open browsing is letting anyone read what the site has.
My suspicion on why, is because AI bots and crawlers can just read the contents of the posts and send it back to whoever prompted, thus “stealing” clicks that would otherwise go into reddit proper and generate ad money
Yup. They have an exclusive deal with specific AI scrapers; don’t want to let other scrapers to keep getting the bot-infested shit for free.
Sooo… your saying Reddit is based because they are slowing model collapse?
In case others do se the joke, yes that is a joke.
The article I read stated it more plainly.
That 80% of their revenue comes from authenticated users, despite them being a fraction of their total traffic. So they think by making everyone log in, much more money.
If you don’t show what your website has to offer to logged-out users, why would logged-out users ever start to become interested in it and thus becoming logged-in users?
Commercialized social media was a mistake. It’s time for the public to figure out a real solution to how to fund online communication infrastructure; I don’t want a system where users pay for access (because that excludes poor people, most minors, etc.), but clearly making it funded by advertisers isn’t having desirable results either.
I wonder if social media could be run by governments (similar to public television and radio broadcasting), or by ISPs (like they used to run Usenet servers). Federation could mean we don’t have to choose, we can have a mix of these and other concepts.
I’m guessing they think it would be like Facebook where you need an account to see the bulk of it. But Facebook, Instagram has the whole “Talk to your friends and family” angle and Reddit doesn’t have that.
They are trying to build a moat. Yes, it can keep people in but it also stops new folks from coming in. This might be the Digg moment of Reddit but then we have heard that many times over the years in the past. It is probably just a long slow bleed.
linkie please
It was on here yesterday.
Most of the news sites carrying this have the same article nearly word for word. Here is the top result from DDG.
Same reason why every other social media site has done it, they want to to create an account and sell your data.
It almost certainly about blocking AIs from scraping the site without paying.
But what stops then from making an account for the AI to login under? You mean to tell me those “are you human?” pages actually work?
They can then see how fast that account is injesting pages.
If it’s inhumanly fast they can stop it.
All of Reddit could be historically seen without a Reddit account. That’s about to change - you will need to login first just to see a post.
So if you’ve been permabanned, you won’t just be prohibited from posting, you won’t be able to read ANY Reddit content.
That should make them fully irrelevant.
