Say bye bye to the “site:reddit.com” trick. It fixes Google’s search results, but it doesn’t do anything for Reddit, and the company is planning to block search spiders as part of a plan to bolster itself as a platform rather a stripmined content source for other companies.
“Reddit can survive without search,” said the Post‘s anonymous source.
Reddit isn’t denying that it might block crawlers. “In terms of crawlers, we don’t have anything to share on that topic at the moment,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge, clarifying that the company’s earlier “nothing is changing” comment only applied to logins.
We got a taste of what Google without Reddit might look like when many subreddits went dark to protest the company’s API pricing changes — at that time, many Reddit results took you to private communities, which was a pain. Appending “site:reddit.com” to a Google search has become a popular trick for weeding SEO farms and other attention-seeking websites out of Google results, but if this change goes through, you might not be able to access Reddit from search at all.
Finding a way to do this stuff without activating the media ecology’s immune system (see Elon Musk’s crude and impulsive implementations at Twitter) is a pressing unsolved problem in “content” right now.
