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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

Instead of api business model reddit should have blocked google indexing like Facebook does and force everyone to use reddit search and then show ads in search results rather than forcing people to go to google and append “reddit” to the end of search results which i had been doing for something like 99% of my commercial searches. Google has been eating reddit’s lunch… not random third party apps like Apollo.

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No, if reddit does that they lose a giant amount of traffic. And reddit search sucks they should improve it first if they want that. But also for many things you do not necessarily search for reddit but just search a question and reddit turns up in search results. If that goes away, reddit will have less visits and become way less usefull for many things

Honestly the traffic reddit gets from google is probably << traffic from organic reddit users. Even for myself as a non-Reddit user I intentionally search Reddit through Google. What you say holds true for smaller sites, but there's a reason Facebook blocks Google indexing (for the most part), and it's because Facebook wants people to be using Facebook, not Google. Even if Reddit loses some search traffic they shouldn't be giving up that control. It's not like people don't know what reddit is, or that the app isn't sticky (it's obviously very sticky).

>the traffic reddit gets from google is probably << traffic from organic reddit users.

I question "<<" at this point. Maybe "<", but the gap isn't as large as you expect.

It's not going to be as impactful as r/all being removed, but removing google searchability would probaly do more harm to traffic than it does benefit to the site.

>here's a reason Facebook blocks Google indexing (for the most part), and it's because Facebook wants people to be using Facebook, not Google.

I think it's more because Facebook is an inherently more private site. It has public groups but Facebook wasn't made (by default) to have every post you make be searchable from Google.

You search on Facebook for people, and you care about who they are. You search for content on reddit and don't care who redditors are.

Modern social media usage is definitely not private. People do stuff to be seen and both Instagram and TikTok exploit users wanting to go viral.

For Facebook, it was only private in the sense that the greater general public couldn't see your content, but that's really just unrelated third parties and Google. The stuff you post on Facebook was effectively public in the people around you could all see it.

They could combine it with the newspaper model and show 3 open posts to unregistered members before asking them to register. That way Google still allows full indexing.

This is a great idea and I think I heard a few good ideas and even thought of my self a few, about how Reddit could be more profitable. Which is weird, why they went with the API model. It's really suspicious. It's like they want to raise its value fast and dump it. It really looks like the want to sell Reddit.

You would block google traffic causing the site to drop to 20% traffic over asking power users to pay for api access?

Better than what they are doing now risking losing 80% of traffic. I mean, blocking Google has costs, but the argument here is the gain of control and revenue makes up for it. Blocking Google is also more of a concern for smaller brands and sites, but Reddit is probably Facebook/Instagram level of users (at least in the US). Most of reddit's traffic is probably coming from retained users, shared links and social media, not random searches.

Or just force API users to publish ads the same way they publish normal threads.

I've used the old.reddit site and ads don't really bother me. On the other hand I've often found the solution to a problem on Google pointing to a Reddit post.

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