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      • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        72·
        16 hours ago

        To be fair, the likely reason in this case is AI companies mass-downloading Reddit posts for their training runs. You can’t really cache the internet, so from what I understand, every training run they scrape this stuff anew.

        For many smaller sites, it’s effectively a denial-of-service attack, which is why lots of them have put up this thing:
        Anubis bot protection screen

        For Reddit, it might just be additional traffic that they have to pay for and which doesn’t give them any profit. Although, if Reddit is still as unstable as it was years ago, I also wouldn’t be surprised, if they got DoSed by that a few times as well.

        • SaraTonin@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          14 hours ago

          What you say is true, but not the reason. Part of reddit’s business model is selling its data to AI companies. So they just don’t want to give it away for free

        • Log in | Sign up@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          9 hours ago

          I think it was a sarcastic attack on the claim that forcing you to log in for read-only access to the website is in any way keeping anything safer than it was.