Comment by popcalc
2 years ago
# Welcome to Reddit's robots.txt
# Reddit believes in an open internet, but not the misuse of public content.
# See https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26410290525844-Public-Content-Policy Reddit's Public Content Policy for access and use restrictions to Reddit content.
# See https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit4researchers/ for details on how Reddit continues to support research and non-commercial use.
# policy: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26410290525844-Public-Content-Policy
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
They serve a different robots.txt to Google: https://merj.com/blog/investigating-reddits-robots-txt-cloak...
You can see it here: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results/result?id=_mYogl... (click on "View Tested Page")
> # Reddit believes in an open internet, but not the misuse of public content.
Calling it "public" content in the very act of exercising their ownership over it. The balls on whoever wrote that.
Their license/Eula clearly state that Reddit has perpetual whatever to content posted on Reddit, but relying solely on DMCA for "stolen" content _yet again_ feels like a terrible way to deal with non-original content. Part of me hopes that Reddit gets hit with some new precidence-setting lawsuits regarding non-original content that requires useful attribution, but I double t that will ever happen.
An EULA does not change the morality of the situation anyway. They are a leech profiting off users generating content who are now upset about not getting a cut from third-parties also profiting from said user generated content.
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it's even worse. it's not theirs (it's the users'), they are merely hosting it and using it (ToS gives them a fancy irrevocable license I guess).
so they can do whatever they want with it and the actual owners/authors have no chance to really influence Reddit at all to make it crawlable. (the GDPR-like data takeout is nice, but ... completely useless in these cases where the value is in the composition and aggregation with other users' content.)
On top of that, a sizable chunk of Reddit content is ripped from elsewhere, whether videos, images, etc.
actually owners/authors like me would not want our stuff crawlable because that gives up our ownership.
When I am answering some random dude on reddit with a problem I want that dude to read my solution. I don't want this to be crawled and forever stored (probably deanonymized) or enshrined in a dozen commercial LLMs. There is substack for that stuff.
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> the GDPR like data takeout is nice
Is there a way to export my history? How?
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The Fake News police should shut down this sort of messaging
Looks like it changed a month ago:
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/1doc3pt/updating...
Nobody who wants to be successful obeys robots.txt. And I do mean nobody.
They changed it to disallow so that scrapers can't just claim the robots.txt gave them permission.
According to the US court systems the robots.txt file is meaningless. If they respond with a 200 status code giving you the access then you can legally scrape it all you want. If they require that you log in then you have to follow the terms you agree to when creating an account. Public means public though, and if Reddit doesn't want to make the content private (put it behind a login) then we can scrape away.
Note that scraping, regardless of the level of permission, doesn't mean you can do anything you want with the content. Copyright still applies. But you can scrape it, and if your use falls under Fair Use or another caveat to the copyright laws then you can do ahead and do it without needing any permission from the authors.
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Independent scrapers can launder the data between Reddit and AI consumers. The only folks this hurts is users seeking info via search engines and folks willing to kowtow to rules that are potentially low impact to evade. Next steps would be (from an adversarial perspective) browser extensions that stream back data for ingestion similar to Recap for Pacer [1].
[1] https://free.law/recap/faq
(full disclosure: assisting someone pursuing regulatory action against reddit in the EU for a separate issue from scraping, it's a valuable resource, but the folks who own and control it are meh)
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That’s a weird statement to be absolutist about. The majority of individuals and companies who want to be successful do not do so by scrapping websites, thus have no reason to disobey robots.txt. Most people in the world, ambitious or not, wouldn’t even understand what your sentence refers to.
OP is obviously talking about people whose area of research/development/product would involve web scraping... This feels like being purposefully obtuse
Has not NYT tried to sue OpenAI because of them ignoring robots.txt or you mean it's impossible to prove and / or it's still more profitable to just ignore robots.txt?
Sadly true. That's why I gave up on robots.txt years ago and started blocking crawlers outright in .htaccess
Of course, that became unsustainable so now I have everything behind a login wall.
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> We believe in something that we will now proceed to violate.
I will never take a statement given by a company that blatantly lies like this at face value going forward. What a bunch of clowns.
With the amount of crap in Reddit, cleaning it must be a very non-trivial problem. (I mean, it never is, but in the case of Reddit it's probably extra complicated)