Within the coming weeks, Reddit will begin blocking most automated bots from accessing its public knowledge. You’ll must make a licensing deal, like Google and OpenAI have performed, to make use of Reddit content material for mannequin coaching and different business functions.
Whereas this has technically been Reddit’s coverage already, the corporate is now implementing it by updating its robots.txt file, a core a part of the net that dictates how net crawlers are allowed to entry a website. “It’s a sign to those that don’t have an settlement with us that they shouldn’t be accessing Reddit knowledge,” the corporate’s chief authorized officer, Ben Lee, tells me. “It’s additionally a sign to dangerous actors that the phrase ‘enable’ in robots.txt doesn’t imply, and has by no means meant, that they’ll use the info nevertheless they need.”