Earlier this month, thousands of subreddits went dark as a protest for Reddit’s sudden change to their API that would essentially kill all third-party apps. Now, as you might, or might not, expect, this had a huge impact on Google.
Reddit is actually a really useful source for troubleshooting. So when people have issues, they will add “reddit” to their search query, to find a better answer. However, when over 8,000 subreddits went dark, it rendered pages and pages of Google search results useless.
Google’s senior vice president of search, Prabhakar Raghavan told employees at an all-hands meeting earlier this month that the company was working on ways to display helpful resources in search, without adding “reddit” to the query. Raghavan also acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience. Stating that “Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy. We need to make users happy.”
Enter Perspectives
To combat this issue, with appending search queries with “Reddit”, Google has announced a new feature called “Perspectives”. Basically, Perspectives is a new tab that is now available on mobile in the US, and it will surface discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora.
This will help solve one of Google’s issues. That is, adding “reddit” to searches. As you can now tap on a specific tab to get discussions and stuff. But that won’t fix the issue of Reddit going dark, which could happen again, as a number of subreddits are still blacked out due to Reddit’s API changes. And Reddit is working to force moderators back into their subreddits – though mods are not paid by Reddit, so we’ll see how that goes. It probably won’t end well.
2023-06-27 15:20:53