According to the Verge exclusive report, Reddit announced that he would block access to Internet Archives for their content and retain only the first page to be archived. This means that the “Wayback Machine” with 2.7 billion pages will no longer be able to access Reddit’s post details, comments and the user’s home page, but only to record daily hot titles. This restriction shall take effect gradually from that date.
The incident was triggered by the “Darkness Barracks” of AI, where Tim Rathschmidt, a spokesman for Reddit, revealed to the media that: “We found that there was an AI company that violated platform policy and crawled through the website’s time machine to obtain data that should have been limited.” While the Internet archive serves an “open network”, Reddit accuses it of failing to fulfil its responsibility to remove removed content from users in a timely manner, while allowing third parties to bypass Platform data protection.
This is already Reddit’s third wave of data blockades in recent years. In 2023, Reddit presented a controversial change to the API interface, resulting in a large-scale death of a third party (officially attributed to the misuse of the interface by AI), and then entered into a payment data agreement with Google and OpenAI, while blocking the unpaid search engine. In June 2024, Reddit indicted Anthropic on charges of shaming and continuing to steal data.
Reddit converted user-generated content into a commodity and charged authorization fees to the AI giant. Early last year, Reddit entered into an agreement with Google to provide the latter with data to support its Google search and artificial intelligence training. A few months later, Reddit began to prevent the main search engine from capturing its data unless they paid for it.
The “digital civilization preservation” mission upheld by the Internet Archives is a loophole to AI ‘ s zero-cost access to training data. Ordinary users lose the right to archive historical content and become leverage for platform and capital games. When asked if the future would be back on file, Reddit’s spokesman’s conclusion was interesting: “It depends on when they learn to respect Reddit users — not just the data needs of AI.”
Mark Graham, Director General of the Internet Archives, responded: “We have a long-standing relationship with Reddit and are in constant communication.” But Reddit made it clear that the embargo would not be lifted until the other side met the platform policy.