This is exactly the point, as we all know. Answers to every random question out there should NOT be a centralized single point of failure that can be captured and monetized. It should be distributed, archived, and made freely available like libraries.
I had a friend suggest that Google just buy Reddit. With their deep pockets they could just run it at a loss. And it can help the search and AI development. Not the worst idea. Can't see them running it any worse than the current administration.
Lol, it must be bad when I'm genuinely the thinking this isn't a bad idea. Google, yeah that company. It wouldn't cost that much to run anyway and would probably be helpful to them as you say.
Why would you buy a company to run it at a loss plus however many millions you paid for it?
Google has mastered aggregating data over decades, they don't need to own a website to get the data they want, Reddit much like any other website uses Google Analytics anyway.
Never thought about that but that will probably have massive implications for Reddit traffic in the coming weeks as Googles caches decay and reddit gets thrown out of the search results.