Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while “other” revenue reached $33.2 million on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.
In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now, Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.
apparently, the path to profitability was “shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit”
Well and behind it is stealing other peoples’ work (posts and comments, moderation and administration) and selling them as yours. The oldest capitalist criminal trick in the book: privatization AKA primitive accumulation AKA enclosure of the commons.
I mean, to be fair, I’m nearly positive that the Reddit T&Cs will have said they retain rights to anything posted there for ages. And the AI bubble is already showing signs of deflation or bursting coming not too far down the line. Let them enjoy their first and hopefully only profitable year.
No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.
But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.
It doesn’t really matter because there is not much content to train AI on in a worthwhile manner. The huge amount of content is mostly hostile retorts, and sarcastic meme banter. AI will be a mess after training on that
I never was arguing against that. Also I’m pretty sure their moral compass was pushed by the feds until he topped himself, so nothing about their bullshit has surprised me since.
A few years ago I started a blog where I can post lengthy stuff instead on Reddit. To have more control over my own posts and without the mercy of Reddit or any moderator. Little I did knew this was the best decision I could make, after I saw what happened after Ai hype. (I’m not much active, but still, the principle counts.)
Anyone deleting their content there thinking this will avoid selling to Ai is probably a mistake. Because now Reddit can sell those deleted content from their backup (I assume they have backups…) and no normal user can access the information anymore, which hurts the normal users even more than any Ai or Reddit.
I encourage everyone to start a blog and at least post the deleted stuff there for future access. At least you have more control this way.
Which is a good reminder to everyone to support your local Lemmy instances.
TBH, it feels like social media always needed some back door business like this to make it profitable.
It’s almost like human communication is not supposed to be a product or something…
Fuck Spez
(Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)
This is important for everyone to hear regularly. Thank you
A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.
I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.
35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.
I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.
Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.
But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:
- I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
- Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
- Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
- Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
- Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
- Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.
I know this might sound a little condescending, but why are you torturing yourself by not using an adblocker?
I was using the mobile app.
That app is a special kind of inhuman torture.
Android Firefox has access to adblockers though??
Brother in christ, that thing is a spyware.
Yikes.
I still browse reddit, honestly more than I do lemmy, but its mostly reddit old with adblock. Even on browser even though that is painful to navigate.
With properly curated subs its not so bad, but there definitely is still something missing. Also holy cow the current algorithm on reddit is trash. It used to be that the front page changed and shifted but sometimes I see the same crap on my front page for 2 days. It’s insane!
The bot generated comments are training AI… full circle
It won’t be long before the internet is just bots talking to each other and advertisers paying them to do so.
98 million are bots
Indeed, you will note that they carefully chose the moniker “Daily Active Uniques” and not “Daily Active Users”.
I think that speaks volumes, as humans are definitely harder to retain.
Well I’m glad my leaving the platform had such an impact, I never said
After selling user generated content to Ai.
Doesn’t seem like that gravy train will roll on forever
It cannot - more and more content is coming from AI so they are just “relearning” what one of the AI platforms has already produced… the endgame of that is convergence on nothing new being produced from AI
I’m thinking AI-powered something is going on, for sure.
Just as we are all leaving for Lemmy. Reddit now makes you have an account to access some of their shit. Good riddance!
I CALL BULLSHIT
Well, clearly you are not a bot on reddit then.
I really wanted that site to crash and burn. Oh well.
Who the fuck is Alice? (if you do not get this reference, Gompie is what you’re looking for.)
i get the reference but how does the song relate to this
edit: im blind
I’ll take any reference that isn’t Wonderland!
Boo!
Whatever, this is far from the end of the story, and Lemmy has nothing but time. The bigger they are, the harder they fall in the end.
I vividly remember the Digg migration and Reddit is so very much like Digg these days.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Lemmy has nothing but time.
Isn’t Lemmy decreasing in numbers?
Not that I’m aware of. AFAIK nobody collects hard long-term data right now, and I’m actually working actively on a system to do it.
Just based on me peaking at current federation stats every once in a while, .world has grown relative to the niche but early-arriving .ml/heaxbear/lemmygrad sphere, which makes me think it’s growing overall.
That’s all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.
NPCs don’t mind
ok now i am 100% sure im hoping for an ai bubble
