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.
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.
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
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.
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??
Yikes.
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.
After selling user generated content to Ai.
Doesn’t seem like that gravy train will roll on forever
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!
Just as we are all leaving for Lemmy. Reddit now makes you have an account to access some of their shit. Good riddance!
As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value
exploitationextraction* from a distance. Valueexploitationextraction typically generates a peak of profit in the short term, but it makes losses even harsher in the long run.As such I don’t think that Reddit is getting “bigger”. That profit is like someone who lives in a wooden house, dismantling their own home to sell it as lumber; of course they’ll get some quick cash, but it’s still a bad idea.
In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature.
Let’s pretend for a moment that we can totally trust Huffman’s claim here. Even human translations often get some issues, as nuances and whatnots are not translated, and this generates petty fights, specially in a younger userbase like Reddit’s; with AI tendency to hallucinate, that gets way worse. And even if that was not an issue, a lot of content is simply irrelevant for people outside a certain regional demographic.
*EDIT REASON: I switched the terms, sorry. (C’mon, I’m L3.)
value exploitation
I tried searching that term but had no luck any article I could use to know more?
I fucked it up and switched the terms, sorry. Look for “value extraction” instead; you’ll find multiple references to the concept such as this or Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything”.
To keep it short: you create value when you produce desirable goods/services for the customers; however, when you extract it, you’re picking the value that was already created (by society, your customers, or even your own business) and turning it into profit. The later is faster but unsustainable, as that value doesn’t pop up from nowhere, so when a business shifts from value creation to value extraction it’ll get some quick cash and then go kaboom.
In Reddit’s case, this value is mostly users willing to generate, curate, and share content with the platform, and other users knowing this:
- someone recommends you a product/brand. The person might be wrong, but you were reasonably sure that they aren’t a corporation astroturfing their own product. Someone else might criticise it instead.
- you hop into your favourite subreddit and, while the content there isn’t the best, it’s still good enough - because the mods gave some fucks about growing their subreddits;
- you discuss some controversial topic. You might get dogpiled, but at least you know that the dogs piling you are human beings, that sometimes might listen to reason; a bot will never;
- et cetera.
All that value was being slowly extracted through the last years, but the changes in 2023/2024 did it the hardest.
Alright now I find the thing. Thanks a lot for providing this knowledge.
L3?
Shorthand for third language [English] speaker. I mean that I’m prone to switch a few words here and there, due to other languages interfering inside my head.
That’s all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.
NPCs don’t mind
I’m looking forward to LLMs copying the gibberish german communities like to use. It is very common there to translate things word for word without any regard for correct german grammar or understandibility.
Who would have thought, that it would one day be a weapon against ai.
That’s awesome. I hadn’t heard about that. I love silly shit like that! :)
Such a shame it turned out the way it did, but the writing was on the wall. Every single reddit announcement thread was a shit show aha. I guess in a way they were transparent about only being in it for the money. Their actions were always consistent
Congrats to them. Sad though that they had to go as low as selling their users out to AI training for that. And context sensitive advertisements in social media are also more a drag to society. But hey, they did it.
Maybe now they can shift to more ethical business models?
They wouldn’t, even if they knew how. Because unethical makes more money.
Maybe now they can shift to more ethical business models?
You can’t honestly expect that?
That. Apart the last sentence, obvs.
The loser remains a loser, but he’s not losing money.
