this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 177 points 1 week ago (3 children)

apparently, the path to profitability was "shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit"

[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

No one is arguing that they don't have the legal right.

But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (1 children)

TBH, it feels like social media always needed some back door business like this to make it profitable.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

It's almost like human communication is not supposed to be a product or something...

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

Which is a good reminder to everyone to support your local Lemmy instances.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

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.
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I know this might sound a little condescending, but why are you torturing yourself by not using an adblocker?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I was using the mobile app.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago

That app is a special kind of inhuman torture.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Android Firefox has access to adblockers though??

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago
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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fuck Spez

(Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

This is important for everyone to hear regularly. Thank you

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The bot generated comments are training AI... full circle

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago (1 children)

After selling user generated content to Ai.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Doesn't seem like that gravy train will roll on forever

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

NPCs don't mind

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I really wanted that site to crash and burn. Oh well.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago

Just as we are all leaving for Lemmy. Reddit now makes you have an account to access some of their shit. Good riddance!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago

ok now i am 100% sure im hoping for an ai bubble

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Well, clearly you are not a bot on reddit then.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (19 children)

As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value ~~exploitation~~ extraction* from a distance. Value ~~exploitation~~ extraction 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.)

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago

I’m thinking AI-powered something is going on, for sure.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

Really wonder how they plan to increase their revenue on the AI training data, especially now that a significant amount of their data is "poisoned" by the models they try to train

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

Well I'm glad my leaving the platform had such an impact, I never said

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

Deceased users’ estates still haven’t agreed to the new terms, have they?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I vividly remember the Digg migration and Reddit is so very much like Digg these days.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Who would have thought, that it would one day be a weapon against ai.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Dammit, all of you told me Reddit was going into the ground and I didn't invest lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

Pffffffffffff...since when is it a good idea to get financial advice from randos on the internet?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

They wouldn't, even if they knew how. Because unethical makes more money.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Maybe now they can shift to more ethical business models?

You can't honestly expect that?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

The loser remains a loser, but he's not losing money.

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