The moderator rebellion is crushed, there are no longer any third party apps competing with the official Reddit app and Reddit seems to be as popular as ever.“It’s a nice time right now,” he says. “I think we’re executing really well.” In 2024, the company plans to focus on three pillars. 1. Maximizing ad revenue 2. Charging AI companies for training on its data3 . Enabling users to make money from Reddit
reddit is just another twitter now. kinda sad. it had such potential
There were never really any apps competing, some were so insignificant in user count that they still work (if you’re a moderator).
“I think I’m following the enshittification of platforms just like more successful people than me” he says; “we’re really making users our lowest priority!”.
Training AI companies on our conversations.
Thing is, he complained from the start of the protest that all these AI companies had trained their products on reddit’s data, and that not only had those companies not paid reddit for it, but that reddit had actively ended up paying for all the bandwidth and everything to transfer that data multiple times to multiple companies. He knew from the start who was really sucking up all the API bandwidth. He could’ve gone after the corporations and worked with the app developers, given them time to adjust.
But he didn’t. He didn’t because he panicked when he realized how he had let reddit foot the bill for massive corporations, because he’s always been butthurt that no one likes reddit’s shitty app and he wanted to force them to move over, because he’s too fragile in his masculinity to admit he’s made a mistake and change course, yet he’s too much of a pussy* to actually stand up to the corporations that screwed reddit over.
He’s a shitty person and a worse CEO.
* term used deliberately, because he thinks of himself as this big alpha male “in charge” type but he’s really really really not.
I seriously doubt that each company that wanted to train an AI on Reddit’s data went and downloaded a fresh copy of the data from Reddit anyway. There were already pre-packaged dumps of Reddit’s data floating around on archive sites. Still are, so making Reddit’s API harder to use doesn’t really change anything going forward either. It may make those archives slowly get more out of date, but there are better ways to make an AI knowledgeable about current events anyway. We’ve learned a lot about AI training in the past year and I think the value that was imagined around data sources like Reddit may have actually just been a brief blip.
They are executing really well yeah… Just not what they think. :)
LOL at all the people who said this would be the “end of Reddit”.
Digg also still exists.
Also big platforms don’t die in a bang, they became awful and then slowly and painfully die or fade into irrelevance over the course of a few years.
Yes with all 5% of it’s original userbase
Exactly the point.
Let’s make Lemmy/kBin/the Fediverse great, and leave tis silly place behind.
Humanity = maximizing ad revenue. All you need to know about reddit nowadays.
Obligatory “fuck Spez.” I’m sure I’m not the first.
Points two and three break my heart, and exemplify why I have no interest in contributing content over there. I don’t go on sites like that to make money. There are a few - esp in niche hobbies - who do, and that’s fine, but it’s hardly the primary purpose and some folks from the FP sub have survived and thrived in the time since.
Ew.
Aside from the occasional Google search that leads me to reddit, I do not post on reddit anymore. Not going to invest my time in a site that will become more unstable overtime.
For now, it’s still a very good way to find reviews and rundowns that were (probably) written by real humans, and for the more niche communities it’s often still the only community with a critical mass of people participating. Its content is a resource that was created by the users, and I’m not going to cut off my nose to spite my face.
Now that said, I never post anything there anymore, and I never browse without adblock, and I refuse to download their garbage app. It’s a read-only resource for me now, and I’ll survive just fine if it locks itself down completely.
