13 ms·

Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually. Aside from this move that is

by maeln 3y ago

Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually. Aside from this move that is an obvious way to steer user toward the official app and have tighter control, the r/de and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit [1]. Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular subreddit ( r/offmychest, r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google translated popular post from the original english sub or just plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly google translated). Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is very dodgy. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/14199iu/reddit_sautoastrosurfe_encore_dans_les/ https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/14199iu/reddit_saut...

itsoktocry 3y ago
>Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually. If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree. Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community". IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe above.
- batmenace 3y ago
  IPO doesn't have to mean ads, though. There are other ways to monetize a user base and to generate money based off of a 'community'. They're just ways that require more time, more concerted effort and planning to execute.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    As a shareholder I don't want "instead of ads we have", I want "On top of ads we have"
    - _v7gu 3y ago
      On top of ads, you can have a dead website :^)
  - djbusby 3y ago
    So, impossible.
  - Xelbair 3y ago
    so they give lower ROI. therefore they don't exist after IPO.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - CivBase 3y ago
    Many platforms have recently shown how you can monitize an audience without ads. It's weird to me that Reddit hasn't pursued something like that. Discord and Twitch have a funding model that would probably work great for Reddit. Allow users to pay a small fee to upgrade their subscription to a subreddit - maybe $1.50/mo per sub or $15/mo for all subs. The upgrade includes access to special emojis for the sub, a special flair or re-colored username, and no ads on the upgraded sub. A portion of the money would go towards funding moderation for the sub, and Reddit could pocket the rest.
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      > A portion of the money would go towards funding moderation for the sub That creates bad incentives, though. A streamer I mod for once suggested something similar, I told them I’d quit modding in that case. If it’s a job, it stops being a hobby.
- Anon4Now 3y ago
  Meanwhile, their valuation has gotten worse. In 2021 Fidelity invested $28.2M in Reddit and now values that investment at $16.6M - a 41% drop [1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    To be fair most every growth tech company took a pretty big haircut. Some value has returned to the stronger players recently. However, weaker ones are still well off ATHs. Will be interesting to see how Reddit looks.
  - throwaway1777 3y ago
    Most tech companies are down 40% from their peak still unless they are part of this ai hype train.
    - the_doctah 3y ago
      Big difference between tech giants making software used by businesses and a glorified message board
      - afavour 3y ago
        Not really, all comes down to "are they making money?"
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    That's not far off tech in general though
intrasight 3y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they try to stop this protest by allocating a large block of IPO shares to moderators. As they should given how much moderators contribute to their success.
- vesinisa 3y ago
  Actually paying the moderators for their time and effort to manage and build your product? I mean - it would be the right thing to do, for sure, but to suggest that Reddit Inc. under its current direction would have such foresight is a fantasy.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  There is 0% chance of this happening. Moderators are too fungible
- Ralfp 3y ago
  How many mods are there on Reddit that run big communities? For all we know it may result in mods getting $100 each.
- dingledork69 3y ago
  Far more likely they'll just remove all the "offending" mods and replace them with puppets
pixl97 3y ago
Google is showing its regency bias and not allowing me to find the older articles about reddits creation and how the admins back then used to post a huge amount of their own traffic to make the site seem busy to draw users in. Why would the admins not do it now if it worked then.
- grt_thr 3y ago
  [dead]
- CaptainNegative 3y ago
  Reddit Founders Made Hundreds of Fake Profiles So Site Looked Popular https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
- shrikant 3y ago
  I guess you just needed the right search terms? I searched for "history of reddit fake user activity" and got this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi... ..and it turns out it's right on Reddit's wikipedia page as well: > Supported by the funding from Y Combinator,[28] Huffman coded the site in Common Lisp[29] and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.[30][31] Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated,[32] an example of a fake it till you make it strategy.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    "Hundreds" of fake users doesn't register in the grand scale of things. Nobody would accuse a waitress of fraud for seeding the tip jar with a few dollars.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      I guess at the end of the day scale matters. When Reddit was doing this that percentage of fake posts was huge per capita of total users. Now, if Reddit is doing fake posts in mass to change the valuation of an IPO, that would be the definition of fraud, specifically a public fraud the SEC could investigate. Reddit doing this at the start at best would be a civil investigation by any investors it had at that time, but it's highly unlikely any investors it had when committing said fraud would bring said investigation because it increased the value of its investment.
w-m 3y ago
Isn't faking user activity how reddit originally started out, so that's very on brand? On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I’d say most, but certainly not (almost) all. There are quite a few (real) German subreddits, and most of my countrypeople prefer their native language over English, and are often not even that comfortable with it. Forum culture is also still relatively big in Germany, so for niche hobbies there are probably several forums, I know that for ecigs, the German reddit community can’t hold a candle to the several ecig forums.
- biztos 3y ago
  Reddit is hiring and some of the job descriptions talk specifically about international expansion, so I guess at least Reddit thinks it is or will be significant. Although I’d be shocked if good old Rocket Internet hasn’t done a Reddit clone by now, thus capturing the non-English-speaking part of the German market.
  - m4jor 3y ago
    Reddit actually just fired 90 people and put on a hiring freeze for the rest of the year. https://archive.ph/3wR5j https://archive.ph/3wR5j
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  I think people who speak no english don't end on Reddit in the first place. It had very few traction in France as a far as I know, and facebook groups would be the go to places for most people. So yes, members of /r/france and /r/de read and probably participate the other subs as well, and the whole point of /r/france and the variations is less to speak french but to have local discussions gate-keeped by the language. Same for Japanese communities, there's massive subs for anime an Japan life, and there will be small niche subs in Japanese only to isolate from the bigger group and paradoxically have a less filtered bubble.
Semaphor 3y ago
> the r/de and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit For anyone who doesn’t want to translate the French post and German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with local content by machine-translating successful posts of the original subs, and then spammed every user from that country with an admin message about those subs.
- activiation 3y ago
  Reddit going back to it's roots with fake users
  - 7373737373 3y ago
    They gotta read more Dante
    - grepfru_it 3y ago
      Is your username your (old) phone number?
      - giantrobot 3y ago
        Could be the ham radio sign-off "73" which is basically "cheers/best regards".
    - joeythedolphin 3y ago
      Amazing comment and I'm sort of left begging... how does Dante tie into this? (serious comment)
  - the_doctah 3y ago
    Just copying the playbook of every social media platform using monthly active users as a bullshit metric to pump their perceived value.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
roflyear 3y ago
This is essentially how reddit was founded - fake users, fake organic content. We shouldn't be surprised.
web3-is-a-scam 3y ago
Isn’t faking use activity….fraud? When you’re trying to gain traction on a new and free website it’s one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)…but if you’re trying to sell the company to investors this should be a crime.
- tyingq 3y ago
  It sounds a lot like a version of "pump and dump", which the SEC puts in the securities fraud category.
  - kevstev 3y ago
    Its fine (well to be more specific- legal) to have fake users/content on your privately owned website, but it will be fraud if they include those users and posts in their metrics provided to investors. In the US anyway.
    - hunter2_ 3y ago
      If the owner of the site was in on it (adding fake users/content) and passed it off to investors as natural, I can see that as being fraudulent, but what if the owner legitimately wasn't in on it, as could easily be the case if the "fake" users/content were created by third parties for unrelated reasons and not detected by the owner? Indeed, the concept of using a throwaway per submission in certain circumstances is a well-known part of the culture, which is why I put "fake" in quotation marks -- accounts are only fake if someone erroneously assumes the ratio of humans:accounts would be anywhere near 1:1. And if the latter is not fraud but legitimate usage of the site, then it seems like there could be a huge gray area of plausible deniability that the owner was simply using the site the same way that anyone else could (albeit with a streamlined interface).
- hackinthebochs 3y ago
  Faking activity to bootstrap real activity is probably fine. To expand into international markets, they need to present existing activity to draw and retain users. But I don't see a problem with this.
iamacyborg 3y ago
Yikes that DM in the first comment from a Reddit admin basically asking the community member to perform free labour.
- yung_steezy 3y ago
  Reddit is built on free mod labour. I remember seeing a relationship advice thread from a woman who was concerned her partner thought being a reddit mod equated to having a second job. https://teddit.net/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_husband_is_the_moderator_for_a_few_different/ https://teddit.net/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_husba...
  - KomoD 3y ago
    Proper link: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_husband_is_the_moderator_for_a_few_different/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_h...
jollofricepeas 3y ago
I find it funny that… Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data via the API. So far… - PaLM - GPT3 - Falcon Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it’s not a non-profit. But that doesn’t mean they should be forced to provide a low cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire investor community backing LLM startups. Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon
- rcxdude 3y ago
  It's quite key to the legal strategy of all the LLMs that they do not need a license for their input data. So if they want reddit data they'll just scrape it (which is also legally protected). And if they do need a license then reddit does not have one to sell to the AI companies, at least for most of the text on their site. I don't believe it's a reasonable strategy for any platform (except maybe marketplaces like shutterstock) to attempt to charge money for data for machine learning.
- oldandboring 3y ago
  I find it funny also. This fact seemed to have its moment in the sun for about 15 minutes a few months ago when everyone was first talking about ChatGPT and then everyone forgot?
- andrewxdiamond 3y ago
  Reddit is able to license its content in a way that prevents companies from using it while leaving the API free. In fact, making the API paid does nothing for that goal. Scrapping has been long established as legal so if their license doesn’t change, nothing about LLMs using their content will either
  - pierat 3y ago
    > Reddit is able to license its content in a way that prevents companies from using it while leaving the API free. And there's the scam laid bare. It's *NOT* Reddit's content. Sure, by posting you're granting them a whole slew of rights. But you dont transfer ownership to them. And when your content creators leave, blammo, you have no more new content. And I'm already seeing some subreddits drop dramatically in terms of comments and posts. Tech ones, naturally. Turns out Lemmy is actually pretty cool for a fediverse version of reddit. We're already seeing the start of death of Imgur as "reddit image host", oh wait "imgur social network", oh wait "no porn Imgur". We all know how this works out. Same game, just a bit ahead of reddit.
anlaw 3y ago
Do you think humans would do that? Intentionally instigate online engagement for profit?
ericmcer 3y ago
It's behaving like a VC funded unicorn that is trying to get their IPO payday but it really isn't that at all. Sucks.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Bystander22 3y ago
That's part of a whole program; while reddit lets many mods work for free they are paying these "mods" $20/hour to "organically" drum up subscribers on non-US subs. I shared some links about this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481478
koyote 3y ago
Whenever I read r/de or r/France I am always surprised by the higher quality of the comments compared to any of the English subs. I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing. Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.

by maeln 3y ago

itsoktocry 3y ago

>Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually. If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree. Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community". IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe above.

batmenace 3y ago
IPO doesn't have to mean ads, though. There are other ways to monetize a user base and to generate money based off of a 'community'. They're just ways that require more time, more concerted effort and planning to execute.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  As a shareholder I don't want "instead of ads we have", I want "On top of ads we have"
  - _v7gu 3y ago
    On top of ads, you can have a dead website :^)
- djbusby 3y ago
  So, impossible.
- Xelbair 3y ago
  so they give lower ROI. therefore they don't exist after IPO.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- CivBase 3y ago
  Many platforms have recently shown how you can monitize an audience without ads. It's weird to me that Reddit hasn't pursued something like that. Discord and Twitch have a funding model that would probably work great for Reddit. Allow users to pay a small fee to upgrade their subscription to a subreddit - maybe $1.50/mo per sub or $15/mo for all subs. The upgrade includes access to special emojis for the sub, a special flair or re-colored username, and no ads on the upgraded sub. A portion of the money would go towards funding moderation for the sub, and Reddit could pocket the rest.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    > A portion of the money would go towards funding moderation for the sub That creates bad incentives, though. A streamer I mod for once suggested something similar, I told them I’d quit modding in that case. If it’s a job, it stops being a hobby.
Anon4Now 3y ago
Meanwhile, their valuation has gotten worse. In 2021 Fidelity invested $28.2M in Reddit and now values that investment at $16.6M - a 41% drop [1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/
- nemo44x 3y ago
  To be fair most every growth tech company took a pretty big haircut. Some value has returned to the stronger players recently. However, weaker ones are still well off ATHs. Will be interesting to see how Reddit looks.
- throwaway1777 3y ago
  Most tech companies are down 40% from their peak still unless they are part of this ai hype train.
  - the_doctah 3y ago
    Big difference between tech giants making software used by businesses and a glorified message board
    - afavour 3y ago
      Not really, all comes down to "are they making money?"
- paulddraper 3y ago
  That's not far off tech in general though

intrasight 3y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they try to stop this protest by allocating a large block of IPO shares to moderators. As they should given how much moderators contribute to their success.

vesinisa 3y ago
Actually paying the moderators for their time and effort to manage and build your product? I mean - it would be the right thing to do, for sure, but to suggest that Reddit Inc. under its current direction would have such foresight is a fantasy.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
There is 0% chance of this happening. Moderators are too fungible
Ralfp 3y ago
How many mods are there on Reddit that run big communities? For all we know it may result in mods getting $100 each.
dingledork69 3y ago
Far more likely they'll just remove all the "offending" mods and replace them with puppets

pixl97 3y ago

Google is showing its regency bias and not allowing me to find the older articles about reddits creation and how the admins back then used to post a huge amount of their own traffic to make the site seem busy to draw users in. Why would the admins not do it now if it worked then.

grt_thr 3y ago
[dead]
CaptainNegative 3y ago
Reddit Founders Made Hundreds of Fake Profiles So Site Looked Popular https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
shrikant 3y ago
I guess you just needed the right search terms? I searched for "history of reddit fake user activity" and got this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi... ..and it turns out it's right on Reddit's wikipedia page as well: > Supported by the funding from Y Combinator,[28] Huffman coded the site in Common Lisp[29] and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.[30][31] Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated,[32] an example of a fake it till you make it strategy.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  "Hundreds" of fake users doesn't register in the grand scale of things. Nobody would accuse a waitress of fraud for seeding the tip jar with a few dollars.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I guess at the end of the day scale matters. When Reddit was doing this that percentage of fake posts was huge per capita of total users. Now, if Reddit is doing fake posts in mass to change the valuation of an IPO, that would be the definition of fraud, specifically a public fraud the SEC could investigate. Reddit doing this at the start at best would be a civil investigation by any investors it had at that time, but it's highly unlikely any investors it had when committing said fraud would bring said investigation because it increased the value of its investment.

w-m 3y ago

Isn't faking user activity how reddit originally started out, so that's very on brand? On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/

Semaphor 3y ago
I’d say most, but certainly not (almost) all. There are quite a few (real) German subreddits, and most of my countrypeople prefer their native language over English, and are often not even that comfortable with it. Forum culture is also still relatively big in Germany, so for niche hobbies there are probably several forums, I know that for ecigs, the German reddit community can’t hold a candle to the several ecig forums.
biztos 3y ago
Reddit is hiring and some of the job descriptions talk specifically about international expansion, so I guess at least Reddit thinks it is or will be significant. Although I’d be shocked if good old Rocket Internet hasn’t done a Reddit clone by now, thus capturing the non-English-speaking part of the German market.
- m4jor 3y ago
  Reddit actually just fired 90 people and put on a hiring freeze for the rest of the year. https://archive.ph/3wR5j https://archive.ph/3wR5j
makeitdouble 3y ago
I think people who speak no english don't end on Reddit in the first place. It had very few traction in France as a far as I know, and facebook groups would be the go to places for most people. So yes, members of /r/france and /r/de read and probably participate the other subs as well, and the whole point of /r/france and the variations is less to speak french but to have local discussions gate-keeped by the language. Same for Japanese communities, there's massive subs for anime an Japan life, and there will be small niche subs in Japanese only to isolate from the bigger group and paradoxically have a less filtered bubble.

Semaphor 3y ago

> the r/de and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit For anyone who doesn’t want to translate the French post and German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with local content by machine-translating successful posts of the original subs, and then spammed every user from that country with an admin message about those subs.

activiation 3y ago
Reddit going back to it's roots with fake users
- 7373737373 3y ago
  They gotta read more Dante
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    Is your username your (old) phone number?
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      Could be the ham radio sign-off "73" which is basically "cheers/best regards".
  - joeythedolphin 3y ago
    Amazing comment and I'm sort of left begging... how does Dante tie into this? (serious comment)
- the_doctah 3y ago
  Just copying the playbook of every social media platform using monthly active users as a bullshit metric to pump their perceived value.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago

roflyear 3y ago

This is essentially how reddit was founded - fake users, fake organic content. We shouldn't be surprised.

web3-is-a-scam 3y ago

Isn’t faking use activity….fraud? When you’re trying to gain traction on a new and free website it’s one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)…but if you’re trying to sell the company to investors this should be a crime.

tyingq 3y ago
It sounds a lot like a version of "pump and dump", which the SEC puts in the securities fraud category.
- kevstev 3y ago
  Its fine (well to be more specific- legal) to have fake users/content on your privately owned website, but it will be fraud if they include those users and posts in their metrics provided to investors. In the US anyway.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    If the owner of the site was in on it (adding fake users/content) and passed it off to investors as natural, I can see that as being fraudulent, but what if the owner legitimately wasn't in on it, as could easily be the case if the "fake" users/content were created by third parties for unrelated reasons and not detected by the owner? Indeed, the concept of using a throwaway per submission in certain circumstances is a well-known part of the culture, which is why I put "fake" in quotation marks -- accounts are only fake if someone erroneously assumes the ratio of humans:accounts would be anywhere near 1:1. And if the latter is not fraud but legitimate usage of the site, then it seems like there could be a huge gray area of plausible deniability that the owner was simply using the site the same way that anyone else could (albeit with a streamlined interface).
hackinthebochs 3y ago
Faking activity to bootstrap real activity is probably fine. To expand into international markets, they need to present existing activity to draw and retain users. But I don't see a problem with this.

iamacyborg 3y ago

Yikes that DM in the first comment from a Reddit admin basically asking the community member to perform free labour.

yung_steezy 3y ago
Reddit is built on free mod labour. I remember seeing a relationship advice thread from a woman who was concerned her partner thought being a reddit mod equated to having a second job. https://teddit.net/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_husband_is_the_moderator_for_a_few_different/ https://teddit.net/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_husba...
- KomoD 3y ago
  Proper link: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_husband_is_the_moderator_for_a_few_different/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_h...

jollofricepeas 3y ago

I find it funny that… Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data via the API. So far… - PaLM - GPT3 - Falcon Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it’s not a non-profit. But that doesn’t mean they should be forced to provide a low cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire investor community backing LLM startups. Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon

rcxdude 3y ago
It's quite key to the legal strategy of all the LLMs that they do not need a license for their input data. So if they want reddit data they'll just scrape it (which is also legally protected). And if they do need a license then reddit does not have one to sell to the AI companies, at least for most of the text on their site. I don't believe it's a reasonable strategy for any platform (except maybe marketplaces like shutterstock) to attempt to charge money for data for machine learning.
oldandboring 3y ago
I find it funny also. This fact seemed to have its moment in the sun for about 15 minutes a few months ago when everyone was first talking about ChatGPT and then everyone forgot?
andrewxdiamond 3y ago
Reddit is able to license its content in a way that prevents companies from using it while leaving the API free. In fact, making the API paid does nothing for that goal. Scrapping has been long established as legal so if their license doesn’t change, nothing about LLMs using their content will either
- pierat 3y ago
  > Reddit is able to license its content in a way that prevents companies from using it while leaving the API free. And there's the scam laid bare. It's *NOT* Reddit's content. Sure, by posting you're granting them a whole slew of rights. But you dont transfer ownership to them. And when your content creators leave, blammo, you have no more new content. And I'm already seeing some subreddits drop dramatically in terms of comments and posts. Tech ones, naturally. Turns out Lemmy is actually pretty cool for a fediverse version of reddit. We're already seeing the start of death of Imgur as "reddit image host", oh wait "imgur social network", oh wait "no porn Imgur". We all know how this works out. Same game, just a bit ahead of reddit.

anlaw 3y ago

Do you think humans would do that? Intentionally instigate online engagement for profit?

ericmcer 3y ago

It's behaving like a VC funded unicorn that is trying to get their IPO payday but it really isn't that at all. Sucks.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Bystander22 3y ago

That's part of a whole program; while reddit lets many mods work for free they are paying these "mods" $20/hour to "organically" drum up subscribers on non-US subs. I shared some links about this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481478

koyote 3y ago

Whenever I read r/de or r/France I am always surprised by the higher quality of the comments compared to any of the English subs. I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing. Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.