7 ms·

Reddit really is desperate for this IPO isn't it. This pricing decision is a total debacle. They're clearly going to try and tell a story about how their data s

Reddit really is desperate for this IPO isn't it. This pricing decision is a total debacle. They're clearly going to try and tell a story about how their data set is massively valuable for AI (it isn't) and that they've got it under lock and key (it's already been crawled by every major player in AI) so that they can get a totally unrealistic valuation at IPO. It makes sense, imagine how incredible it would be if you could get an Nvidia level multiple at IPO. Unfortunately in the process they're killing the actual product. They're trying to backtrack to try and paper over this but you really can't get past the fact that what they're doing is deliberately attacking their own users and community. So they're trying to go "err uhh well, if you're exclusively using the API for accessbility and not making any money"... alright, we'll let you fix our broken shitty site but only if you take a vow of poverty. The correct answer from any developer to this should be clear "Fuck you pay me.". The relationship between Reddit and it's community is very delicate, so it seems pretty silly for Reddit to decide to crash it into a wall shortly before their IPO. They might get the IPO pop they want - I doubt it, they're smashing the long term viability of the company.

sebzim4500 3y ago
I think their data set is valuable, it's just freely available for anyone to scrape (or as you say, has already been scraped).
- MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  You can’t scrape it anymore. It’s really annoying because I was just scraping individual posts to save them and now I can’t.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Pretend you are a bing bot
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    What happens when you try?
gremlinsinc 3y ago
it's not even like they need the API, they can get all the Reddit data simply by scraping, it's all crawlable by bing bot, if search indexes can index it, that same data can be extrapolated for ai training. you know who can't do that in a meaningful way? apps that really matter to core Reddit users, they need the API and are the only ones hurt by this.
dmix 3y ago
> try and tell a story about how their data set is massively valuable for AI (it isn't) How would it not be valuable?
- adrr 3y ago
  It’s very valuable. I frequently find my myself adding “reddit” to my google searches looking for conversational information. Eg: trying to figure out what to do in Tokyo on a vacation or an honest review of a new product
- elcomet 3y ago
  It's valuable to train models. It's just not valuable to sell, as it can be accessed freely, and has been dumped multiple times already and used to train models.
- some_random 3y ago
  It's been scraped already by every major player and likely will continue to be scraped because it has to be public in order for the site to function
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    A large chunk it's available online, on archive.org[1] and other places for more recent stuff. [1] https://archive.org/details/2015_reddit_comments_corpus https://archive.org/details/2015_reddit_comments_corpus
phpisthebest 3y ago
I dont think the smoke and mirrors is going work any more... Maybe, but it appears me we are seeing the business cycle return to first principles and things like user engagement, user growth, Daily Active Users, etc that were all used to cover up bad business models and non-profitability in the age of free money are over... an IPO that does not have reddit turning an actual profit (not made up API Money in the future but actual revenue generated from actually selling something to actual clients in an actual market) will be a failure.
- vinyl7 3y ago
  That's probably why they're scrambling....they missed the peak of the bubble
doix 3y ago
> The relationship between Reddit and it's community is very delicate, so it seems pretty silly for Reddit to decide to crash it into a wall shortly before their IPO. They might get the IPO pop they want - I doubt it, they're smashing the long term viability of the company. I'm guessing someone looked at the data and figured that losing x% of users is worth it if they can extract an extra y% profit from the remaining users. We'll shortly see if they are right! If I was in their position, I would just restrict 3rd party app access to Reddit gold subscribers. You would probably lose less users that way, and extract at least some money from them. You'd need to figure out some heuristic to detect when people are "abusing" their reddit gold to scrape all data. And also work with 3rd party developers to reduce the number of API calls they make rather than just being condescending dicks [0]. If they did all that, they could probably even milk it a bit, something like: "We heard the community and we are listening!". [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/jmolrhn/ https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...
- willis936 3y ago
  There's a reason Digg has been mentioned so much around this story. Reddit ate Digg's lunch because Digg made bad decisions. Reddit is making the same flavor of bad decisions and their lunch will be promptly eaten by someone else. It's obviously a losing strategy. Everyone can see it except for the greedy execs seeing dollar signs rather than the real world.
  - sslayer 3y ago
    If anyone else is like me, I'm just looking for the next community so that I can ditch reddit. I'm looking for a site that can maintain free speech,limit the bot noise,draw in real users and foster a real community spirit and attitude without selling out to corporatism, over moderation, and overall corrupt tendencies.
    - IggleSniggle 3y ago
      I’m trying out federated via lemmy (lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, self-host, whatever) which interoperates with mastodon etc. If somebody were to start a larger lemmy server and do Reddit scraping for even just the next couple days, it would probably gain traction pretty quickly. But also that sounds expensive for an enthusiast
_fat_santa 3y ago
Makes me wonder if their IPO will be a flop as a result. If you're a registered investor that would be part of the IPO, I would assume that you are looking at public discourse in addition to whatever IPO docs Reddit might give you. So what does it say about a company about to IPO that's telling you everything is ok on their whitepapers and docs but you look online and see a full blown revolt by their userbase. I hope Reddit has a similar IPO experience that WeWork had, they deserve it.
- fullshark 3y ago
  It won't flop, but they won't hit their projections during the frothiest times of the market and their last funding round. The AI FOMO bull run just shows how much money there is on the sidelines desperate for anything to invest in with growth potential. If the metrics look anything like this: https://backlinko.com/reddit-users https://backlinko.com/reddit-users they will get investors
some_random 3y ago
>alright, we'll let you fix our broken shitty site but only if you take a vow of poverty. What a fantastic way to put it, thinking about it so much of the 3rd party tools for reddit are about fixing the site. Bots, because moderation tools aren't powerful enough for the job, RIF in the browser because even old.reddit is kinda crappy, and 3rd party mobile apps because the 1st party one is notoriously bad.
- reportgunner 3y ago
  I wonder why people keep going to such a trash website, just leave it to die already.
  - philipov 3y ago
    Network effects. It's the same reason people are locked into twitter, even if they want to leave. They can't leave until the other people they depend on leave, and those people are in the same situation. A social network is a molecule, and your bonds will keep you from moving unless the entire molecule decides to move at the same time. That's why Going Dark is an effective threat: it forces everyone to go somewhere else at the same time. Whether you want to exercise voice or exit, dealing with corporations requires organized, collective action.
    - TX81Z 3y ago
      But network effects work in reverse, colony collapse is real.
  - coremoff 3y ago
    It's not a trash website, it's a trash company - it's a forum used by tens of millions of people regularly. I am not looking forward to its demise, and I am sure there are many others looking on in horror at what they're doing to it.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Any community that isn't massive and doesn't get shown on the front page is most likely doing what the community members want. Things only go awry when it gets big enough that corporate starts to pay attention, or "normies" from the /all feed suddenly decide they are subject matter experts and have extremely important opinions.
danShumway 3y ago
> alright, we'll let you fix our broken s** site but only if you take a vow of poverty. I'm so glad someone brought this up. Every conversation I've seen about Reddit's API pricing on HN has had at least one person asking, "well, how are they supposed to fund the site then?" And that's not Reddit-specific, it's a really common talking point whenever a property/platform starts cracking down on fan/volunteer work. But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary. If 3rd-party accessibility services are important for accessing your service, those 3rd-party developers should be allowed to make money off of their stuff. Sometimes "non-commercial" clauses are appropriate for some projects/terms, but sometimes they get really abused and it's worth taking a step back in many situations and asking why they were included in the first place. Community-focused devs like to eat and have housing too.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  Or like, don’t have a website that is a steaming pile of the jankiest JavaScript on the web. The damn site barely works and has crashed my browser more than every other site I visit combined. God help anybody with a screen reader. The other story here is these apps all exist because Reddit the site is a joke from a technical standpoint. It’s just a disaster. The community is why people are there and the apps allow the communities to function.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    This is also a good point. It's somewhat orthogonal to what I'm getting at, my point is more that even if Reddit wasn't in that position it would still be really weird and unreasonable for them to be pushing a non-commercial requirement. But agreed that in addition to the "Open Source developers like to eat" thing, it's also very worthwhile to ask why Reddit isn't accessible to blind users already. Accessibility can be hard, but it's not that hard. It's not so hard that a company with 2000 employees (I guess less now) couldn't do it. Blind accessibility shouldn't be the community's responsibility to fix; and there's an extra layer of absurdity in people fixing Reddit's horrible accessibility for them, for free, and Reddit responding with, "we've decided in our infinite generosity not to charge you money for the privilege of fixing our site. But God help us if we find out that anybody else is giving you money to do it..."
treprinum 3y ago
(2022 snapshot of) Reddit might be the last fully human-prepared dataset there will ever be. That might be their main value.
- dTal 3y ago
  A beautiful thought, except that Attention Is All You Need came out in 2017. ChatGPT was when the hype cycle kicked off, but I guarantee there were LLM-generated comments on it before then, possibly from nation-state-funded propaganda mills - not to mention other, less sophisticated bots.
  - treprinum 3y ago
    Yes, but the real human-like comments were possible only with ChatGPT and I doubt the startups that got GPT-4 early access in 2022 used it to generate Reddit comments. These days a self-hosted Vicuna-LLaMa-13B is good enough to write MBA essays so anything published in 2023 is a suspect.
    - dTal 3y ago
      You don't know that a nation state didn't make something ChatGPT level earlier.
      - treprinum 3y ago
        I doubt it as I was in touch with OpenAI when they were making GPT-4 available last year to their preferred partners. Governments rely on these companies and lag in their capabilities these days.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

sebzim4500 3y ago

I think their data set is valuable, it's just freely available for anyone to scrape (or as you say, has already been scraped).

MagicMoonlight 3y ago
You can’t scrape it anymore. It’s really annoying because I was just scraping individual posts to save them and now I can’t.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Pretend you are a bing bot
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  What happens when you try?

gremlinsinc 3y ago

it's not even like they need the API, they can get all the Reddit data simply by scraping, it's all crawlable by bing bot, if search indexes can index it, that same data can be extrapolated for ai training. you know who can't do that in a meaningful way? apps that really matter to core Reddit users, they need the API and are the only ones hurt by this.

dmix 3y ago

> try and tell a story about how their data set is massively valuable for AI (it isn't) How would it not be valuable?

adrr 3y ago
It’s very valuable. I frequently find my myself adding “reddit” to my google searches looking for conversational information. Eg: trying to figure out what to do in Tokyo on a vacation or an honest review of a new product
elcomet 3y ago
It's valuable to train models. It's just not valuable to sell, as it can be accessed freely, and has been dumped multiple times already and used to train models.
some_random 3y ago
It's been scraped already by every major player and likely will continue to be scraped because it has to be public in order for the site to function
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  A large chunk it's available online, on archive.org[1] and other places for more recent stuff. [1] https://archive.org/details/2015_reddit_comments_corpus https://archive.org/details/2015_reddit_comments_corpus

phpisthebest 3y ago

I dont think the smoke and mirrors is going work any more... Maybe, but it appears me we are seeing the business cycle return to first principles and things like user engagement, user growth, Daily Active Users, etc that were all used to cover up bad business models and non-profitability in the age of free money are over... an IPO that does not have reddit turning an actual profit (not made up API Money in the future but actual revenue generated from actually selling something to actual clients in an actual market) will be a failure.

vinyl7 3y ago
That's probably why they're scrambling....they missed the peak of the bubble

doix 3y ago

> The relationship between Reddit and it's community is very delicate, so it seems pretty silly for Reddit to decide to crash it into a wall shortly before their IPO. They might get the IPO pop they want - I doubt it, they're smashing the long term viability of the company. I'm guessing someone looked at the data and figured that losing x% of users is worth it if they can extract an extra y% profit from the remaining users. We'll shortly see if they are right! If I was in their position, I would just restrict 3rd party app access to Reddit gold subscribers. You would probably lose less users that way, and extract at least some money from them. You'd need to figure out some heuristic to detect when people are "abusing" their reddit gold to scrape all data. And also work with 3rd party developers to reduce the number of API calls they make rather than just being condescending dicks [0]. If they did all that, they could probably even milk it a bit, something like: "We heard the community and we are listening!". [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/jmolrhn/ https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...

willis936 3y ago
There's a reason Digg has been mentioned so much around this story. Reddit ate Digg's lunch because Digg made bad decisions. Reddit is making the same flavor of bad decisions and their lunch will be promptly eaten by someone else. It's obviously a losing strategy. Everyone can see it except for the greedy execs seeing dollar signs rather than the real world.
- sslayer 3y ago
  If anyone else is like me, I'm just looking for the next community so that I can ditch reddit. I'm looking for a site that can maintain free speech,limit the bot noise,draw in real users and foster a real community spirit and attitude without selling out to corporatism, over moderation, and overall corrupt tendencies.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    I’m trying out federated via lemmy (lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, self-host, whatever) which interoperates with mastodon etc. If somebody were to start a larger lemmy server and do Reddit scraping for even just the next couple days, it would probably gain traction pretty quickly. But also that sounds expensive for an enthusiast

_fat_santa 3y ago

Makes me wonder if their IPO will be a flop as a result. If you're a registered investor that would be part of the IPO, I would assume that you are looking at public discourse in addition to whatever IPO docs Reddit might give you. So what does it say about a company about to IPO that's telling you everything is ok on their whitepapers and docs but you look online and see a full blown revolt by their userbase. I hope Reddit has a similar IPO experience that WeWork had, they deserve it.

fullshark 3y ago
It won't flop, but they won't hit their projections during the frothiest times of the market and their last funding round. The AI FOMO bull run just shows how much money there is on the sidelines desperate for anything to invest in with growth potential. If the metrics look anything like this: https://backlinko.com/reddit-users https://backlinko.com/reddit-users they will get investors

some_random 3y ago

>alright, we'll let you fix our broken shitty site but only if you take a vow of poverty. What a fantastic way to put it, thinking about it so much of the 3rd party tools for reddit are about fixing the site. Bots, because moderation tools aren't powerful enough for the job, RIF in the browser because even old.reddit is kinda crappy, and 3rd party mobile apps because the 1st party one is notoriously bad.

reportgunner 3y ago
I wonder why people keep going to such a trash website, just leave it to die already.
- philipov 3y ago
  Network effects. It's the same reason people are locked into twitter, even if they want to leave. They can't leave until the other people they depend on leave, and those people are in the same situation. A social network is a molecule, and your bonds will keep you from moving unless the entire molecule decides to move at the same time. That's why Going Dark is an effective threat: it forces everyone to go somewhere else at the same time. Whether you want to exercise voice or exit, dealing with corporations requires organized, collective action.
  - TX81Z 3y ago
    But network effects work in reverse, colony collapse is real.
- coremoff 3y ago
  It's not a trash website, it's a trash company - it's a forum used by tens of millions of people regularly. I am not looking forward to its demise, and I am sure there are many others looking on in horror at what they're doing to it.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Any community that isn't massive and doesn't get shown on the front page is most likely doing what the community members want. Things only go awry when it gets big enough that corporate starts to pay attention, or "normies" from the /all feed suddenly decide they are subject matter experts and have extremely important opinions.

danShumway 3y ago

> alright, we'll let you fix our broken s** site but only if you take a vow of poverty. I'm so glad someone brought this up. Every conversation I've seen about Reddit's API pricing on HN has had at least one person asking, "well, how are they supposed to fund the site then?" And that's not Reddit-specific, it's a really common talking point whenever a property/platform starts cracking down on fan/volunteer work. But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary. If 3rd-party accessibility services are important for accessing your service, those 3rd-party developers should be allowed to make money off of their stuff. Sometimes "non-commercial" clauses are appropriate for some projects/terms, but sometimes they get really abused and it's worth taking a step back in many situations and asking why they were included in the first place. Community-focused devs like to eat and have housing too.

TX81Z 3y ago
Or like, don’t have a website that is a steaming pile of the jankiest JavaScript on the web. The damn site barely works and has crashed my browser more than every other site I visit combined. God help anybody with a screen reader. The other story here is these apps all exist because Reddit the site is a joke from a technical standpoint. It’s just a disaster. The community is why people are there and the apps allow the communities to function.
- danShumway 3y ago
  This is also a good point. It's somewhat orthogonal to what I'm getting at, my point is more that even if Reddit wasn't in that position it would still be really weird and unreasonable for them to be pushing a non-commercial requirement. But agreed that in addition to the "Open Source developers like to eat" thing, it's also very worthwhile to ask why Reddit isn't accessible to blind users already. Accessibility can be hard, but it's not that hard. It's not so hard that a company with 2000 employees (I guess less now) couldn't do it. Blind accessibility shouldn't be the community's responsibility to fix; and there's an extra layer of absurdity in people fixing Reddit's horrible accessibility for them, for free, and Reddit responding with, "we've decided in our infinite generosity not to charge you money for the privilege of fixing our site. But God help us if we find out that anybody else is giving you money to do it..."

treprinum 3y ago

(2022 snapshot of) Reddit might be the last fully human-prepared dataset there will ever be. That might be their main value.

dTal 3y ago
A beautiful thought, except that Attention Is All You Need came out in 2017. ChatGPT was when the hype cycle kicked off, but I guarantee there were LLM-generated comments on it before then, possibly from nation-state-funded propaganda mills - not to mention other, less sophisticated bots.
- treprinum 3y ago
  Yes, but the real human-like comments were possible only with ChatGPT and I doubt the startups that got GPT-4 early access in 2022 used it to generate Reddit comments. These days a self-hosted Vicuna-LLaMa-13B is good enough to write MBA essays so anything published in 2023 is a suspect.
  - dTal 3y ago
    You don't know that a nation state didn't make something ChatGPT level earlier.
    - treprinum 3y ago
      I doubt it as I was in touch with OpenAI when they were making GPT-4 available last year to their preferred partners. Governments rely on these companies and lag in their capabilities these days.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]