9 ms·
Reddit signs $60M content licensing deal with AI company
- tonystubblebine 3y agoI’m not surprised. There had been some talks among various platforms to form a coalition and the reason we (Medium) thought they broke down was because people were trying to cut individual deals. I think this is overall bad for the internet because it cuts creators out of the decision and compensation.
- jelder 3y agoSeems like a good time to stop posting original content on Reddit for free.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoYeah - I was going to keep my existing stuff up, but I think I'll clear out my account's previous posts and comments.
- cobertos 3y agoI deleted all the content on my main account. Most of it wasn't useful, but a couple of posts and threads ranked well on Google and I like to think that hurts the site just a little bit.
- jtriangle 3y agoI used a rust port of shreddit to delete all my posts across all my accounts, such that when logged in, there are no posts on my profile, however, I spent about a month on and off googling my username and finding posts that didn't stay deleted but wouldn't show up on my profile. So I'd guess that reddit somehow restored some number of posts, and it seems to occasionally continue to do so. In terms of hurting the site, it absolutely does. Reddit is a ghost town, and I find deleted posts constantly that google thinks are relevant. It's a shame it had to be this way.
- ametrau 3y agoThe key thing is not to delete all your posts but overwrite a couple of times (to bust their cache). And then leave the account active with no real posts. There’s a few projects that will do this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aldarisbm 3y agogood luck on actually "deleting" your data
- FireBeyond 3y agoThe best that can be done, where possible, is to edit each comment down to whitespace, save that, and then delete it. But yeah, probably still not technically good enough.
- justaj 3y agoI archive (in multiple places, including locally) all of the threads that I add as sources to my personal knowledge base. I'm sorry, but shared knowledge and wisdom I can refer to in the future is more important than your "protest voice" against a centralized platform. I recommend that if you want to delete something, then delete your account only. Your username won't be visible, but the content still will be.
- hugi 3y agoI've been working on deleting my reddit posts over the past year. The site now feels like it's almost 100% bots, which I find more than a little sad.
- nickthegreek 3y agoThere are scripts that can do this all for you in an instant.
- hugi 3y agoThanks for the pointer! And yes, there are, but I kind of enjoy going through the comment history while deleting. Memories :).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- al_borland 3y agoI wrote myself a little python script to do this a while back. I’m not sure that it will still work due to their API changes. A longer while back I wrote a little JS bookmarklet to do it. It could just do a page at a time, which was annoying, but not too bad. However, when they would change the site, it would stop working and need to be fixed. Remember to edit the comment before you delete it. From what I read, deleting a comment just sets a flag on the comment as delete, so it’s still in the DB for them to sell. Making it garbage text will kill the value of the comment in the DB as well, and probably really screw with the AI trying to train from it.
- wetpaws 3y ago[dead]
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- goles 3y agoReuters article cites Bloomberg article here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-16/reddit-is-said-to-sign-ai-content-licensing-deal-ahead-of-ipo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-16/reddit-is... https://archive.is/caW1Y https://archive.is/caW1Y https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39404051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39404051 (15 hours ago, 29 points)
- m0guz 3y agoI am glad I trashed my reddit posts/comments before deleting accounts with shreddit [0]. [0] https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jtriangle 3y agoI did the same, but, it seems reddit has some capability to restore posts anyway, as I keep finding original posts of mine via google while my logged in profile remains blank... It's to the point where I search for them every few weeks and take time to edit and delete them manually, after which they seem to stay gone. My best guess is that they can detect mass deletion and have some sort of automation that restores posts at (seemingly ) random. Either that or their platform is broken enough that editing or deleting posts isn't reliably committed to disk.
- GRISELDA 3y agoHacker News users love to act like they are the most intelligent people on the internet but in reality they have no idea what they are talking about if it isn't about some obscure programming language. There is no conspiracy to restore deleted comments lol. You can only retrieve 1000 items with Reddit's API so when you use Shreddit to delete your posts only 1000 are deleted. Everything else before that remains untouched. Use PullPush to really delete everything.
- jtriangle 3y agoYou misunderstand, likely because you were too excited to be snarky. My reddit profile was empty, I'm aware of the api limitations, I read the readme.md, shreddit ran on a loop for 24 hours, each time pulling 1000 posts, editing, and deleting them. My profile is still empty, and currently my google results are empty, but in another few weeks some will pop up again, but still won't show in my reddit profile. Clear enough for you?
- 34679 3y agoReddit's MO is snark and sarcasm. It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where a LLM trained on reddit would be useful for anything serious. How do they propose to seperate fact from fiction?
- pavel_lishin 3y agoThere are a lot of subreddits, and they vary wildly. Something trained on r/askhistorians could spew out a lot of very plausible sounding bullshit.
- anotherhue 3y agoYou needn't wonder, though it's a little behind the times now. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/
- pier25 3y agoThat's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a reason plenty of people append "reddit" to their google searches.
- data-ottawa 3y agoThe main reasons are to get local content, or to avoid SEO spam sites which provide overly verbose listicles or "review" sites that link out to Amazon affiliate links. Reddit is still one of the few sites left that provide user content openly. FB+Instagram+Twitter are entirely inaccessible if you don't have an account, and a lot of forums do things like only show images to logged in users. I've found the Reddit experience much worse with recent changes. When you land on Reddit from a Google search comment threads are only 1 level deep with a max of only a few replies shown, so you have to load a new page for each response you want to read. It's one of the worst UX I've seen considering that landing from search is probably the most financially lucrative use patterns Reddit has.
- fragmede 3y agowhich is really fascinating in the face of TikTok being Googleable. like, it's still not there, but being able to Google for a TikTok but not an Instagram reel is something.
- pier25 3y agoGood time to create a community for artists that doesn't allow AI scraping.
- bjelkeman-again 3y agoMaybe something like https://www.royalroad.com https://www.royalroad.com
- leobg 3y agoHow can they license something that they didn’t author? Yes, they have TOS. But training generative AI wasn’t something that existed when ~99% of Reddit’s content was created, hence users could not possibly have consented to it. Besides, at least in Germany, TOS cannot contain regulations that are “surprising” or “unexpected”. Using my content to serve ads is one thing I might expect. But licensing it out for a fee to third parties? I don’t think so.
- PM_me_your_math 3y agoBecause it is reddit, one of the most vile companies on the planet.
- andrewinardeer 3y agoSays the guy with the Reddit meme username on Hacker News.
- AznHisoka 3y agoFWIW, they already have been licensing their data for years to social media management platforms (ie SproutSocial, Sprinklr)
- mtillman 3y agoIt’s an American company. Bullets didn’t exist when the 2nd amendment was created but they’re still protected as arms. Also, basic internet concept, if you do something on someone else’s property, it’s theirs. This site is also a source of training material for ML and has been for a very long time.
- bewaretheirs 3y ago> Bullets didn’t exist when the 2nd amendment was created Uh, what? Wikipedia dates the first bullet to the 13th century: > Fire lance barrels made of metal appeared by 1276.[30] Earlier in 1259 a pellet wad that filled the barrel was recorded to have been used as a fire lance projectile, making it the first recorded bullet in history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun#Transition_to_true_guns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun#Transition_to_true_guns
- cuckatoo 3y agoThey could've saved themselves $60M by just downloading the torrent of the data.
- bryan0 3y agoNot if you include expected future legal fees. This also seems to imply if you train on Reddit data without a license Reddit will sue you.
- timeon 3y agoBut there is lot of content on Reddit wich is not original. Often just screen-shoted/reposted licensed content. Will this be 'reddit-washing' of original licenses?
- blindriver 3y agoThis is exactly my point for many years now. Reddit exists because of the free work of the various subreddit communities and their moderators. And in return they get nothing. But the company, the investors and employees will all become rich off of it. It’s weird how no one cares that Reddit isn’t trickling down anything to the people that make the site a success.
- s1k3s 3y agoYou're saying it as if someone from Reddit came into your house and forced you to become a moderator or user who submits content. Is that true? Of course not, people are willingly creating communities and willingly submit content to the site. Reddit exists because millions of people like it. Reddit also exists because hundreds of developers created it while other people are paying for its infrastructure.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chollida1 3y agoEvery year, I pay to play hockey. I pay for new equipment, jerseys, referees and ice time. And the arena gets paid by selling food to people who come to my games, sell advertising on the boards, beer to fans. What do I get and why is none of this money trickling down to me? Clearly I get the enjoyment of being Canadian and playing hockey. Reditors are no different. None of them were tricked, they participate on the site by writing comments or submitting articles because the get enjoyment out of it. I don't expect to see a dime from the arena when I play hockey and they make money from it and no redditor expects to see a dime when they participate on the site and the site makes money form it. If you think its weird that a for profit company is making money and no one is complaining, its because everyone went into the deal knowing exactly what's what. No one was tricked or deceived.
- mandmandam 3y ago> None of them were tricked They were tricked from day one, when the founders pretended to be different people to make the site look busier than it really was. They are tricked every day by bots, troll farms, spammers, astroturfers, bought-out moderators, corrupt admins, etc. Go look at the founders page, where Aaron Swartz used to be. Look into who maxwellhill probably was (first Redditor to a million karma and mod of some huge and deranged subs like worldnews). Look into how certain keywords get shadowbanned. Look into the mod and admin cabals with their private agendas. Look into the way many national subs were taken over in quiet coups. There are nice things about Reddit, even today, but the idea that users know what they're getting into is deeply naive.
- fallingknife 3y agoAm I the only one who couldn't care less if something I write is used to train an LLM? Much better than the current tracking that is the norm.
- CamelCaseName 3y ago> worth $60 million on an annualized basis Reddit is pulling out all the stops for their upcoming IPO and it still amounts to nearly nothing. Bringing back r/place to juice user count, killing the API, destroying their mobile site, and that's just the start. That's why they are only planning a "very small float", there's simply no interest. It seems even at just $5 billion, the valuation is too rich.
- data-ottawa 3y agoI'm not surprised they made this deal, but $60M feels low for the cost of killing their 3P APIs. I can only assume the price is because the license is non-exclusive and they think they can get other big fish to bite. They can offer higher quality and more timely data than scrapers can, so there is a value proposition there.
- antisthenes 3y agoI'm actually curious if Reddit's going to be the first successful example of monetizing what is essentially a community into an IPO fast enough before normies get on it and start flooding it with their low-effort takes and celebrity gossip drivel. I know this is possible to do by other communities like paid forums (SomethingAwful), or grow into an adjacent e-commerce supported community (e.g. bodybuilding forums), but is it possible to do it on Reddit's scale? We'll see. I have no horse in the race either way, most of my posts on there are from the Reddit vs Digg era, so I'm not really invested.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ametrau 3y agoKilling the api was a massive mistake. They should have worked with appolo et al to broker a deal. They had a the best of both worlds, other people tackling the app development for them and they just needed to take a reasonable rent.
- vinni2 3y agoTime to stop posting stuff on Reddit.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- selivanovp 3y agoReddit became a weird place in recent months. Rampant propaganda wars in most subreddits, recommending system pushing ridiculous stories to front page feed from subreddits I've never visited before. Even the niche technical subreddits I used to enjoy becoming a battlefield regularly.
- SleepilyLimping 3y agoIt's a US election year /tinfoil