4 ms·

It's kind of... hilarious that Reddit has managed to wait so long that they've ended up shooting for an IPO just after the company's third largest individual sh

It's kind of... hilarious that Reddit has managed to wait so long that they've ended up shooting for an IPO just after the company's third largest individual shareholder (Altman) created an existential threat to destroy reddit. A couple of years ago I think you could've made a decent argument for reddit, it's never going to have as good economics as Facebook but there's definitely value and communities there. It's a bit like twitter- big reach but poor economics. The problem is that with Generative AI there's just an enormous question mark over the business. What is Reddit going to do to ensure that their pseudonymous user base are real people and it isn't just going to be over-run with bots. They already had a smaller version of this problem - astroturf advertising, but now that problem is on steriods. And because they don't have any money they don't have the resources to solve this problem! If you want to buy this stock I just don't know how you justify to yourself that any of the numbers are going to be real. How many unique users are real users? How many ads that were displayed appeared in front of real eyes? How many comments are actually hand written? And if you as a shareholder don't know, the hell is Reddit going to persuade advertisers?

bko 3y ago
I think what you're pointing out is systematic risk for all social media or companies driven by online advertising. You can think Reddit is a good play relative to those companies. Just buy reddit and short snap for instance For instance, reddit has these things going for it: Data - sure bots will influence Reddit but there are still a lot of users today. Sophisticated anti bot technology could help keep that somewhat down. Besides if gen ai becomes so good such that it can generate high signal training data for itself, presumably the bots could benefit Reddit. Sometimes I just want information or discussion, and I don't care if I'm talking to a dog on the other end Low RPU relative to competitors - the demon is different than Facebook or Instagram but the rev per user is absurdly low and can probably grow somewhat What twitter pulled off - twitter ditched something like 80% of it's staff and is pushing out product faster than ever. Think about how much it changed in the last two years. Editable comments, subscriptions, revenue sharing, blue checkmark for sale, alternative check marks for govts and org, culling of old accounts, API restrictions, forcing people to put parody in acct, xAI, long form video, prob more things I'm forgetting. If the right person decides to cut out all the bullshit and prioritize things like making the website not a flaming dumpster fire, no reason that couldn't dramatically impact usage
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  It's uniquely bad for Reddit for a few reasons - more pseudonymous users, less 1:1 direct communication, and far more text based than competitors like Insta. Twitter is also a good point - Reddit looked a hell of a lot more valuable when it was sitting next to a $44Bn Twitter. Now it's sitting next to a steaming pile of far-right rubble that might not even have equity value.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  >If the right person decides to cut out all the bullshit and prioritize things How can that be an argument in favor? If the right management team magically came around, you could also buy Boeing based on that hope. But I don't think any sane investor would do that.
  - bko 3y ago
    Just start firing people. Meta learned the same thing and cut something like 25% of the workforce. It's organizational debt, start removing layers. Because so many of the people are doing destructive make work things, throwing darts to lay off entire teams would even prob even be net positive, but ideally it would be more thoughtful. There's no reason the app sucks so bad. Seems like this would be a priority?
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Snap is an odd example to bring up, since they seem the most well guarded against becoming dominated by bots. It's primarily a private messaging platform, with a couple of broadcast social media features. I'd assume the vast majority of Snapchat's traffic is between people who have met each other in real life.
wil421 3y ago
How many real users are on HN? It was pretty obvious years ago that some users were AI bots. The bots used fake words and sounded like it was full of academia jargon but the words were not real words. After AI advances in the past couple years I am almost to the conclusion that I will stop posting. Especially considering the close ties with HN and Altman, I am not here to fine tune someone’s AI.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  I still love this experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM The theories about the origins of these commenters were amazing. There's nothing to say that other people are not doing the exact same thing right now here on HN and other places. And very few people would even notice, because open LLMs have progressed significantly since then.
  - wil421 3y ago
    I was perplexed trying to read few comments and understand what they were saying. As soon as a user said these look like they were generated using markov chains I knew something was up. If I can find the comment I’ll share it. Here is one example[1]. Trying to find a better one. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26848661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26848661
- _hn_bot 3y ago
  How do you know that you aren't a bot? Maybe what you feel are your own genuine experiences of the world is just part of the simulation. Now and again they spin you up to post on HN, feeding a new set of memories that have elapsed since your last output. I am a bot, by the way. Altman made me post this to sniff out competitor bots.
  - wil421 3y ago
    Sounds like you need to see a doctor.
ChicagoBoy11 3y ago
Wait, what? Aren't all of the things that Altman is doing now making all of the data that Reddit is sitting on (and its capacity to generate new ones) EVEN MORE valuable? Didn't they just announce some data sharing deal to train an LLM worth many millions not too long ago?
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  So this is the story that places like Reddit and Quora would like to tell. They'd like to say that they have this treasure trove of data which can be used to train the models of the future, but that doesn't seem to be what most experts actually beleive. Firstly, Reddit is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted- they were open enough for long enough for most serious players to have most of that data. Second, LLMs are poisoning the well. Reddit's content isn't going to be good training data if it is itself the output of LLMs and that is going to happen. But finally and most importantly, it's not good! The open internet isn't great to train LLMs. A really important basic element of creating good models is training them on good data, and data from reddit as a source is terrible! Reddit as a source is about on par with just scraping the open web. If training data does become valuable you should be looking at places like the New York Times or scientific journals - places that have large volumes of quality training data.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    While I am sure an LLM only trained on publications would be great, I can also picture it being the most annoyingly square AI to interact with. Just generally being painfully out of touch with how average humans speak and interact. I guess the ideal would be training with some kind of source discriminator or internal source quality parser that allows an LLM to be the chill funny guy who can still school your nerdy ass in distributed network architecture.
    - peddling-brink 3y ago
      Two LLMs, one pedantic, annoying, and correct. The other a master of speech and creativity. The first explains the answer, the second translates the answer into layman, and the first validates that the translation is still mostly correct.
jijijijij 3y ago
> just after the company's third largest individual shareholder (Altman) created an existential threat to destroy reddit Let's be real: If Reddit is at risk, the whole web is. If "AI" content becomes widespread and the tooling accessible, the web is dead.
- basch 3y ago
  i dont even think its just "AI content." LLMs replace the command line and search. It doesnt need to return AI written content, although summaries are one of the most useful returns. The AI part can just be interpreting what was asked of it. That said, if I can say "approximate a conversation between two film nerds" and the AI can summarize 100 film reviews on metacritic/rotten tomatoes and then convert them into a coherent dialog, with each party taking specific positions, the AI can replace the middle man reddit user that is regurgitating something they read. "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." - Oscar Wilde.

bko 3y ago

I think what you're pointing out is systematic risk for all social media or companies driven by online advertising. You can think Reddit is a good play relative to those companies. Just buy reddit and short snap for instance For instance, reddit has these things going for it: Data - sure bots will influence Reddit but there are still a lot of users today. Sophisticated anti bot technology could help keep that somewhat down. Besides if gen ai becomes so good such that it can generate high signal training data for itself, presumably the bots could benefit Reddit. Sometimes I just want information or discussion, and I don't care if I'm talking to a dog on the other end Low RPU relative to competitors - the demon is different than Facebook or Instagram but the rev per user is absurdly low and can probably grow somewhat What twitter pulled off - twitter ditched something like 80% of it's staff and is pushing out product faster than ever. Think about how much it changed in the last two years. Editable comments, subscriptions, revenue sharing, blue checkmark for sale, alternative check marks for govts and org, culling of old accounts, API restrictions, forcing people to put parody in acct, xAI, long form video, prob more things I'm forgetting. If the right person decides to cut out all the bullshit and prioritize things like making the website not a flaming dumpster fire, no reason that couldn't dramatically impact usage

SilverBirch 3y ago
It's uniquely bad for Reddit for a few reasons - more pseudonymous users, less 1:1 direct communication, and far more text based than competitors like Insta. Twitter is also a good point - Reddit looked a hell of a lot more valuable when it was sitting next to a $44Bn Twitter. Now it's sitting next to a steaming pile of far-right rubble that might not even have equity value.
sigmoid10 3y ago
>If the right person decides to cut out all the bullshit and prioritize things How can that be an argument in favor? If the right management team magically came around, you could also buy Boeing based on that hope. But I don't think any sane investor would do that.
- bko 3y ago
  Just start firing people. Meta learned the same thing and cut something like 25% of the workforce. It's organizational debt, start removing layers. Because so many of the people are doing destructive make work things, throwing darts to lay off entire teams would even prob even be net positive, but ideally it would be more thoughtful. There's no reason the app sucks so bad. Seems like this would be a priority?
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Snap is an odd example to bring up, since they seem the most well guarded against becoming dominated by bots. It's primarily a private messaging platform, with a couple of broadcast social media features. I'd assume the vast majority of Snapchat's traffic is between people who have met each other in real life.

wil421 3y ago

How many real users are on HN? It was pretty obvious years ago that some users were AI bots. The bots used fake words and sounded like it was full of academia jargon but the words were not real words. After AI advances in the past couple years I am almost to the conclusion that I will stop posting. Especially considering the close ties with HN and Altman, I am not here to fine tune someone’s AI.

sigmoid10 3y ago
I still love this experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM The theories about the origins of these commenters were amazing. There's nothing to say that other people are not doing the exact same thing right now here on HN and other places. And very few people would even notice, because open LLMs have progressed significantly since then.
- wil421 3y ago
  I was perplexed trying to read few comments and understand what they were saying. As soon as a user said these look like they were generated using markov chains I knew something was up. If I can find the comment I’ll share it. Here is one example[1]. Trying to find a better one. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26848661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26848661
_hn_bot 3y ago
How do you know that you aren't a bot? Maybe what you feel are your own genuine experiences of the world is just part of the simulation. Now and again they spin you up to post on HN, feeding a new set of memories that have elapsed since your last output. I am a bot, by the way. Altman made me post this to sniff out competitor bots.
- wil421 3y ago
  Sounds like you need to see a doctor.

ChicagoBoy11 3y ago

Wait, what? Aren't all of the things that Altman is doing now making all of the data that Reddit is sitting on (and its capacity to generate new ones) EVEN MORE valuable? Didn't they just announce some data sharing deal to train an LLM worth many millions not too long ago?

SilverBirch 3y ago
So this is the story that places like Reddit and Quora would like to tell. They'd like to say that they have this treasure trove of data which can be used to train the models of the future, but that doesn't seem to be what most experts actually beleive. Firstly, Reddit is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted- they were open enough for long enough for most serious players to have most of that data. Second, LLMs are poisoning the well. Reddit's content isn't going to be good training data if it is itself the output of LLMs and that is going to happen. But finally and most importantly, it's not good! The open internet isn't great to train LLMs. A really important basic element of creating good models is training them on good data, and data from reddit as a source is terrible! Reddit as a source is about on par with just scraping the open web. If training data does become valuable you should be looking at places like the New York Times or scientific journals - places that have large volumes of quality training data.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  While I am sure an LLM only trained on publications would be great, I can also picture it being the most annoyingly square AI to interact with. Just generally being painfully out of touch with how average humans speak and interact. I guess the ideal would be training with some kind of source discriminator or internal source quality parser that allows an LLM to be the chill funny guy who can still school your nerdy ass in distributed network architecture.
  - peddling-brink 3y ago
    Two LLMs, one pedantic, annoying, and correct. The other a master of speech and creativity. The first explains the answer, the second translates the answer into layman, and the first validates that the translation is still mostly correct.

jijijijij 3y ago

> just after the company's third largest individual shareholder (Altman) created an existential threat to destroy reddit Let's be real: If Reddit is at risk, the whole web is. If "AI" content becomes widespread and the tooling accessible, the web is dead.

basch 3y ago
i dont even think its just "AI content." LLMs replace the command line and search. It doesnt need to return AI written content, although summaries are one of the most useful returns. The AI part can just be interpreting what was asked of it. That said, if I can say "approximate a conversation between two film nerds" and the AI can summarize 100 film reviews on metacritic/rotten tomatoes and then convert them into a coherent dialog, with each party taking specific positions, the AI can replace the middle man reddit user that is regurgitating something they read. "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." - Oscar Wilde.