Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”
On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Reddit has entered a contract with Google, which will license its content for $60 million a year in order to train Google’s AI models.
Remember when Reddit had a daily donation goal to cover “site maintenance costs?”
They already monetized their fucking users, they’ve had users straight handing them money for fucking years now (sometimes for basically nothing in return!), but that’s never enough for these god damned vampires.
You know how spez was bitching about how reddit never made a profit? Yeah, now we know why. You know what his compensation was last year? $193,000,000. Fuck that arrogant prick.
Yeah, and they gave the COO like another 93 million. Yet somehow we’re the “landed gentry”.
Not to take Reddit’s / spez side, but to clarify, that’s not actually what he got in cash - what he got in cash on 2023 was something around 600k.
Those 193mil was in stock. Which kind of explains his drive to monetize users and kick out third-party apps: that piece of paper is only worth that much as long as he can keep the stock value afloat.
I can’t understand how investors would fall for this. For the sake of humanity and my own mental health I hope they don’t. But I have a suspicion they will, and it goes to shows how fucked up the world is.
It’s why they released news of the actual IPO on the same day they released the news of Google buying our data: they want to tie reddit and Google together in the public’s mine, make reddit seem better than it is.
All I see is these fake fucks with no fangs tryna draw blood from my ice-cold veins.
But back then Reddit still believed in opening up their platform, and their relation with their users was not adversarial. Their source code was even available on GitHub with an open source license! It didn’t feel much different to us sending monthly donations to instance admins and Lemmy devs now on Lemmy. People genuinely didn’t want Reddit to shut down back then.
Remember when Reddit had a daily donation goal to cover “site maintenance costs?”
Remember those paid rewards too, under which it was written that they are, eh, the monetization.
You mean the paid awards in September they just got rid of because Fuck Users?
If you are in the EU file a complaint under the GDPR with your supervisory authority. They are processing data of people and especially children here that they have no right to at all. Users were not informed, no opt out, nothing. This is extremely illegal in the EU. Not to mention all that data on special categories like health data, sexual orientation ,ethnicity, etc. Etc.
I’ve made a write up for you to follow along and reference: https://kbin.social/m/reddit@lemmy.world/t/854162/Any-EU-based-users-of-reddit-should-immediately-file-a
tl;dr instructions towards the end.
I’ve made a write up for you to follow along and reference: https://kbin.social/m/reddit@lemmy.world/t/854162/Any-EU-based-users-of-reddit-should-immediately-file-a
Just curious, shouldn’t that Federate and be available over here as well?
I wasn’t really against Reddit when I left to go on Lemmy. It was mostly to try something which is luving because of its users.
Now I’m glad I did.
Ditto. I left during the api stuff, but left my account in case they calmed down and realized it was stupid. The whole ‘selling data for ai training’ and actually filing for an ipo is what actually drove me to delete my 15 year old account today
Eh, deleting accounts does little. I am just going to sell my old accounts to spammers/bots after IPO. They all are old and have no emails attached yet.
company exists for 19 years.
is still in the “early stages” of figuring out how to even make money.
Yup, that is DEFINITELY a solid buy for institutional investors during the ipo!
figuring out how to even make money
Which, to be crystal clear, they have never accomplished
And then they disclose both their users and Huffman are volatile and pose a risk.
If selling all the data is early stages, I want to know what late stage monetization looks like. Pay a fee to get unbanned? Fines if the post gets down voted?
I’ve never bothered with them, but aren’t there already? Additional stuff for your personal avatar?
