Maybe they just need to post another phone recording that directly shows Huffman is a blatant liar and see what ācorrectionsā come from PR.
A fullscreen button for vertical video bullshit that was copied from a TikTok post, which was clipped from a real podcast? Iām shocked this doesnāt also have JPEG artifacts and Facebook reaction memes.
Can anyone explain to me, please, how is this good (financially) for the reddit investors? I mean, I ran from reddit since I only accessed it from sync. Didnāt really care for the āpoliticsā. Now I get here and see thereās a lot more to it than just the shut down of 3rd party apps (which I understood as a financial decision). If moneyās the motivation for all of this, how is it financially healthy?
Itās not clear to me that this decision is financially healthy for Reddit. Even aside from the consequences of upsetting a lot of users (which has already made advertisers unhappy, since they prefer to advertise to people who arenāt upset; thereās been a noticeable decrease in ad spending on the site lately), Reddit only makes money from this move if anyone actually pays for the API, and/or they can force more people to use the official app. Whether they get more takers for the app, I donāt know. Weāll find out next week. But I donāt think a lot of people are going to pay for the API. Most third-party apps canāt, and neither can a lot of people who might use the API for research.
Basically, only big companies can afford the new prices, and if big companies pay, Reddit will make a profit. But big companies donāt become big companies by paying for overpriced commodities. API access for sites that have similar content costs a lot less than what Reddit wants. So, of the big companies that could pay, Microsoft is quietly modifying its products to avoid paying (you canāt upload from their hardware directly to Reddit anymore, for example). Google is introducing a service that is meant to take traffic away from Reddit, I doubt theyāll want to buy overpriced API data. AIs have already slurped up a lot of Reddit data, and can just scrape the site if they want more. The API is not the only way for bots to get access to Redditās data, just the easiest. Probably someone is going to pay for API access, at least in the short term, but I really donāt see this going well in the long run. People just donāt buy products that cost more than theyāre worth. Even if Redditās data was worth the inflated price theyāre asking, the API is not the only way to get that data. And I am pretty sure itās not that valuable to anyone except the people who canāt afford it.
Third party apps are the only ones who need API access to survive, and therefore the ideal customers for Redditās API, but Reddit would rather fish for the customers that arenāt there than do business with the customers that are. Or, were, until a few weeks ago. Nowānot so much. Christian Selig could have put a significant chunk of change in Redditās pocket on an ongoing basis if theyād negotiated a decent price, since Apollo was doing well, and Selig wanted to work with them, but no, Reddit had to ask a price Selig literally couldnāt pay, so Reddit gets nothing, users lose Apollo, and no one is happy. Infinity is going to try to make it work, but I doubt thatāll be much money for Reddit, and I doubt itāll last more than a year, tops.
To be fair, in theory, charging for API access would give Reddit an additional revenue stream, which is probably what Huffman told investors. But no company that actually makes money from selling API access does it at this price point, or without, yāknowā¦ trying to keep customers instead of chasing them off. This is how Twitter did it, and Twitter is losing more money on a regular basis than Reddit has ever made. But itās not my business, so what do I knowā¦ [/Kermit drinking tea]
Reddit totally has the potential to compete with tiktok in the mindless scrolling for a much more massive audience.
They can consolidate all their users and better track their routines and serve them more mindless addicting content which advertisers love.
I expect there will be major changes to how the app works in a few months to the point it becomes completely unrecognisable. Kind of like how musical.ly turned into tiktok overnight
If Reddit kills 3rd party apps it can absorb (or at least hope to do so) users of those apps and have complete control over how they access Reddit. Reddit can then feed them more ads, trackers and whatnot, all of which would translate into more revenue for Reddit, which is a net positive for shareholders.
Thereās also the fact that companies training LLMs would be interested in paying those exorbitant fees to get training data as they likely can afford those fees.
So in short, Reddit likely wants to become a content farm for LLMs. As for the users, Reddit doesnāt care given their recent statements. So if some c*cks stay on Reddit, spez will just inundate them with more ads because why not, free money is free money, until everyone leaves.
Please correct me if Iām mistaken but isnāt the reddit dataset used to train LLMs from before Chat GPT became widely known? I was under the impression data from that point onwards was poisoned and not useful for training purposes
I canāt seem to find it now but I remember there being a ~90gb .zip megadb upload that got passed around a lot on machine learning reddit subs that was a snapshot of reddit before x date
Maybe, the problem with old reddit is that itās as much about the comments as it is the content. Comments are hard to advertise on. Where card style scrolling content is great for advertising. Scroll a couple cards with a 20-60 second engagement, look at an ad, scroll a little more. . ā¦
However, I donāt see this as being a great way to farm content for language models, the content engagement tends to drop significantly with the endless scrolling so my guess is that itās a short term play to prove they can sell ads before the IPO.
Third party app users only made up ~3% of total reddit traffic. The revenue potential there is miniscule. It was never about the money, but about control.
I donāt trust reddit reporting that value accurately. Not saying it is a huge percentage, but they likely doing some things to minimize the numerator and maximize the denominator.
But yeah, definitely about control. They could have monetized users on third party apps with more reasonable API pricing. People would probably have barely noticed and thatād be new revenue for reddit that didnāt exist before.
Oh, that felt soooo good to watch.