Interesting read. I get where he’s coming from vis a vis training data for LLMs. But if those are the problem, negotiate a solution with those companies or block their crawlers. Don’t kill the apps making the site usable for everyone else.
No doubt, his comments are accurate as far as they go albeit completely out of context. I’d be much more interested in knowing how many of the top 100 subs (rather than top 5000) have reopened. I’d like to know what “top” even means here. I’m sure that 97% of mods don’t use 3rd party apps (according to Huffman) because they mod subs of a few dozen to a few hundred members or their subs are almost completely inactive.
In other words, this is interesting damage control, but it needs a lot more context. And NPR’s quality control and fact-checking are sadly lacking.
Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site.
…
Huffman acknowledged that if those users instead browsed with Reddit’s own app, it would shore up the company’s bottom line.
Hmm.
44 of the top 100 are still closed: https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
Thanks for the info. I’ve been following the Reddark site, but it’s a broad brush without detailed metrics. I can’t help noticing that all 203 sites that Photon-Reddit has still marked as dark have more than 1m members. Many have a few dozens of millions. That must be having an impact.
wow that’s got some seriously detailed info - it’s dataisbeautiful worthy
Friendly heads-up @CaptObvious@lemmy.world, this community (Lemmyworld) is starting to be moderated to be more about this server in particular as it notes in the sidebar.
Threads like this are probably better suited to the newly formed Reddit news community or General community.
Meanwhile, companies that already copy the whole web for their search engines (e.g. Microsoft and Google) still don’t need to make API calls to get Reddit posts.
More generally, anything that can be seen by a not-logged-in browser can be indexed by search engines and thus ingested into any training pipeline you can imagine.
This is part of my complaint against Reddit doing this. Google and Microsoft already have the data, they are just ensuring smaller companies and open source LLMs fail. I am also a little annoyed by the app thing, but I think it’s important that we don’t let tech giants monopolize this new technology.
I deleted my reddit post history, it’s not their data to sell.
Really a terrible interview. Bobby Allyn needed to have some pushback or followup questions, instead of just publishing a statement with little to no context.
