One of Spez’s answers in the infamous Reddit AMA struck me

Two things happened at the same time: the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront, and our continuing efforts to reign in costs…

I am beginning to think all they wanted to do was getting their share of the AI pie, since we know Reddit’s data is one of the major datasets for training conversetional models. But they are such a bunch of bumbling fools, as well as being chronically understaffed, the whole thing exploded in their face. At this stage their only chance if survival may well be to be bought out by OpenAI…

    • I am sorry but you don’t know what you are talking about. These things are regulated by legal documents, you don’t just wake up on morning and say “trust me bro, their data is public”

      If you go and read their TnC’s it explicitly statea that scraping is forbidden without prioir written consent. They only allow access to their data via APIs, which of course they charge for

      The fact that it can be easily scraped it’s neither here nor there, if they catch you they can sue you