Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while “other” revenue reached $33.2 million on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.
In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now, Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.
Deceased users’ estates still haven’t agreed to the new terms, have they?
I really wanted that site to crash and burn. Oh well.
Fuck Spez
(Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)
After selling user generated content to Ai.
Doesn’t seem like that gravy train will roll on forever
ok now i am 100% sure im hoping for an ai bubble
apparently, the path to profitability was “shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit”
Well and behind it is stealing other peoples’ work (posts and comments, moderation and administration) and selling them as yours. The oldest capitalist criminal trick in the book: privatization AKA primitive accumulation AKA enclosure of the commons.
I mean, to be fair, I’m nearly positive that the Reddit T&Cs will have said they retain rights to anything posted there for ages. And the AI bubble is already showing signs of deflation or bursting coming not too far down the line. Let them enjoy their first and hopefully only profitable year.
No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.
But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.
I never was arguing against that. Also I’m pretty sure their moral compass was pushed by the feds until he topped himself, so nothing about their bullshit has surprised me since.
TBH, it feels like social media always needed some back door business like this to make it profitable.
It’s almost like human communication is not supposed to be a product or something…
98 million are bots
Indeed, you will note that they carefully chose the moniker “Daily Active Uniques” and not “Daily Active Users”.
I think that speaks volumes, as humans are definitely harder to retain.
Really wonder how they plan to increase their revenue on the AI training data, especially now that a significant amount of their data is “poisoned” by the models they try to train
A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.
I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.
35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.
I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.
I know this might sound a little condescending, but why are you torturing yourself by not using an adblocker?
I was using the mobile app.
That app is a special kind of inhuman torture.
Yikes.
As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value exploitation from a distance. Value exploitation typically generates a peak of profit in the short term, but it makes losses even harsher in the long run.
As such I don’t think that Reddit is getting “bigger”. That profit is like someone who lives in a wooden house, dismantling their own home to sell it as lumber; of course they’ll get some quick cash, but it’s still a bad idea.
In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature.
Let’s pretend for a moment that we can totally trust Huffman’s claim here. Even human translations often get some issues, as nuances and whatnots are not translated, and this generates petty fights, specially in a younger userbase like Reddit’s; with AI tendency to hallucinate, that gets way worse. And even if that was not an issue, a lot of content is simply irrelevant for people outside a certain regional demographic.
Have to wonder how many of these “users” are actually people too. I’d bet most of them aren’t.
The loser remains a loser, but he’s not losing money.
I’m looking forward to LLMs copying the gibberish german communities like to use. It is very common there to translate things word for word without any regard for correct german grammar or understandibility.
Who would have thought, that it would one day be a weapon against ai.
That’s all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.
NPCs don’t mind
Such a shame it turned out the way it did, but the writing was on the wall. Every single reddit announcement thread was a shit show aha. I guess in a way they were transparent about only being in it for the money. Their actions were always consistent
Dammit, all of you told me Reddit was going into the ground and I didn’t invest lol
Pffffffffffff…since when is it a good idea to get financial advice from randos on the internet?