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…

  • Yes, but it could have been handled better. If ai was the problem they could have gone the route of api only being allowed after an application process so they know who is using it and everyone else trying to use it would get denied until they were assigned a key

    •  jay   ( @lunarshot@beehaw.org ) 
      link
      fedilink
      English
      151 year ago

      100% and they also didn’t need to be total tools about it. giving a month window is a joke, being snarky assholes answering AMAs, telling their user base that profitability is the only thing that matters to them.

      Surprising nobody, Reddit continues to make really awful business decisions. This is just another nail in their coffin.

    •  naeap   ( @naeap@sopuli.xyz ) 
      link
      fedilink
      2
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I’m thinking, that they want to sell the generated data to AI companies as training data - and AI generated content would nullify that

      edit: and obviously currently everyone can suck their data for free - although I don’t know how that should be different with their changes, if I just use a web scraper

    • 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

    • The original announcement said they were making exceptions for applications that gave back to Reddit. I and many others hoped that was basically everyone who wasn’t AI scraping. But seems like they got greedy while they were at it and decided to kill everything

  • Could they have something to do with it? Yes, for sure. But the thing is that they didn’t have to do any of this the way they did. They could have made an API plan that allowed third party apps to still exist/thrive, and also charge big companies that just want to use reddit to train LLM’s. Change the pricing/terms based around this idea. They deliberately went after third party apps, and then double and tripled down on it in the face of massive backlash. If spez was competent, he would have been able to better pivot this conversation and make it about training LLM’s for megacorps, but he didn’t and even then it would have still been bullshit that is easily seen past.

  • Yup. AI consumers are more profitable than 3rd party apps. why focus on tiered pricing when you can just name a price point everyone has to pay that only huge AI companies are willing to.

    Reddit gets their content for free. Reselling it at a high price to AI/ML consumers is an easy way to turn free content into profit with almost no effort.

  • I’m very sure that this is the case. Reddit is pissed they gave away all the content as training data for free while struggling to monetize their platform adequately.

    But I suspect the damage is already done. There are projects like “Orca” from Microsoft that skip the learning process from source data for a big part by using chatGPT and GPT4.

    They missed the timing but are too stubborn and double down on it

    • What’s more, chat-gpt 4 is near the upper bound of what you can collect on the web in that way. They basically took everywhere you’d look to for information and grabbed it along with as much structure as they could… There’s plenty more information on the Internet, but the structure and quality are much lower. It’s very data poor and unstructured interactions between humans

      Moving forward, everyone is talking about synthetic data sets - you can’t go bigger without some system to generate (or refine) training data - and if you have to generate the data anyways, you’re not going to pay much for a dataset that is just decent

      So yeah, Reddit most definitely missed the timing.

      I think Elon’s claims that he’s made Twitter profitable (despite a lot of evidence to the contrary) is also creating pressure for the other social networks to chase overly aggressive monetization schemes

  • Like, why go after Selig like that if it was about AI?

    Why not have a cheaper legacy tier (not even free, just cheaper) so Apollo and other third party apps could stay in business? Only AI needs to get charged the higher price. Instead, it seems there’s essentially only one tier and third party apps simply can’t afford to pay it.

  •  z2k_   ( @z2k_@lemmy.nz ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    111 year ago

    Yes but imo it would be easy to seperate LLM and 3rd party apps since 3rd party apps have users sign in independently. They chose to also target 3rd party apps and take them down.

  •  SkyNTP   ( @SkyNTP@lemmy.ml ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    101 year ago

    Reddit’s business model was not founded on selling LLM data. Reddit got greedy and decided to change their business model to cash in on an unexpected revenue stream. What was also unexpected (to Reddit) is that you cannot cater to social media users and monetize their data for LLM training effectively at the same time. And now Reddit will have neither, and will die just like all other businesses that adopt Enshitification as a core operating procedure.

    Let this be a lesson to them and all that follow: do not let your greed make you blind to the consequences of your actions.

  • It is, but reddit don’t own the content on their site according to their TOS, posters merely grant them a license to redistribute it. So it’s not really their call to shut off ChatGPT scraping, it should be a community decision

    • “Merely” - the TOS basically grant Reddit the ability to do what the hell they want with it, LOL

      When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit.

      And furthermore

      You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.