Technology

37689 readers

487 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

127

Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

73 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Bots are parasites: they only thrive if the host population is large enough to maintain them. Once the hosts are gone, the parasites are gone too.

In other words: botters only bot a platform when they expect human beings to see and interact with the output of their bots. As such they can never become the majority: once they do, botting there becomes pointless.

That applies even to repost bots - you could have other bots upvoting the repost, but you won't do it unless you can sell the account to an advertiser, and the advertiser will only buy it if they can "reach" an "audience" (i.e. spam humans).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not saying there aren't still people there, I'm saying a HUGE number, possibly even the majority, are bots. Might not be more than 50% yet, but there have always been a lot of bots on reddit and it only got worse over time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Yup, I got that you don't mean that everyone is a bot there. I just don't think that there aren't so many of them as you're saying; it's certainly not as much as half the users, or even the activity (bots tend to be more active than actual users).

They're still wrecking damage on the place though. Eventually they'll reach a plateau in proportion, but their numbers will go down, alongside the actual users.