this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 hours ago

Well I'm glad my leaving the platform had such an impact, I never said

[–] [email protected] 20 points 12 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

Boo!

Whatever, this is far from the end of the story, and Lemmy has nothing but time. The bigger they are, the harder they fall in the end.

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

Lemmy has nothing but time.

Isn't Lemmy decreasing in numbers?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I vividly remember the Digg migration and Reddit is so very much like Digg these days.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

[–] [email protected] 17 points 18 hours ago

I’m thinking AI-powered something is going on, for sure.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 20 hours ago

I CALL BULLSHIT

[–] [email protected] 40 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The bot generated comments are training AI... full circle

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

It won't be long before the internet is just bots talking to each other and advertisers paying them to do so.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 22 hours ago

Just as we are all leaving for Lemmy. Reddit now makes you have an account to access some of their shit. Good riddance!

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Fuck Spez

(Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 14 hours ago

This is important for everyone to hear regularly. Thank you

[–] [email protected] 165 points 1 day ago (3 children)

apparently, the path to profitability was "shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit"

[–] [email protected] 15 points 17 hours ago

Which is a good reminder to everyone to support your local Lemmy instances.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago (1 children)

TBH, it feels like social media always needed some back door business like this to make it profitable.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago

It's almost like human communication is not supposed to be a product or something...

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I really wanted that site to crash and burn. Oh well.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 day ago (1 children)

After selling user generated content to Ai.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Doesn't seem like that gravy train will roll on forever

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

It cannot - more and more content is coming from AI so they are just "relearning" what one of the AI platforms has already produced... the endgame of that is convergence on nothing new being produced from AI

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 day ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (3 children)

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.

Edit: Okay yall... I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it's really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

  • I'm a mobile dev, so I don't mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I'm going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn't bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
  • Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
  • Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn't logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
  • Even if I was already logged in, it's an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I'm not sure it would've improved much.
  • Even if I was on Android, I'd probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
  • Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved... I didn't ask for that, and swarming people with "have you considered doing it the right way?" when they're just making a basic observation doesn't create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

I still browse reddit, honestly more than I do lemmy, but its mostly reddit old with adblock. Even on browser even though that is painful to navigate.

With properly curated subs its not so bad, but there definitely is still something missing. Also holy cow the current algorithm on reddit is trash. It used to be that the front page changed and shifted but sometimes I see the same crap on my front page for 2 days. It's insane!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I know this might sound a little condescending, but why are you torturing yourself by not using an adblocker?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I was using the mobile app.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago

Android Firefox has access to adblockers though??

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 day ago

That app is a special kind of inhuman torture.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago

ok now i am 100% sure im hoping for an ai bubble

[–] mspencer712 13 points 1 day ago

Deceased users’ estates still haven’t agreed to the new terms, have they?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (9 children)

As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value ~~exploitation~~ extraction* from a distance. Value ~~exploitation~~ extraction 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.

*EDIT REASON: I switched the terms, sorry. (C'mon, I'm L3.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

Shorthand for third language [English] speaker. I mean that I'm prone to switch a few words here and there, due to other languages interfering inside my head.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (6 children)

this comment in one of the cross-postings seems relevant: https://lemmy.world/comment/13157556

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

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

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