Valuable training data for AI. Spez does not give a damn about it. He gladly takes money and sell it off to someone like OPEN AI whose models can be trained on its data.
“I trained on millions of users’ data and now I ape them. AITA?”
Can’t they blow Musk up by accident or send him on a rocket to Mars that orbits forever there (oops)? Something like the submarine last year but better.
Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago... Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that's their problem, not the stock market's.
Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don't have data to back it up)
Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate "synergy" with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.
My point is that corporations often see a fine as a cost of business because the fines are issued by a regulatory system that has no teeth.
If you’re in a lawsuit against another corporation they are going after damages in civil court and it’s likely to be a high enough fine to stop the behaviour.
Whatever already existed won’t be thrown away regardless of the ruling. It’s like throwing all the gold already dug up just because it was done by slave labor. The law and legal actions are mostly just a moat around the pile of gold already dug up. Sure AI companies will have to pay more for the new data from other sources. However that would be peanut compared to how much they will have to pay starting from zero.
Generally if someone is clearly in breach of copyright the rights holder will apply to a court to issue an injunction to order that company to cease their activities until a case can be resolved.
Given that has not happened, it seems that from a court’s perspective, it’s not a clear breach of copyright.
No they’ll train on laundered model output. Like every llama.
The investment thesis they the data is valuable is bonkers. It’s not. Not only has it been exfiltrated and can be laundered in a dozen ways, Reddit also won’t be able to effectively assert copyright.
Look at Facebook. It’s full of reposted quora content now with AI images and AI laundered text.
Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
I think you’re overselling the importance of this one. When I’ve talked to friends about federated alternatives, they really aren’t interested. Even if they hated Twitter/reddit and think they’ve gotten worse, they just don’t really care about a federated alternative. I’ve heard some interest in threads, so maybe we count that?
If they really understood the phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the soup’, then they’d realize the advantage of smaller online communities.
Reddit was at its best when it had a low count but engaged userbase, and became actively worse as it grew.
I think this is because trolling and response isn’t a 1 to 1 ratio. All it takes is 1 toxic person to make an entire subforum rancid and takes the effort of several mods to mitigate it.
The more people you have, the more chance you will have these trolls organize, the more likely they will either overwhelm or infiltrate the mods.
Yeah I tend to agree. I think all communities have a critical mass and past that point they go downhill.
I was just googling for the rat overpopulation experiment because I think it works as a great example of this and it turns out this whole concept has a term.
It happens naturally whenever the ingredients are brought together but in order to get a quality product you need ridiculous amounts of knowledge, process, and technology.
And even a tiny bit of the wrong bacteria can ruin an entire batch, but people will still drink it and go blind.
Regular people didn't know or care wtf reddit was for quite a while also and there absolutely is a building friction between people and corporate social media. We're in the early stages for now, but stuff like Activitypub is not going away.
Even my most alternative, vegan, communist friends agree with me when I pitch the fediverse and then flock to capitalist social media like moths anyway. It’s disheartening.
They already make money with ads. Killing third party apps was part of this, now they can control exactly how you see ads. It’s the same as any other social media now, they recommend you content, which is exactly not the point of reddit.
Short selling, Wallstreet thing for making money when the stock. It kinda works like borrowing a stock and immediately selling it, then we it’s time to return the stock you borrowed you buy a replacement and if the price has gone down you keep the profit.
shorting means to bet against a stock. instead of buying a stock and waiting for it to grow over a long period and selling it for more money (long position), you borrow the stock from somebody, sell it, then buy it back (for a lower price) after a short amount of time to give back to whom you borrowed it from. (short position). If the stock price rapidly drops in that time, you gain money.
If this sounds like a perversion of what investing was supposed to be, yeah welcome to wall street
Politics and whatever the other maladies are that infect Reddit aside: the app and the website are impossibly difficult to use. Ita just ads ads ads. Even if the place was a veritable utopia that’s a no from me dawg.
Imo Reddit has been the winner of the 3rd party apps and fuck spez protests. The users came crawling back. A few of us went to lemmy and formed quality communities, but for the most part, a large majority are on there.
Really? It was more work to find and occasionally add communities than it was to spend months-years to accumulate subs for your frontpage and block subs for all? I browse all on lemmy and find new communities that way. Or by links and referrals for newer ones.
It’s worth noting that Reddit changed too, permanently, both in terms of ease of use (not only 3rd-party apps, but also the mobile and desktop browser routes too) and in how many content creators simply left - who knows what they are even doing now (reading books, touching grass, some came here ofc). Even many niche subs over there are empty, dead, or one may consider them dying from lack of interesting content (though those people still there I expect would be resistant to admit that).
And it will be interesting to see how that changes further, the moment they get their IPO and thus can finally kill off old-Reddit, which still allows you to block ads iirc? That will drive additional content creators away. Perhaps they will come here - despite how we are not ready for that.
Anyway, the old Reddit is just flat gone, for many people, and there is no going “back”, ever, even if you wanted to, it’s not there to return to, especially after the IPO changes it still further.
I still visit Reddit and that's definitely been my experience - my front page diversity has gone way down, many of the subreddits I am subscribed to have basically gone silent. There's still a few specialized ones left, and the big news ones I still read, but only in old reddit. When old Reddit is gone then so am I.
Why wait? Jump now! Hehe, okay so only you know your schedule, it’s mostly just a funny phrase (but also: don’t sleep on it forever - you don’t want to be surprised one day when it disappears overnight with no notice).
For me, it’s not just emptiness - it’s the site being devoid of content anymore. Like look at r/firefox after the mods left (I forgot which communities got ousted vs. who left voluntarily, but either way that community packed up and followed them iirc). It is all just the most basic of questions “how do I…?”, often with later edits “I should not have bothered asking, these people will just yell at you”. Just about every post has 1 or 0 upvotes (though more uncommon spikes above 10 do exist, and even rare ones with hundreds), but the titles of the popular posts are all things that are extremely common knowledge - “Mozilla says Apple’s new browser rules are “as painful as possible” for Firefox”, “YouTube is loading slower for users with ad blockers yet again”, “Will Firefox survive in the browser market?”, “Chrome wants to track me? Bye. I use Firefox …”, “Google settles $5 billion privacy lawsuit over tracking people using ‘incognito mode’ (Re: Switch to Firefox ASAP).” These are things that I constantly hear about on Lemmy.
And even more than that, I dread speaking there after Rexit - the trolls omg the trolls… it’s just not fun. Then again, I tended to make posts advertising useful alternatives to Reddit, so you could argue that I brought that upon myself? :-P (edit: although in a community that calls itself by the name r/RedditAlternatives, THAT was the POINT of the discussion that we were TRYING to have there!!)
Similarly with twitter and mastodon. Generally, that’s fine … smaller niche online spaces are a good thing (as many who’ve remained have discovered I suspect).
But in the end, for those who see this fediverse project as a mission to “take back the web” … so far only pretty minor movement has been made on that front. To the point that IMO I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter etc just “win” and the whole “alternative” social media thing stays “alternative” and relatively small. If there’s a chance of this, I’d say to fediverse advocates that they should maybe rethink what the fediverse is and what it’s good and not good for, because there’s a real chance here that the fediverse kinda dropped the ball, especially mastodon which has been going strong for a while now.
I’ve never used Mastodon, but from what I’ve heard it’s an entirely different ballgame where you basically need to go where the people are. e.g. artists seeking commission work need more rather than less people, and if you want to follow a particular someone, you go to where they are not the other way around.
And if their servers have anywhere close to the level of technical glitches that we do here on Lemmy… well it is quite off-putting, especially to non technically minded people.
I’m not sure they have technical glitches in the same way lemmy does. Interestingly, the difficulties people have, I think, are because federated social media is actually a bad non-idea technology to use for a twitter clone.
So much either doesn’t work how you’d expect or involves new problems that all together they start to defeat the point for many. For example, replies to a post. The author of the post sees all of the replies. But replies aren’t actually federated unless certain conditions are met based on whether someone on your instance follows the person writing the reply. As a result the author of a post that receives many replies has to manage/tolerate a bunch of replies that have no awareness of the fact that they’re just repeating what has already been said, sometimes many times over. For people replying to a post from a small/niche instance, they basically don’t see any of the other replies, which just makes for bad content for them, but also means they constantly risking being really annoying people which in turn effectively punishes small instances. This is generally referred to as “context collapse”, and yea, it’s something kinda extraordinary when the core feature of a social media platform actively destroys the context of conversations.
Lemmy doesn’t have this problem because its based on groups where the whole premise is that the whole conversation gets federated, and for that reason I think a reddit clone or a forum or a youtube-clone (or anything based on groups, sub-reddits or channels) is a better fit on the fediverse.
The other friction mastodon has is that, as a twitter-clone or microblogging platform, its core mechanic is following people and allowing people to form their own network of connections and friendships. But once you’ve got federation and instances in the mix, where defederation happens, then you have this often completely separate dynamic (ie the relations between instances) capable of completely slicing your personal social network in many destructive ways. Often this happens without people hearing about it (as there aren’t mechanics for notifying people of defederations AFAIU), so that they have to find out after some time to realise that they hadn’t heard anything from a whole bunch of friends and were wondering what had happened. Moreover, what such people can then do to re-connect with those friends is rather non-trivial. It’s probably the major draw back of fedi-drama, that the majority of people affected by it don’t benefit from it and would prefer to just be on the big instance (mastodon.social) that no one really defederates from or just go back to twitter.
EDIT (more ranting):
The way someone I like (as a person on social media) put it, after giving mastodon a good shot, was that mastodon misunderstands what people want from social media, that mastodon puts independence over socialising when people prioritise it the other way around … the whole point is to connect and converse, not to run your own instance and make sure you’ve defederated from everyone who has it coming.
Now there’s the whole issue of making sure someone vulnerable to abuse is able to ensure their own safety and happiness from would-be assholes and abusers and even those eager to voice unwelcome, abrasive and triggering points of view which are generally tolerable because they’re the mainstream. Federation across instances can help with this … but can also make it worse because anyone can talk to you from any instance over which you have no control or information until it’s too late. In many ways, decentralisation isn’t great for these problems and creates new problems that a centralised form of social media simply doesn’t have (not least of which being that the whole thing is about copying you and your posts out to everything on the network). It’s for this reason that BIPOC left mastodon and went back to twitter, because to them, mastodon was the racist/facist place, not twitter. In light of that phenomenon, it’s worth considering the perspective that decentralised social media might be a bit of a weird idea and rightly seen as a bit of a fanatical and even a bit of a right-wing or libertarian movement.
In the case of group-based platforms like lemmy and forums however, I think it makes much more sense. Many independent forums are out there, and have been and hopefully will be for a long time. Why not contribute Open Source software for such things (such as lemmy) and enable them to connect to each other however they wish.
Yikes. It does not sound pretty. For them at least, but indeed, Lemmy is a whole other deal. It seems to mainly just need some polish? Especially easing in new people, if increasing the numbers is really the goal.
Old-Reddit’s days are numbered… so we’d best prepare for the next incoming migration.
The weird thing is that people on mastodon mostly go along happy with their feed. Those that have found the problems too much bounced or just learnt to tolerate it. One thing that may fade away is the idea of running your own personal instance. I get the feeling that some don’t find it to be entirely worth it. There are “relays” though, which are commonly used, and basically feed in content from major instances as though you’re following a bunch of people there. I don’t really know how that goes though.
With lemmy (and kbin too), yea, it certainly feels like it’s not far from being kinda “done”, at least as a version “1.0”. Scaling up to many more users is likely to surface more issues though. But we’ve got many apps and alternative front ends, a somewhat stabilising API and months now of mostly working as intended.
Yeah Lemmy got much better with v0.19, while Kbin has barely improved visibly at all it seems so I just gave up on it for now.
I still suffer the issue, on both mobile and desktop browser, that literally every time I come back, to pretty much anywhere I have to login again - I cleared cookies a few times but that didn’t seem to help. Most instances seem to have that, though I may have an odd selection of them (Kbin, Discus.Online, and StarTrek.website), and there are the occasional days where I have to attempt to make every comment at least twice for it to stick (but at least now if it doesn’t go through, you notice, unlike previously where it disappeared into the void invisibly, though I only had Kbin experience back then).
I haven’t bothered to research the apps yet - security, stability, ads vs. no, etc. - so all that I’m saying is for the vanilla browsing experience.
Also people report that the creation of new accounts from the mobile browser is barely if at all functional. I haven’t tried that myself, but it does seem like the experience varies enormously depending on which method of interface someone is using - and that’s going to be off-putting to a migration event, like if something doesn’t work it would be better to put up a sign saying “this (often?) doesn’t work on a mobile, just go to a desktop computer for this task”. Caveat: assuming the desire is to bring in more people who are less technically minded, for the sake of e.g. content creation.
And this doesn’t even begin to cover the modding concerns:-).
Re kbin, you might be interested in mbin … it’s a fork and has active development happening. They have at least one instance up that I’ve seen. Generally seems to be a positive move.
And yea plenty of rough edges. Your experiences definitely sounds worse than mine though (and I’m on web apps too).
Yea, I do think there’s a bit of cult-hype around federation and decentralisation and has been for a while here in the Fedi. Which is really just tech hype … the idea that some technology magically solves problems.
In reality, better social media requires more than just a technology.
I’ve been on Mastodon for over a year and I never experienced anything that could be classified as a technical glitch. From a tech / UI perspective it feels very polished to me.
I guess the only exception would be that old posts are sometimes missing on profiles from different servers.
Thank you, that’s helpful to know:-). Kbin had MANY issues and that was the closest I’d seen.
It seems to confirm that what is holding Mastodon back isn’t technical at all but just the design - i.e. like if people are on X then that’s where most other people want to be, similar to Windows where it is not technologically superior, just the default for some reason.
Probably an unpopular opinion here, but honestly I’d rather just everyone migrate to lemmy and mastodon and leave reddit and twitter broke and empty husks. A low quality federated platform is still better than a mediocre centralized one.
For “us” e.g. the users of the federated platforms i’d prefer the smaller, nicer and more qualitative community we have currently.
For the users of reddit there is the ones that also want this experience (again) and i am confident they’ll find their way eventually.
For the users of reddit that just want the quick meme/outrage video and farm karma on the ever same joke-chains, i think they are in the better spot for themselves than it would become if they’d clash here with the different culture.
For society as a whole i think enshittification is necessary to drive people off of platforms eventually. I wholeheartedly agree, that the enshittified web needs to go down, but it can only come from people realizing it for themselves.
People having to get used to people is common. If they can get used to their uncle talking about how the earth is flat I’m sure they they can get used to people on Lemmy.
I don’t recommend lemmy because I don’t have conversations about social media sites with people.
On the subs I visited on reddit I’ve encountered virtually no fascists. I don’t need to discuss politics all day and even then the takes were way less extreme than on here.
It might be difficult to imagine for some of the zealots on Lemmy but I don’t want to be stuffed to the brim with Chinese and Russian propaganda. I don’t need to hear how bad the west is and how it has to burn, die, whatever. I don’t care how superior the communist ideology is and why liberals are the root of evil.
It literally reads like a bunch of absolute idiots and edge lords thriving in their bubbles, be it hexbear, chapo stuff, political memes, etc.
Agreed. During the pandemic, I adopted a policy of unsubbing to any subreddit that made me angry. Usually this came in the form of people bringing up trump/capitalism/whatever out of completely nowhere. luckily the Beehaw people seem to be pretty good about actually having conversations and not just devolving into mocking trump every second. But whenever I venture into some of the other instances, I see some of Lemmy’s true colors. Chronically online people completely out of touch with reality kinda run shit around here.
90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.
I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.
Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.
I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).
The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).
I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.
Did they? Other than /nfl most of the communities I followed went to shit very quickly and haven’t recovered. They are mostly bots talking to bots or the same questions and post over and over with minimal new content
For me, it was politics that sank Reddit. I was banned from a half dozen news forums for criticism of the IDF in Gaza at the beginning of what most people now acknowledge to be an ethnic cleansing. I reported every account calling for murder and genocide of Palestinians, which is against the Reddit TOS. They permanently banned me for “report abuse” for doing their jobs for them. They have obviously shown that there’s no freedom of speech, even when you follow the rules, if it goes against the feelings of the administration and the unelected moderators. Fiefdoms ruled by angry internet trolls shouldn’t get an IPO.
Shadowbanned from r/news and God knows what other subredits, because I refused to add an email. Banned from r/politics because I said that not wearing a mask during Peak COVID was a death wish. (Apparently that’s promoting violence or whatever?). Banned from r/Pyongyang because I dared question next months chocolate rations.
To a degree. The large subreddits, like AskReddit, get far fewer upvotes on the top posts of the week than they used to get. I think there’s a good chunk of folks who left for a replacement, then left their replacement without going back to Reddit.
There’s very little quality on Lemmy. It lacks diversity. It’s quite authoritarian left. Tankies under every rock. Even in non-politics communities. I still use a forked version of Boost to lurk reddit. But as someone else said, if never recommend Lemmy to anyone I actually know.
If that’s what I meant then I would have simply said that. If that’s what you choose to believe, so be it. Most observant people can see this is a rather large echo chamber. It’s really obvious.
Sure, it’s been the “winner” if you were expecting reddit to topple from top spot as best aggregator - but it was never really reasonable to expect that.
Even now, the perspective that Lemmy should strive to be some kind of new reddit is really daft.
What we actually want, is for Lemmy to grow in a sustainable and manageable way with real actual content enjoyed by real contributing users.
The quality of Lemmy has improved dramatically in the last 6 months. Way more users, servers, content, and third party apps. The quality of reddit has decreased dramatically in the last 6 months. User counts may not have suffered, but the content and the experience most certainly has.
If you mean that an entitled douchecanoe who has no trouble allowing genocides to occur on his service getting stupid rich, then they did win. If you are looking at how much they could have gotten, then, yeah, they suck.
I’ve already left, but seeing them marching towards an IPO makes me even happier with my decision. I just fear that the mountains of helpful troubleshooting and advice on Reddit will be locked away forever soon, while the rest of the web falls to SEO and AI-generated nonsense text…
Man, and it works great. It is waaaaay more common to find good answers to a question from a bunch of randoms on the Internet than trying to get an actual answer from a random website. Sometimes you find bs but you can usually quite quickly filter it out, and it gives a good basis from which to then continue to search on the topic.
Sadly I’ve found a few of those on Lemmy already. What I’d prefer is the internet of the 1990s when it took effort to figure out and the masses were too lazy or dumb to do so.
I used to purposefully disable the error correction on my modem so the connection sound didn’t have that stupid hissy wobbly beepy part at the end. Yeah it meant that sometimes I’d fjhkswa thjasd ar eee e but it was worth it for that pure music.
Maybe we’re blessed for knowing it like none that came after, or cursed for knowing it will never be that good again…
Petabytes of raw training Data for LLMs. Arguably atm reddit us one of the better gold mines of LLM training data on the internet, bazillion of posts already formatted as post-response chains, which us the exact type if format an LLM wants to train on.
Can you imagine how valuable those servers loaded with posts are to a company like OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft?
5 billion is quite reasonable to harvest every reddit post that has ever been made ever and cut it off from your competitors.
Most LLMs have tonnes of NSFW data in their training.
Typically, if this wants to be blocked, a secondary RAG or LORA is run overtop to act as a filtering mechanism to catch, block, and regenerate explicit responses.
Furthermore, output allowed lexicon is a whole thing.
Unfiltered LLMs without these layers added on are actually quite explicit and very much capable of generating extremely NSFW output by default.
The worst part is that ai chatbots will start responding like redditers. I can’t wait for chatgpt to regale me with a story about his dad beating him with jumper cables, or jolly ranchers, or hell in a cell.
Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody’s just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying “boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don’t have to force an intern to scrape it for us”.
I asked Bard whether they could make a bastardization of rogersimon10 post and it made this:
<span style="color:#323232;">Ah, the 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost. A pocket rocket some called it, a ticking time bomb I preferred. Owned one myself, sunshine yellow with a dent shaped like a screaming Muppet (courtesy of a rogue shopping cart). Let me tell you, that car was less a vehicle and more a high-octane game of Russian roulette with pistons.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Every morning was a gamble. Would she purr to life like a hungover kitten, or unleash a symphony of coughs, bangs, and the ominous "Check Engine" light disco? One day, the radio spontaneously switched to polka, which, let's be honest, is only two steps away from a thermonuclear detonation in a Fiesta's internal combustion fiesta.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Speaking of fiestas, the fuel gauge was as reliable as a politician's promise. One minute it was brimming, the next it was flashing "Bone Dry, Mate," even if I'd just filled it. Learned to carry a jerrycan like a Prohibition-era bootlegger, never knowing when the engine's thirst would strike.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">But oh, the things that little lemon could do! On a good day, that turbocharged engine was like a caffeinated hummingbird on steroids. Weaving through traffic, leaving Audis in the dust (until their turbos spooled up, of course). Handling? Razor sharp, unless you hit a pebble, then it was suddenly a drunken ballerina on roller skates.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Comfort? Ha! The seats were about as plush as a park bench, and the suspension was tuned for "Feel Every Pebble in the County." But hey, it kept you awake, which was essential considering the constant fear of spontaneous combustion.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">In the end, I sold the Fiesta to a circus clown for a fistful of juggling pins and a lifetime supply of those tiny, uncomfortable hats. He seemed thrilled, probably because the polka radio was a bonus feature for him.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">So, would I recommend a 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost? Only if you enjoy existential dread, questionable fuel efficiency, and the thrill of living life on the edge (of a breakdown). Otherwise, stick to something safer, like a heavily sedated hamster. You'll thank me later.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a tow truck and a very suspicious mechanic who keeps asking about "jumper cables." Wish me luck.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">P.S. Don't forget the jumper cables. Seriously. You'll thank me later.
</span>
Scraped data isn’t legal to resell, scraping isn’t even legal in the first place.
Just because you can scrape the data doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.
Companies like MS, Google, OpenAI, FB they make money by selling the usage of their LLM services to other companies who then they use that service to make their own products.
If it came to light that MS/Google/OAI/FB were using illegal training data for their LLMs, it would get all those other companies hit in the crossfire.
So these companies have to do a shit tonne of diligence to assure their investors and clients that their LLMs are purely trained on legally obtained data and are safe to use.
And you know what is a super easy way to assure them of that?
If they literally own the original data themselves
Have you been following any of the court battles involving LLMs lately?
The New York Times suing OpenAI. Getty Images suing Stability AI. Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin suing OpenAI.
All of those cases involve data that has been scraped. (In the latter two cases, the memoir/novels were scraped from excerpts and archives found online).
It’s too late to say with complete certainty that it’s all legal (the appeal processes haven’t all been finished yet), but at this point it looks like using scraped and copyrighted data in training LLMs is legal. Even if it’s going to turn out not to be legal, it’s very clear that nobody’s shying away from doing it, because we have the courts showing as a statement of fact that it’s been happening for years.
Everything you’ve written is just fantasy. We have a lot of reality which contradicts it. Every LLM company has been primarily relying upon scraping data (which we know to completely legal) and has been incorporated copyrighted and scraped data in its data sets (which is still legally a grey area, but is happening anyway).
NYT hasn’t actually won that case yet, so it’s pointless to bring up. OpenAI has publicly stated that NYT heavily has misrepresented their findings.
OpenAI’s value would plummet and crash if they gained a reputation for using illegal material to train their AI on, investors would drop them so fast.
This is just a simple fact. LLM providers reputation is heavily staked on the legality of their data.
So far the courts have ruled in these companies favor.
But it’s extremely likely illegaly scraped Dara from reddit would not pass the sniff test and debestate an offending companies reputation.
If you don’t understand why, you have to do some brushing up on why these LLM services are worth so much and who is using them and for what. Once you understand that, it becomes extremely apparent why legally owning the entire history of every reddit post ever would be extremely valuable, and why a 5bil price tag is actually not that crazy.
Do you actually think this has any impact? That’s silly.
Reddit’s servers have the original copy of every single post made, undoubtedly, and everytime you edit your post, they store that copy too.
So not only has everyone “poisoned” their data ineffectively, they literally have created training data of “before” vs “after” poisoning to compare the two for training the LLM against poisoned data.
Whoever buys the right to that is going to have a pretty huge goldmine, and perhaps they will rent it out, or perhaps they’ll use it themselves.
And yes, that very very much matters if you intend to actually sell the service to companies that they themselves dont want to get hit in the crossfire of potential lawsuits for building their products on top of stolen info.
So if you can own the data itself (via buying reddit), you now have an ENORMOUS quantity of prime training data that you’re investors and potential customers know is legally clean, because you literally own it.
I still wouldn’t use it, but Elon should buy it so he can more convincingly posture a saviour of independent social media. Just drop the tracking, sell square ads on the sidebar based on content only, open up api for all sorts of uses and make rif is ridiculous fun for reddit the official client. Give it to five geeks to maintain and call it a public service. What’s a bit more down the drain? It’s all gonna go Midas anyways. At least that would be a win for the internets
$5 Billion for a chronically unprofitable, niche social media platform in an already crowded field. Yeah, Ok. You’d get a better return on your investment if you just burned the money for heat.
Reddit is niche when it comes to social media. It caters to a particular group of people and has its own style of both content and engagement, just like Facebook or Tiktok have their own styles. I would argue reddit is, in some ways, more like an old school forum with a fresh coat of paint. It requires more effort from the user to engage with than some other social media platforms. The content can be a lot “heavier” and it’s not centered around people and/or personalities. To be clear thats something I liked about Reddit but I don’t think it really resonates as much with the average user.
Site visits are just one metric and, while it’s an interesting metric, it doesn’t say much without a lot more context. OK, so a lot of people end up visiting Reddit. Why? Is it intentional? Is it because every third Google result is a reddit post? If so, is it driving further engagement? If not, then that benchmark is worth little. If it is driving further engagement, then something else is wrong.
Is reddit really considered social media now? I always have described it as the biggest forum and site aggregator on internet.
I know at some point avatars and some crypto? BS came, but that did not change site fundamentals, reddit to me still feels like the same site I joined 10 years ago especially because I used same reddit client for majority of those 10 years. Only reason why I abandoned it is the closure of free API. That and the fact I dislike management, but if 3rd party clients would not have been nuked like that, I would have probably stayed.
Now I am using same client I used for reddit - Sync, so from UI perspective nothing has changed.