Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base'

DolphinMath@slrpnk.net to Technology@lemmy.world – 602 points – Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base'
404media.co

Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Reddit has entered a contract with Google, which will license its content for $60 million a year in order to train Google’s AI models.

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Remember when Reddit had a daily donation goal to cover "site maintenance costs?"

They already monetized their fucking users, they've had users straight handing them money for fucking years now (sometimes for basically nothing in return!), but that's never enough for these god damned vampires.

You know how spez was bitching about how reddit never made a profit? Yeah, now we know why. You know what his compensation was last year? $193,000,000. Fuck that arrogant prick.

Excuse me, WHAT THE FUCK? 193 MIL?

Not to take Reddit's / spez side, but to clarify, that's not actually what he got in cash - what he got in cash on 2023 was something around 600k.

Those 193mil was in stock. Which kind of explains his drive to monetize users and kick out third-party apps: that piece of paper is only worth that much as long as he can keep the stock value afloat.

I just wish these platforms wouldn’t attract people like that. I get he is after a life changing amount of money no doubt, but 600k is a comfortable living by any metric.

Thank goodness for this decentralized stuff now. Communities are important, especially for the marginalized in society. There is a potential good in social technology without jerks with ad budgets and AI delusions of grandeur

I just wish these platforms wouldn’t attract people like that.

He was a Founder who left and came back. In all fairness, he was never attracted to it so much as he was instrumental in creating it.

The type of person he is is the type of person who created the platform to begin with...

Another example might be Jack Dorsey, who claimed that Elon Musk could be the only one to save Twitter.

In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.

These asshats are all alike. To get to the point where you can afford fleets of servers to create a service like this to begin with, you already were exploiting people and greasing palms. Other than Aaron Swartz, you should be pretty fucking skeptical of anyone who has been involved with Y Combinator.

get he is after a life changing amount of money no doubt, but 600k is a comfortable living by any metric.

Can't buy very many yachts on that salary. /s

I can't understand how investors would fall for this. For the sake of humanity and my own mental health I hope they don't. But I have a suspicion they will, and it goes to shows how fucked up the world is.

It's why they released news of the actual IPO on the same day they released the news of Google buying our data: they want to tie reddit and Google together in the public's mine, make reddit seem better than it is.

It would be HILARIOUS if Google declared Reddit shady AF and bailed on the contract

It would be HILARIOUS if Google declared Reddit shady AF and bailed on the contract

Google gave up their "do no evil" philosophy a long time ago, unfortunately.

Around the time they re-corporatized into Alphabet. Probably a little while before that, so at least a solid decade since that's been completely out the window.

Also, it only ever referred to putting ads before search results... which is how it is now. They clearly dropped any principles they had a long time ago. It's honestly a little shocking more isn't written about how Google was one of the earliest to begin its enshittification process, probably with the death of Google Reader, which was the death knell for RSS feeds and the Old Internet.

They restructured as Alphabet in 2015, and Reader was shut down in 2013. Google was founded in 1998. So that means it took about 15 years all told for Google to completely shed any ethics or morals they had about being a better company. That's how quickly selling out your principles happens now.

Speaking of which, let's bring back Selling Out.

I sure as hell hope that my deleted posts aren't part of that data.

Investors seem to be some of the most powerful and yet fucking stupidest people alive.

That's why they're trying to sell sick to their own tedditors first. If theyre gullible enough to stick around they're gullible enough to invest.

But back then Reddit still believed in opening up their platform, and their relation with their users was not adversarial. Their source code was even available on GitHub with an open source license! It didn't feel much different to us sending monthly donations to instance admins and Lemmy devs now on Lemmy. People genuinely didn't want Reddit to shut down back then.

Oh, I totally agree about the time period, but it also shows why this is such a big slap in the face to the userbase from Huffman. It literally ignores that time period and acts like this is the first time they've tried to wring money out of their userbase.

I keep saying that commercial, money making clients should donate 10% of their profit (or living money) to the server their user chooses. This is how FOSS services will survive.

Remember when Reddit had a daily donation goal to cover “site maintenance costs?”

Remember those paid rewards too, under which it was written that they are, eh, the monetization.

You mean the paid awards in September they just got rid of because Fuck Users?

Paid awards were always bullshit also

How so?

How are they NOT?! Paying Reddit money to have someone go EDIT THANKS 4 DA AWARD KIND STRANGER is stupid, and it caused every thread to be clogged with asinine comments like “I WISH I CUD GIV U A WARD!”

I don’t know if you were there before gold existed, but it was a lot more like… Lemmy. None of that twaddle.

I think you're overstating the significance of those edits and comments.

Anyway, it was a bad place. I've seen it being interesting somewhere in 2019, after that always worse and worse.

Fuck users or not, not sure whether they could really control that descent, even if they tried.

If you are in the EU file a complaint under the GDPR with your supervisory authority. They are processing data of people and especially children here that they have no right to at all. Users were not informed, no opt out, nothing. This is extremely illegal in the EU. Not to mention all that data on special categories like health data, sexual orientation ,ethnicity, etc. Etc.

I've made a write up for you to follow along and reference: https://kbin.social/m/reddit@lemmy.world/t/854162/Any-EU-based-users-of-reddit-should-immediately-file-a

tl;dr instructions towards the end.

I wasn’t really against Reddit when I left to go on Lemmy. It was mostly to try something which is luving because of its users.

Now I’m glad I did.

Ditto. I left during the api stuff, but left my account in case they calmed down and realized it was stupid. The whole 'selling data for ai training' and actually filing for an ipo is what actually drove me to delete my 15 year old account today

Eh, deleting accounts does little. I am just going to sell my old accounts to spammers/bots after IPO. They all are old and have no emails attached yet.

Wait, I can make money with my old accounts ? who do I talk to ?

During the API thing 8+ year old accounts were selling for $20 to $100 on eBay. But eBay is probably a bad place to sell if you want a quick sale, there are websites dedicated to buying and selling social accounts.

I havent checked current pricing, but if you have an account with no linked email, I wouldn't take less than $25 for it.

i saw tons of shills on superstonk gme what have yous. 5-10 year accounts with no post or any hisotry for say 2-3 years come in and start sowing all sorts of doubt and whining and fighting adn racist shit... thats my perspective

Ah, but my accounts have a linked email. Thanks for the info anyway

I still have my porn account over there but barely used it for anything other than lurking porn. They can have it.

company exists for 19 years.
is still in the "early stages" of figuring out how to even make money.

Yup, that is DEFINITELY a solid buy for institutional investors during the ipo!

figuring out how to even make money

Which, to be crystal clear, they have never accomplished

Paying pigboy 193M wasn't a great first step.

And then they disclose both their users and Huffman are volatile and pose a risk.

it's like they want everyone to know they are the worst investment in the history of investments or something lol

If selling all the data is early stages, I want to know what late stage monetization looks like. Pay a fee to get unbanned? Fines if the post gets down voted?

Pay to Win Reddit with micro transaction cosmetics?

I've never bothered with them, but aren't there already? Additional stuff for your personal avatar?

Yes. And with collectible avatar saved on a block chain if I recall correctly.

At each new monetization stage, we should once more advertise Lemmy.

Late stage capitalism

Reddit notes that it’s screwed if moderators decide they no longer want to do this free labor, and notes that last year the company’s decision to change its API policies caused many of them to do exactly that.

A lot of the good mods already walked back in July. Wonder what it'll take for most of the rest to throw in the towel.

I would think there are still plenty people who like having the power of being a "moderator" and would be willing to do it for free. So even though reddit lost plenty of mods, there will still be people who'd continue doing it.

Lots of mod also can't let go the community they spend years to build. Not an easy task to just leave. Though i know of some that already partially leave the platform and only occasionally check it

That's true as well. I understand the emotional connection I would have had if I was part of the community from the beginning. It is not easy to build communities and also be responsible for it. I was not pointing at such folks.

Yes. A bit like giving a slave a whip to look after other slaves.

The quality went down, though.

Because the ones doing the best jobs were leveraging the hell out of third party tools to make their jobs easier.

Probably the same folks who think that Xitter is better under Muskrats leadership.

I mean how many people volunteer to moderate Facebook. Once the site is mainsteam and fundamentally uncool to have a job at, few in their right mind are going to give up their time for free.

Yep. But that is something that we have to wait and see. Understanding people has become tricky nowadays. Reddit may as well use bots for moderation and project them as actual users to show a false narrative. Anyways we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

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"Mostly free" my ass.

Depends on how "free" is defined. The US isn't known for government meddling in what the media is allowed to publish, which is usually what people are talking about when "freedom of the press" comes up.

I agree, but the line is titled "country freedom rank." Not "media freedom rank." So the implication goes beyond what may be intended.

So the "unnamed ai company" is Google after all 🤔

Reddit is a treasure trove for LLMs. Plenty of corporates out there willing to pay. Its just funny to see what the outcome of an AI purely trained by the regular shitposting that reddit has will be. 🤣

If Reddit is good at anything it's clickbait headlines. LLMs are gonna level up in that department.

Prompt: "How does a spacecraft navigate to the moon?"

A: "SPACE NOT REAL, GLOBEHEAD LIBTARD SOYBOY SHEEPLE."

Question: Wouldn't Lemmy instances easy be able to this without many users knowing?

And would they also be able to sell data from other instances, because they can load data from federated instances?

Technically? Probably, yes. Legally? I don't think so (never looked into it)

Why do you believe they wouldn't legally be able to?

It's the whole copyright question. Users own the copyright on their own posts, and it's the terms of service that are supposed to say what the server and other federated servers are allowed or not allowed to do with them. I don't even remember if there were terms of service when I joined Lemmy... But assuming there were, and they didn't explicitly say whether it or federated servers can use user content to train AI, then it becomes a legal question that can only be determined by courts.

Note that this determination will only apply in the country/state where that court is.

IANAL

I don't have a problem with anyone scraping what's already public, I just don't want anyone to profit off just selling the data I made for them. OpenAI is at least creating useful stuff. All Reddit ever did was be the middleman.

Yeah. Guess some AI companies may have set up an instance already. They won't even have a rate limit or anything on their own instances.

Reddit has a ton more content though.

Lemmy just has a lot of vintage memes

Agreed.

But it's just a little hypocritical to not use reddit because of this, if it turns out it's much worse to use Lemmy in this regard.

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sounds like a good class action lawsuit...