Sounds like a hell of a lot of money for a CEO who kept insisting that he had to kill 3rd party apps because Reddit still isn’t profitable.
“Reddit isn’t profitable because leadership is wildly incompetent, so let’s pay them an exorbitant amount of money instead of using that money to properly fix things or make any genuine improvements to anything.”
-reddit
It really feels like all corporations do this.
Then the failed CEO gets another CEO gig because they’ve got “experience”.
- CEOs anywhere
Let’s be real, they did it because they didn’t want people training AI models without paying them. They didn’t give a shit about 3rd party apps.
People that want to train AI models on Reddit content can just scrape the site, or use data from archive sites that archive Reddit content.
The archive sites used to use the API, which is another reason they wanted to get rid of it. I always found they were a great moderation tool as users would always edit their posts to no longer break the rules before they claimed a rogue moderator had banned them for no reason, and there was no way within reddit to prove them wrong.
What about archive sites like web.archive.org and archive.today? Both still work fine for Reddit posts, and neither are blocked in www.reddit.com/robots.txt, so so far they haven’t shown an intent to block them.
Yeah, the Wayback Machine doesn’t use Reddit’s API, but on the other hand, I’m pretty sure they don’t automatically archive literally everything that makes it onto Reddit - doing that would require the API to tell you about every new post, as just sorting /r/all by new and collecting every link misses stuff.
You don’t need every post, just a collection big enough to train an AI on. I imagine it’s a lot easier to get data from the Internet Archive (whose entire mission is historical preservation) than from Reddit.
The thing I’m not sure about is licensing, but it seems like that’d the case for the whole AI industry at the moment.
I’m convinced there was more to it. Otherwise they’d have worked with the app devs to find a mutually beneficial solution. Instead they just acted like massive, deaf assholes through all the drama, blackout…
Of course, it’s totally possible they’re also insanely stupid, arrogant assholes.
It makes the ridiculous prices they were quoting make sense. Because giving API access is giving a key to all that data, which they can then turn around and covertly sell access to. So they priced it so that they wouldn’t have to sell the data at wholesale value to apps that could turn around and undercut their AI training prices.
It’s the same reason why they were considering blocking Google search because Google (or any search engine) uses a crawler to look at all that data and you can’t allow Google to continue without leaving it open to any other crawler, like say an AI training data crawler.
Same thing with any push to make users log in to view comment threads (and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what Musk was thinking of when he was doing/considering the same with Twitter). If only users can access the comment data, then it’s easier to see when a user is reading too much data, or rate limit them. Also the move towards only showing a bit of a comment thread by default.
But that data is the only reason people visit the site and provide more data, so I don’t see this problem ever fully going away for them. The problem they are trying to solve is how to give access to enough data to engage users enough to provide more data while preventing AI trainers from getting that same data for free. If I wanted to, I bet I could write something that would fill a database with comment data and metadata while browsing normally in less than a day and then a bit longer to automate the browsing entirely (depending on what kind of bot detection the site uses). There’s no way for Reddit to stop the manual browsing version and the automated one will be an arms race that will also end in no way for it to be stopped because it emulates a real user to an undetectable level.
Just wait until they start selling “Stockholder Flair”
It’ll say “to the moon” with some animation, and then they’ll take away some other feature of the site because it’s “too expensive to maintain”.
IPO = exit liquidity
Should have picked Harassment. Selecting Spam does nothing.
I’d pick prohibited transaction. I live in AU. NYSE won’t let me trade there.
Either that or “hate” - all redditors can get involved, but not you because you are not from the US. Sounds like communism.
‘Sounds like communism’
Show me people who don’t know what communism, Alex
You can trade on the New York Stock Exchange in Australia. I trade foreign stock exchanges all the time.
It’s a bit more complicated… you trade through a broker with trading rights on that exchange. Unless you are a power user on a bloomberg terminal.
Reddit could direct sell shares to a US resident, I’m pretty sure, as a first party sale.
That’s exactly how people in the US trade also!
Why would you want to do that. Unless you are trading massive amounts of money, it’s more practical to just use an online broker.
Spez truly got that little dick energy going on
I take offense to this. I have a little dick. I don’t destroy everything for everyone around me while shitting myself violently. I say he has Caillou energy. Arrogant, narcissistic, hideous, an abject freak, a mistake granted legs and will hopefully suffer from a terminal illness.
Fuck Caillou. Fuck Steve Greedy Pig Boy Spez Huffman
The more I see you post, the more I like you.
“big/little dick energy” is pretty misogynistic, really…
This reeks of small tits energy.
I think misandric is more apt of a description
Now you get to tell us what you think that word means.
it means (cis) women don’t have dicks, so naturally big dick men are in charge
also men with small dicks are inferior and should feel bad about themselves…or would you like to tell me how it doesn’t mean that?
small pp energy here
let me know when you hit puberty
It’s really just body shaming, no?
This doesn’t apply to sayings. If it does, saying someone has a big head for acting proud is also body shaming. That’s dumb.
This doesn’t apply to sayings
i don’t see why you would think that? it definitely applies to sayings.
btw, notice how everyone has a head but not everyone has a dick? the clue for why it’s misogynistic is in there…
notice how men are endlessly shamed and ridiculed for their dick size, and many people have complexes over it and even kill themselves?
the clue as to why it’s harmful and body shaming is right there…
not a lot of people crying over the size of their head…
there’s no support groups for people with big heads…
That’s an insult little dick energy
They lost 93 million on 2023, and paid the CEO more than double that.
Nope - can’t think of a single thing they could do to make reddit profitable.
Well kinda but not really, he owns around 4% of Reddit which is where the $193m comes from because of the $5b valuation.
Still, fuck spez
They paid him just shy of 400k. The stock and options he was given have nothing to do with reported losses. It’s all monopoly money until IPO, them we’ll see what it’s worth.
Paying yourself 190 million in stock options when the company is running at a loss is pretty much blatantly admitting that the company is severely overvalued. My guess is that it will tank 90% once it goes public. If not more, Reddit produces nothing inherent of value and they are really hostile to their users.
Honestly, I’m kinda looking forward to the IPO - because it might be the last enshittification straw that breaks the camel’s neck that will finally drown reddit for what it has become.
Hope the IPO is a fucking disaster and Hufflepig goes bankrupt
So why does your CEO get paid quarter of a billion a year if they had to hike their APIs unreasonably and kill all 3rd party apps because “reddit wasn’t profitable” despite not paying a dime to the mods running their website niether to contribitors, posters nor users ?!?! Reddit is scummier than Uber
Seems to me the institutional investors aren’t interested at the price they’re asking.
Nah, if you click through to the sign up they ask you for a bunch of personal information on a form hosted on reddit.com and then say “there are a limited number of spots, we will accommodate as many people as we can.”
A month from now, 99% of people who fill out that form will be “wait listed” but reddit will have their real name and phone number forever. That’s the grift.
While cutting off reddit apps that are better than the bloated shitshow that is the reddit app
What’s next? Reddit Coin? NFTs?
Doesn’t reddit already have NFTs?
They also do have a reddit vault for crypto
That’s already there since a couple of years.
Maybe Shoes…
Most of that money is in stock, so he’s doing this to further inflate his stock value
So my 16 year account with 90k legit comment karma wasnt good enough to be invited?
Now I dont get to early participate in the fomo panic IPO being forced by investors?
I could’ve made or lost tens of dollars.
I’m at 10 year with about 500k combined. They sent me one. I laughed. Made me feel about as special as being given a pizza Friday at a job I’d been working for just as long. Actually, I would have been happier with the pizza.
that’s so weird because I got an email inviting me to participate and I haven’t ever been considered a ‘prolific poster’. I’m only at 60k and 12 years. I had no clue I was invited until I looked in my spam folder.
Should have marked self harm/suicide
This is such an amazing grift. I can’t wait until more social media firms start trying to direct-market their stock to their user base.
No way this can backfire
And watch as being a shareholder confers no tangible benefits for owning stock in the website of which you are a user, or worse, you get benefits, but they are limited to how much stock you have.
That’s how stock normally works.
