1y ago

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

www.404media.co Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base'

Reddit's filing with the SEC makes clear that training AI with user posts is a core part of Reddit's new business model.

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.”
The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data.

Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an "Enshittification" community :-)

Reddit Was Fun @lemmy.world

fne8w2ah @lemmy.world

12mo ago

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

www.404media.co /reddit-we-are-in-the-early-stages-of-monetizing-our-user-base-2/

82 10

Reddit @lemmy.world

Blaze @reddthat.com

1y ago

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

www.404media.co /reddit-we-are-in-the-early-stages-of-monetizing-our-user-base-2/

161 63

Technology @lemmy.world

DolphinMath @slrpnk.net

1y ago

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

www.404media.co /reddit-we-are-in-the-early-stages-of-monetizing-our-user-base-2/

609 103

138 comments

Reddit has long had an issue with confidently providing false statements as fact. Sometimes I would come along a question that I was well educated on, and the top voted responses were all very clearly wrong, but sounded correct to someone who didn't know better. This made me question all the other posts that I had believed without knowing enough to tell otherwise.
Llms also have the same issue of confidently telling lies that sound true. Training on Reddit will only make this worse.
- Yeah all of my most down voted reddit comments were the ones where I replied about something I'm an actual expert in. Scary stuff
  
  The voting system let's people push comments to the top that they want to be true, not necessarily things that are true.
  
  Downvoting was always just fast food validation that you're better than someone else without having to actually back it up.
  
  Wow. You're extremely on point. No logical counterarguments but rather several downvotes for a field I'm very familiar with. Downvotes determine the validity of a comment, not their content.
  
  I spent 20 years as a producer, developer, and project manager in the lottery and games industry.
  Trying to explain how lottery and games work to people and have them hear me makes me want to cry.
- The problem is that SEO has made it impossible to find accurate information easily, since even "old, trustworthy brands" can't be trusted online. [This is an excellent article that explains the problem thoroughly, and brings receipts] (https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/).
  
  This is a great example of why it's so important to emphasize teaching critical thinking in school right now. Misinformation and disinformation is just going to continue to grow.
  
  https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/
  Great article, thanks for mentioning it!
  
  That's a really good article, and it does a good job of highlighting the issues with modern day search results.
  I've been guilty to use "best x" pages before, but if the website with the "best of page" doesn't have specific reviews linked I usually look up individual product reviews for the good sounding items on other websites.
- @Fubarberry yes I saw this a lot too. Highly upvoted confidently incorrect comments, with the real answer or an answer debunking them with links to factual sources less upvoted.
  Happened to me as well.
  
  I am a lawyer and I would get down voted for posts explaining the law that contained citations to the actual applicable statute if people didn't like the statute. Using reddit up votes as a measure of correctness is fundamentally a dumb idea.
- but sounded correct to someone who didn’t know better
  specious /spē′shəs/ adjective
  
  Having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious. "a specious argument."
  and then the real answer will be hidden or something silly, or in some cases where money is involved the correct answer might have been removed
- I would come along a question that I was well educated on, and the top voted responses were all very clearly wrong, but sounded correct to someone who didn’t know better.
  This can be said to https://news.ycombinator.com/ as well. I wonder how much of this is due to sock puppets and bots.

I'm still happy that I went through the effort to delete all my old posts when I left Reddit a while back. I periodically check if they've restored them and luckily it hasn't happened so far. I do miss some of the bigger communities but overall I'm having a good time on Lemmy.
- I'm sure they have a backup somewhere that they will use to train the AI, but agreed, it is time to leave reddit for good.
  
  Unless you are in the EU Reddit absolutely did not delete your data.
  
  I wonder what the risks are to including deleted and pre-edited content in training data. Most of the edits are going to be typos and formatting, do you want 2-3 copies of the same message with typos in them for training data? Similarly, deleted comments are mostly nonsense, unhelpful, duplicate, or highly controversial things.
  If someone wants to dig through and find individual users to restore that's one thing, but I don't think I'd immediately choose to train off of that other data unless I had to.
- After deleting all of my posts and comments Reddit decided to undelete them three days later and then proceeded to lock me out of my own account. Fucking bastards.
- I just left my comments on. I still use reddit when searching actual human responses from Google. Maybe one day someone might find my archived comments useful in the future.
- I am glad it makes you feel better but the reality is they still have your data. Just because you don’t see it on the front end doesn’t mean it isn’t still in the database with a “deleted” flag set. They aren’t hard deleting your comments.
- Deleting your messages is just another data point for them. Reddit can train an AI on the originals and categorize you as a "comment deleter" to give them more information.

Aye, and that’s why I left. As an author, fuck you trying to monetise my writing when I can’t even do that myself.
- Hey another author?! How you doin? Lol
  Same as you fuck them.
  
  Yeah, hi!
  Can I have a link to your work?

You know the phrase "If you aren't paying, you're the product".
It doesn't hit as hard as a CEO using the phrase "Monetizing Our User Base".

You know what the world doesn't need?
an AI model trained on the old Reddit Hive Mind.
- Some AI models already argue when people point out inaccuracies, just like on Reddit.
  
  Makes me wonder how that technology is going to track. Reddit isn't bad for finding niche answers to niche questions, but if you import the data wholesale then you'll have a hard time separating the signal from the noise, even if you sort by using vote counts as relevance.
  Reddit is valuable because people can do a search for a niche topic and find the answer on that forum. And the answer was written by a human. It's not valuable because it can amalgamate an approximation of those answers that might be 90% true and 10% dead wrong.
  
  Guess what data they're trained on...
  
  This is a human thing and not so much a reddit thing. People been arguing on the internet since the inception of message boards.
- I disagree. A reddit bot would be really funny as it would constantly talk about incest and spez
  
  That and the feeling of pride and accomplishment.
  
  A lot of AI models are probably already trained on Reddit data. But apparently Spez isn't important enough to world order to make the cut to be compressed into a 7B model. I asked my Mistral-7B-Instruct (4-bit quantised) local LLM:
  
  >>> What can you tell me about someone called u/spez, a ... nd are they a nice person or horrible? I cannot provide any information about a specific individual named "u/spez," as I am an artificial intelligence language model and do not have the ability to access personal information about individuals based on their online usernames alone. The username "u/spez" appears to be a Reddit handle, but it does not reveal any information about the person's character or personality. Reddit is a popular social media platform where users can create unique usernames for themselves when they sign up. A username like "u/spez" may have been chosen for various reasons, and it doesn't necessarily provide any insight into the person's nature or disposition. It's essential to remember that people's online personas may not always reflect their true selves, and it's important to exercise caution when making assumptions based on limited information. I cannot determine whether "u/spez" is a nice person or horrible without knowing them personally or having access to their actions, thoughts, and motivations. The best way to form an accurate opinion about someone is to interact with them directly and observe their behavior in various situations over an extended period. >>> Is it possible u/spez is Steve Huffman? Can you tell me anything based on tha ... t? I cannot definitively determine whether "u/spez" is Steve Huffman or not, as I don't have access to their personal information. Steve Huffman is a Reddit user who gained public attention in 2018 when he posted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread where he shared details about his life and experiences living with Crohn's disease. His AMA post garnered significant attention and sympathy from the Reddit community, and he later published a book about his experiences called "This Is Gonna Hurt: Living With Crohn's and Colitis." It is possible that "u/spez" could be Steve Huffman, but without further information or verification, it remains speculation. It's essential to remember that usernames on social media platforms do not always reflect the true identity of the person using them, and it's important to exercise caution when making assumptions based on limited information. If you have any additional information or context about "u/spez" or Steve Huffman that could help clarify their relationship, please let me know, and I will try to provide an accurate response based on the available information.

there should be an "Enshittification" community
basically every technology one
- The start of the bubble popping was the increases in interest rates. We've seen several online companies shut down already because the free money isn't there any more and there is no path to monetization.
  The problem with the Fediverse right now is that it is all run on volunteer labor and donations, similar to an early Reddit. It will be interesting to see how a distributed system solves this problem.
  
  I think the bubble is coming too. The question is how much it will take for normal users to be done with them. The current Lemmy user base is more focused on tech, open source, and/or privacy than the average Internet user, which is why we already abandoned Reddit.
  I think having to pay for access to these sites might be the biggest issue, as many people see the Internet as something that should be free.
- There is such a thing as good technology. It would be nice if one of the tech comms would ban posts about shit tech

"Early Stages?" You've got AI mining your data. The Lions have already come and gone. The hyenas and other scavengers are picking over the scraps, now.
- They mean that they havent made money on it (yet)
  
  They have probably only provided a small amount of available data, and have much more data, of different type.
  Yes we've got the data, but now we need it from different angles!

Fuck u/spez

When I go to some reddit posts on Mobile now (like from a Google search, that's the only way I end up at reddit anymore), it tells me "this content is unmoderated" and gives me a choice to either navigate away or install the Reddit app. Fuck that noise.
- Try this, in either Bing/Copilot AI or Google Gemini: Start your prompt with "According to Reddit", then do your search like you would by using search alone.
  The AI of your choice will scrape the posts and give you a nice summary of whatever you were searching for - no need to ever touch Reddit directly.
  For me, this works better with Copilot, YMMV.
  Example: "According to Reddit, what is the best mechanical keyboard brand to use for touch typing?"
  
  or i can just add "site:reddit.com" to a normal search. meh.
- Change the URL to old.reddit.com as the domain

I know it's only token resistance at this point because others have found their comments from Google searches even after their accounts have been deleted, but Power Delete Suite is busy churning away on mine right now.
- I wish I had known about Power Delete Suite. I nuked my posts / comments by hand :-(
  In case it's useful to more people: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
  
  Lol
  My account was four years old. There was no way I was going to do it by hand. It took PDS 8 hours to get churn through all that crap.
  I had been meaning to delete my account earlier for opsec reasons, but just hadn't gotten around to it.
- I wonder if constantly cycling through it could eat up bandwidth, storage, etc. might be a good way to fuck with them.
  
  Just set up a weekly cron job at the busiest hours
  
  I Remember people uploading 10gb files of noise in order to fuck their storage

They've finally gone full /HailCorporate, become the thing some of the original people of the site would probably not have agreed with in many ways
- That is a story as old as time. Greed is strong.

“we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,”
If anyone on Reddit reads that and stays there willingly they are an idiot. Not they weren't idiots for staying after the API changes but now they are even bigger idiots.

Aaron Schwartz is rolling in his grave

They permabanned my 14yo account because my anti-nazi rhetoric was "encouraging violence." I guess Nazis are a class of humans dumb enough to give them money so they don't want to scare them off. The post that got me banned had more than 60 up votes when it was deleted and I was permabanned. A reply post in the same vein was not deleted.
- Remember that video where Ron Perlman talked about there's a lot of ways to lose a house?
  I lost my 11-year account because I said something to the effect of 'If Ron Perlman pulled up and said get in the fucking car we're going to go burn down Bob Iger's house I wouldn't hesitate.'
  They had been getting very weird near the end there anyways? I kept getting these stupid warnings over the most petty shit. At one point somebody said respond to this comment and I'll gild you. I simply responded fuck you because I thought it would be funny to see that have gold, which it got. Got an official warning for harassment.
  I had said a lot worse over the years.
  
  Same. This.
  Edited to add: fuck redtit
- I got permabanned for inciting violence too about a week ago too. You know the deluded asshole who killed his dad, Justin M whatever his name was? Well it was in the r/all news for a day so I figured people would want to see it. Posted it in a gore sub with the nsfw tag and put a neutral title. It wasn't politically motivated or anything, it was just a video that was recently talked about and interesting to me and maybe others, I thought. Well, it got deleted. Several fucking days after it was removed did I get a random permaban message and banner. No inciting violence anywhere.
  I've been banned specifically for things too when a whole thread of similar comments weren't.
  I've also had random warnings and bans for weird shit like u/EdibleFriend. I wish I left reddit sooner but reddit has a huge userbase and well established communities. A monopoly on everything sadly. I spent my time writing comments for others, not for spez or "reddit".
  If anyone's deleting their comments, make sure to edit beforehand. If you're not banned, use powerdeletesuite. If banned, you'll have to use redact then shreddit. I don't want to advertise them but those were the only two I could find after some hours of trying to delete my data. Nuke reddit is gone. Redact doesn't delete but rather edits and I think shreddit actually deletes. I left mine up so all the scrapers can override any previous data, or so I hope. I don't trust redact honestly so I did it in a vm. Make sure to remove all saved, hidden, blocked, etc. posts, comments, users, and subs and replace it with random shit.
  I wish people could learn from my comments or read their contents but there were too many comments to selectively delete. fuck spez and fuck reddit.
  
  Honest question: deleted comments might be just hidden and still up for sale, do people know if GDPR can come to the rescue here?
- To be fair, advocating violence on any platform will not get you very far even if the idea is justified, eg) nazis
  
  Curiously, Nazis seem to get away doing just that, under their clear name even! Reported a few of those on Twitter a while ago before Elons takeover. Got a message that the reports are unwarranted and if I continued to make them they'd disable my ability to report.
  
  I asked what Eisenhower would do if he saw the Nazi marchers in Wisconsin and had ready access to a machine gun. I don't think that is advocating violence. I intended the comment to illustrate how far some Republicans have moved to the right since Ike was president.
  Eisenhower is dead. Advocating for his attendance at a Nazi march is nothing more than a thought experiment.

“Pay-Per-Click”, is all this is when you break it down to its basest.
Narwhal developers have come out and said that they have to pay beforehand for clicks to the API—- what absolute bullshit Reddit and Spez are bringing to the trough. Spez killed reddit—- calling it now; a slow painful lingering shitty death.
People will not put up with it once they know what is really going on.
Let em know. “Pay-Per-Click” will not stand.
- People will not know what is really going on as they do not care. Reddit will continue to exist.
  
  Ah
  Yes
  I know Fark and /. and MySpace, and still exist

With all the changes that Reddit has made recently esp with the API changes, it definitely did leave salt in my mouth alongside how increasing toxic the Reddit community had become in comparison to when I joined the community but the small niche communities that existed on Reddit did honestly made it harder to quit due to the lack of communities outside, which is another big problem with centralisation, esp in the modern internet as it makes you rely on platforms you may not necessarily like due to big issues like social isolation etc.
When I found out about this, this isn’t simply excusable anymore and I would rather delete my account over having my personal data being sold for profit (which goes completely against the early ethos of Reddit as a whole but being semi owned by Conde Nast, this would have been inevitable) despite the fact that I have been thinking about deleting my Reddit profile way before this issue.
Surprisingly, I honestly have had no regrets deleting Reddit out of my life and honestly I do wish I would have done it sooner, I’m far less frustrated, I’m starting to think more constructively again and I feel way way less dependent on it.
Can say, I made a good choice there tbh.
- Ditto for me, as well. It's just a matter of establishing those 'niche' communities on the Fediverse. The Fediverse has broken thru 10M users. We're getting there. Onward!

Is this a long term source of revenue for Reddit? Or will it loose value at some point, simply because LLMs are all trained sufficiently on user generated content. Is there more to learn at some point?
Also it seems that a lot of content on Resdit is already AI generated, so it would train on data from other LLMs, which I'm sure doesn't improve quality.
- LLM's are a parasitic entity. They can only operate as long as they have a living host (us) on which to draw data. Without their host, they rapidly start hallucinating. Hell, the other day ChatGPT (and every business that relied on it) started hallucinating for no apparent reason.
  The thing about the parasite is, though, that it endangers its host. At some point, the fact that anything you say can be plugged into a machine with no credit given back to you, will encourage creative people to stop bothering being creative, depriving them of income or even exposure.
  It's a funny thing, a few years ago I would say that the "anything you post here can be sold by us" clause on social media was very unlikely to get exploited, as nobody knew how to sell data en masse to make money off of it. I guess now we know that's not true at all. If something bad can happen with your data... It will.
- It’s the reason I can’t see this stock maintaining or improving its price after the IPO. I mean, sure, there will probably be a short term gain for a few stock holders. But, I just don’t see how it doesn’t tank afterwards. I mean, in the end, Reddit is Reddit. It’s just an aggregation site, how can it grow in value? The fediverse is slowly but surely gaining popularity. And even though Reddit calls itself the front page of the internet, it really isn’t.
  *Not investment advice. Good god please don’t take investment advice from me. Knowing my luck that fucking stock will soar to Wall Street record highs, beating out Bitcoin by a large margin.
  
  It’s just an aggregation site, how can it grow in value?
  Supposedly in Reddit finance there's something called the "Anarchy Chess/Ewan gambit". If you post one grain of rice, and double it each time you reach a threshold you can farm near-infinite updoots! Probably works the same with money, idk.
- Well, eventually LLMs will need to be fed new misinformation at some point, such as which minority was responsible for their own genocide

I'm in the early stages of becoming a billionaire. Now I just need approximately a smidge less than a billion dollars.
- that's great. most of us are more than a billion dollars short of a billion.

If you are planning to kill your reddit account, there is an app, Redact, which is available on the Apple and Play stores, that will allow you to nuke all your posts before you close it completely. Deny them your data.
- Surely that just removes the public data.
  They will have backups that will retain it all
  
  My thoughts exactly
- For better or for worse, Reddit has a super valuable archive that has basically replaced Google search for me, it's insane how many times it has helped me solve small and big issues. I understand the logic, but it would still be a big blow for the internet if many people did that.

Read: that means things are gonna get much worse around here
- When Reddit go public we gonna see some serious shit.
  
  Yeah as I have already written the site off, at this point I just kinda wanna see how bad it gets how fast.

monetizing the most racist community outside of twitter what could go wrong?
- ????
  Something something sweet summer childrens

I do think it's interesting that a lot of people seem to think AI is going to take away jobs but understanding AI just a tiny fraction, it seems like the things that are threatened are one that were already micro serviced away like internet search.
We use search everyday and having the best search engine means being the best tech company. These companies are in a race to topple Googles search dominance through providing AI as a service. There's money in them hills if you can train an AI to recommend when and where to go buy the newest shiny thing that solves all your problems.

It took them how many years to monetize their user base? This company is run by complete idiots.
- Given that Spez managed to write himself a $193M cheque, I’d say it’s idiots all the way down.

I wonder if they would use the data on all my old accounts that got banned for promoting violence against the billionaire class.
Don't forget kids -- all rights are won through violence.
- The forgotten truth nobody wants to remember.

See, most companies would do this before they went public.

Only people would lose money when they use Reddit.

Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an “Enshittification” community :-)
There is, its called !enshittification@lemmy.world
- Just subscribed, thanks a lot.

yea make the community; somewhere to post the offenders lol

Looks like the enshitification of Reddit is about to accelerate. I barely use it anymore, but I kept my two ten year + old accounts intact (one for porn one for legit posts). I’ll probably nuke my non-porn account soon.

138 comments