Reddit is getting bigger.

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.

    • Jure Repinc@lemmy.mlEnglish
      77·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
        15·
        2 years ago

        I mean, to be fair, I’m nearly positive that the Reddit T&Cs will have said they retain rights to anything posted there for ages. And the AI bubble is already showing signs of deflation or bursting coming not too far down the line. Let them enjoy their first and hopefully only profitable year.

        • Kichae@lemmy.ca
          English
          22·
          2 years ago

          No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.

          But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.

          • BCsven@lemmy.ca
            2·
            2 years ago

            It doesn’t really matter because there is not much content to train AI on in a worthwhile manner. The huge amount of content is mostly hostile retorts, and sarcastic meme banter. AI will be a mess after training on that

          • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
            2·
            2 years ago

            I never was arguing against that. Also I’m pretty sure their moral compass was pushed by the feds until he topped himself, so nothing about their bullshit has surprised me since.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          3·
          2 years ago

          A few years ago I started a blog where I can post lengthy stuff instead on Reddit. To have more control over my own posts and without the mercy of Reddit or any moderator. Little I did knew this was the best decision I could make, after I saw what happened after Ai hype. (I’m not much active, but still, the principle counts.)

          Anyone deleting their content there thinking this will avoid selling to Ai is probably a mistake. Because now Reddit can sell those deleted content from their backup (I assume they have backups…) and no normal user can access the information anymore, which hurts the normal users even more than any Ai or Reddit.

          I encourage everyone to start a blog and at least post the deleted stuff there for future access. At least you have more control this way.

      • Sabata@ani.social
        29·
        2 years ago

        It’s almost like human communication is not supposed to be a product or something…

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    72·
    2 years ago

    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.
    • qupada@fedia.io
      49·
      2 years 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.

    • realitista@lemm.ee
      7·
      2 years ago

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

      • darreninthenet@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        2 years 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

  • NastyNative@mander.xyzEnglish
    27·
    2 years ago

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

        • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
          2·
          2 years ago

          I am becoming increasingly skeptical of that, repost bots run completely unchecked: The admins 100% do not give a shit and haven’t for a long time, pretty much always ignoring reports because it artificially inflates their numbers.

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          Over time yes, but then again those most likely to leave have already done so. At this point I don’t expect anymore large exoduses from it, but even if there were I’m not so sure that they would come here.

          Conservatives would not feel welcomed in the slightest (nor should they, hey-oh!:-), normies would not feel comfortable due to the heavy need to block every damn thing here just to survive it, and especially the people who think they are leftists (as I once naively thought, with zero evidence I should add!:-P who wants to bother actually looking up definitions of terms? especially if everyone around you is a conservative and thus it makes no functional difference) will find themselves most likely to become dogpiled onto by the people most ah… “eager” to look down upon their fellow human (and some as we so recently and unfortunately discussed go so far as to tell others to kill themselves - highly inappropriate language, especially coming from an instance admin).

          So even if some were to leave, where would they go? Twitter is dead, having been eaten from the inside by X and cancelled, then necro-birthed into its current undead existence. And Facebook… just… no. Threads then? Maybe in a few years but either way it’s not comfortable and familiar like Reddit is. So even if people left Reddit, I would expect them to go crawling right back into it, maybe just change their subs or some such. Especially when they roll out subscription model to avoid (some of) the ads, though it’s too soon still as they get people used to them slowly but surely… just like a frog in a pot being cooked slowly (except that’s a false story, bc irl the frog actually does have enough sense to jump out!).

          Or maybe they’ll simply touch grass, until they can’t stand that anymore?:-) Playing games rather than talking with people can be a real distraction from the grittiness of life - and then there’s Discord servers that so long as you only want a singular specific game, actually do offer a convenient method to discuss such a focused topic.

          So “less profitable”, I guess we’ll see. Probably somewhat less, but substantially so? That I dunno.

            • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
              2·
              2 years ago

              This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

              People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

              Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

              All the rest: yup.

                • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
                  2·
                  2 years ago

                  Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.

                  Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

                  i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.

    • S_H_K@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      2 years ago

      value exploitation

      I tried searching that term but had no luck any article I could use to know more?

  • Hnery@feddit.org
    20·
    2 years 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