Technology

I think this reply by spez has been badly overlooked:

“the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront”.

What he means here is that earlier this year the board realised they were sitting on a massive gold mine, and their single focus right now is to exploit that as ruthlessly as possible. Jacking up the prices to access Reddit data to eye-watering levels is intended to fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.

The fact that they have put no thought or care into managing the damage that this does to third party apps and to their own reputation with the Reddit user base tells me something else too. Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?

Do they even care if Reddit goes to shit in the future? Maybe not, especially now we are beginning to realise how easy it is for careful bots to poison the conversations with AI-generated replies.

I've been getting used to lemmy for the last couple days, going back and forth between here and reddit and following what's going on, and I think I just realized something that I hadn't been able to put into words.

The lemmy community feels responsive and fun to talk to, and I think that's because the people who are coming here from reddit are the people who are motivated to communicate, and are people who care about the topics in each community. That's pretty cool.

Sharing this because it should be shared

TechCrunch: Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA

I keep sitting here waiting for Reddit to backtrack. But it keeps not happening.

Lol. This sounds like a dig at spez.

I just don't get how a site based on freely produced content thst employs volunteer mods can actually monetise.

That part just gets me. The site has nothing without the users and the users have nothing without the mods.

I love how the AMA has 0 points. You down vote it and it comes back to 0. No manipulation there reddit. Just that alone shows what a disgrace that company is.

The active mod team of r/videos (nearly 27M subscribers) has agreed that their shutdown will now be permanent. https://reddit.com/r/videos/comments/145vns0/the_future_of_rvideos/

In a tildes post (I’m riding a lot of horses right now) one of the mods said:

I know this is likely a symbolic gesture because I'm fairly confident reddit will just kick us out and bring the subreddit back up, but after being on the mod team for over a decade its going to be interesting to see how things even function if they decide to take that route.

[Edit: just seen that’s there’s a top level post on this too]

Well, the AMA was a shining success…

There was a response on the AMA where u/spez said "Reddit would always be profit driven and currently does not make a profit. Unlike TP apps"

You can no longer see this on the Reddit app, it is obscured in someway. Perhaps because of the potential impact for the IPO?

This whole situation feels like a short term revenue grab. I bet shareholders are trying to inflate the numbers in order to cash out in the IPO.

what blew my mind, and the minds of many other people on reddit is that they (reddit) have 2,000 employees and yet still can't piece together a good and accessible experience for their users...

I'm out. Redact is busy just now deleting everything under my account.

It's simply disappointing to see the disaster for the AMA. Saddens me to see Reddit go down like this. At least we got the Lemmy-proxy being a community project. Would love to still use Infinity as my main "reddit" browsing app, after all.

RedReader has been granted a non-commercial accessibility exemption and will not shut down. QuantumBadger is planning long term changes to support Lemmy, HackerNews, and Tild.es alongside Reddit in the same app.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/145du4j/update_4_redreader_granted_noncommercial/

I wonder how much backtracking will be done. Are they going to listen to the concerns of the community or are they going to double down on their decisions?

Wow, RedReader somehow managed to get spared due to its accessibility features. Was not on my bingo card at all. I guess somehow I can still manage to use Reddit completely ad free, but who knows for how long. Even better, the RedReader dev might have plans to integrate Lemmy into it.

Wow. Spez is doubling down on attacking the Apollo dev. You'd think spez was new to reddit with the way he's commenting.

Hacker News: Reddit bans subreddit detailing how to move to competitor Kbin

KbinMigration Subreddit URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/KbinMigration

Hacker News Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36268458

I am wondering if, based on this horrible AMA, if subs are going to either blackout early, or decide that 48 hours won't really do anything so they opt to go indefinitely.

BBC coverage: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65855608