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”.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
I think misandric is more apt of a description
