Reddit Inc. is weighing feedback from early meetings with potential investors in its initial public offering that it should consider a valuation of at least $5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, even as it is estimated below that figure in the volatile market for shares of private companies.
Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago… Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that’s their problem, not the stock market’s.
Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate “synergy” with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.
Monetisation?
Licensing the site to AI when there’s finally a ruling they can’t just scrape the internet for training data while ignoring copyright.
I was told reddit has already been scraped for AI and all sorts of stuff. There is very little new value to sell.
Except AI models may end up having to start again with licences or public domain data.
They are currently breaking the law and delaying legal action as long as possible in the hopes they can repeat the trick with a new data set.
No they’ll train on laundered model output. Like every llama.
The investment thesis they the data is valuable is bonkers. It’s not. Not only has it been exfiltrated and can be laundered in a dozen ways, Reddit also won’t be able to effectively assert copyright.
Look at Facebook. It’s full of reposted quora content now with AI images and AI laundered text.
Reddit is dead
Whatever already existed won’t be thrown away regardless of the ruling. It’s like throwing all the gold already dug up just because it was done by slave labor. The law and legal actions are mostly just a moat around the pile of gold already dug up. Sure AI companies will have to pay more for the new data from other sources. However that would be peanut compared to how much they will have to pay starting from zero.
If every time what already exists gets used there’s a risk of a massive fine or court case they’ll throw it away.
The game now is to delay the legal process long enough until they’ve built the replacement.
Then they can afford to throw the, essentially faulty, model away.
It’s not at all clear that the current model does breach the law.
If it was a court would have issued an injunction or whatever.
It’s clear from the output that it breaks copyright.
We don’t have to look inside the black box to demand to see the input which caused that output.
To be clear a machine is not responsible for itself. This machine was trained to break copyright.
Generally if someone is clearly in breach of copyright the rights holder will apply to a court to issue an injunction to order that company to cease their activities until a case can be resolved.
Given that has not happened, it seems that from a court’s perspective, it’s not a clear breach of copyright.
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Typically they aren’t fighting other corporations.
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My point is that corporations often see a fine as a cost of business because the fines are issued by a regulatory system that has no teeth.
If you’re in a lawsuit against another corporation they are going after damages in civil court and it’s likely to be a high enough fine to stop the behaviour.
Yeah that was kinda my understanding too. And regardless of my feelings on it, I think rulings are mostly gonna go in AI’s favor.
I think you’re overselling the importance of this one. When I’ve talked to friends about federated alternatives, they really aren’t interested. Even if they hated Twitter/reddit and think they’ve gotten worse, they just don’t really care about a federated alternative. I’ve heard some interest in threads, so maybe we count that?
Yeah, people don’t really care about decentralisation nor federation. People want an easy experience where everyone is
If they really understood the phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the soup’, then they’d realize the advantage of smaller online communities.
Reddit was at its best when it had a low count but engaged userbase, and became actively worse as it grew.
I think this is because trolling and response isn’t a 1 to 1 ratio. All it takes is 1 toxic person to make an entire subforum rancid and takes the effort of several mods to mitigate it.
The more people you have, the more chance you will have these trolls organize, the more likely they will either overwhelm or infiltrate the mods.
Yeah I tend to agree. I think all communities have a critical mass and past that point they go downhill.
I was just googling for the rat overpopulation experiment because I think it works as a great example of this and it turns out this whole concept has a term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
I think a better metaphor is fermentation.
It happens naturally whenever the ingredients are brought together but in order to get a quality product you need ridiculous amounts of knowledge, process, and technology.
And even a tiny bit of the wrong bacteria can ruin an entire batch, but people will still drink it and go blind.
Regular people didn’t know or care wtf reddit was for quite a while also and there absolutely is a building friction between people and corporate social media. We’re in the early stages for now, but stuff like Activitypub is not going away.
Even my most alternative, vegan, communist friends agree with me when I pitch the fediverse and then flock to capitalist social media like moths anyway. It’s disheartening.
They already make money with ads. Killing third party apps was part of this, now they can control exactly how you see ads. It’s the same as any other social media now, they recommend you content, which is exactly not the point of reddit.
Reddit’s been running ads for a while and has never turned a profit