I used to work in a place where we constantly got looked at by security companies and consultants. The wisdom of that time? Companies don’t hire security firms and consultants to find nothing, so no matter how asinine or impractical it is, they’ll still file it because an empty report is bad for business.

Our security handling was pretty strict, and we had to constantly talk customers off the ledge and kindly inform them that their consultant was blowing crazy swamp gas up their asses. My favorite was a firm that listed all Easter eggs as a vulnerability. An open source package could raise the list of developers with a secret key combo, and so the customer saw this on their report and raised a stink. The customer had no idea what this all meant, but their consultant had scared the crap out of them, so we had to layer on a patch to disable the stupid thing.

It’s not surprising. A lot of these CEOs run around in cliques. They have forums, news letters, Chatrooms, and social events. When Silicon Valley Bank went down, the CEO of the company I work for was giving us news from other CEOs he was talking to from a shared Chatroom they set up, basically a discord for CEOs.

The other point is that many CEOs are slaves to trend and have a deep fear of missing out.

In a way, they’re organized, and combined with the above, that’s part of why when one big company hops everyone leaps behind them as if they’re moving as one (it’s all a dick-measuring Highschool clique contest though, which is why I don’t use the word conspiracy). I would not be surprised if Huffman and Musk both repeated their rhetoric to an adoring crowd of fellows before they took it to their feeds. It’s maybe why they speak so brazenly, because there is a little echo chamber of people who worship at the altar of Survivorship bias in the hope that heaven will send them more bigger-dick pills.

Something to keep in mind is that these companies aren’t concerned with total profit or revenue or anything like that - it’s all about the percentage. I suspect in the short term, these AI-articles will look very profitable. Networking effects, consumer habits, and SEO will carry the day for a time.

But what always screws these MBA types is the inability to recognize the specific natures of their business and the second order effects. Not all costs are representable on a spread-sheet.

Basically, the second order to me really boils down to this: AI generated content isn’t really a ‘brand’. Good writing shops tend to build a following with their writers and expectations with their editors. The writing, investigative, and editorial bent of a house is essentially what makes a shop. See The Economist and The New Yorker as examples. In other places, a lot of niche shops are selling personality as much as product with youtube, podcasts, and others.

this means there is no real ‘value add’ someone like an AI shop can provide. You are throwing yourselves down the hole of becoming a pure commodity, and as every business major knows, being a commodity sucks. Short term profitable, but literally no one cares about where a mass produced nail comes from and its a race to the bottom of price.

So, as time goes on, with the barrier for entry being incredibly low, every bill and joe who fancies themselves an SEO wizard has no reason to not jump in, so your competition rises and your ability to charge some value for (ads?) drops a lot. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. Many of the companies that would occupy this brandless, commodity-filling space are way better positioned to make a run at it than the GAMURS Groups of the world. Microsoft’s Bing chat and (probably soon to follow Bard) will whip your ass in the long-game. Why search Bing to get an AI article from the Escapist when Bing will do it for me? I really doubt anything churned out by an AI with some edits will be that much better per convenience.

This whole could easily collapse in on itself. Like a lot of people in the AI space, I’m interested to watch what happens when AI begins to consume and be built on its own content.

Reddit employees will be able to easily know that more than 1000 subs went dark. They’re also probably well aware about how ad revenue works on the platform.

This message wasn’t really aimed at the employees. It was aimed at the MBAs and bankers who are preparing the IPO. It was meant for investors to say “everything is fine and this is normal…”

Specifically infinite/increasing-growth capitalism.

They need to grow profits/value. These social media tech companies have about saturated potential user base. People are foreseeing a slow-down in ad budgets, and user-data is becoming a commodity. These realities, plus the need to drive up profits, leaves these companies with “no choice” but to seek more and more user-hostile features and rent-seeking behavior to satisfy investors. This was probably a long time coming, and was sorta delayed by valuation gains via an overpriced market. Now the investor love affair with tech has cooled a bit, and they’re asking more for hard-profit on the balance sheets.

The other thing that is ripping through social media platforms is a kind of ‘outrage’ or FOMO among leadership that LLM builders like OpenAI are eating lunch at their table by consuming their user content for training. This feeds into the previous point because they think that their users content can be a product of its own beyond attracting more users or being leveraged by ads. I am not so sure about this because these companies have already gotten their ‘lunch’ if they wanted it, and I am dubious about the value of a model built on data as provided by Reddit’s finest minds, and these platforms have patently failed to stop disinformation bots (which will get worse from these LLMs). But who knows.

Agreed. I think the post-IPO layoffs will be aggressive in Reddit’s case.

It’s not clear to me how reddit could possibly “grow”. They’ve hit peek influence, and ad-revenues haven’t really been a growth factor that has excited investors. They’re not really a technology powerhouse like Facebook or Google - all they have is their central product. So, when the IPO drops, all I can see for reddit is a future of aggressive layoffs and strong enshittification of Reddit as they seek capitalistic eternal increasing growth.

I don’t really consider myself a great poetic connoisseur and I’m not versed in the classics, I just pick a collection now and then let it sit with me for a bit.

With that context on my reading habits: I picked up and enjoyed the collection “Pine”, by Julia Koets.