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.
I really wanted that site to crash and burn. Oh well.
apparently, the path to profitability was “shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit”
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.
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.
No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.
But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.
TBH, it feels like social media always needed some back door business like this to make it profitable.
It’s almost like human communication is not supposed to be a product or something…
After selling user generated content to Ai.
Doesn’t seem like that gravy train will roll on forever
98 million are bots
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.
Fuck Spez
(Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)
This is important for everyone to hear regularly. Thank you
Boo!
Whatever, this is far from the end of the story, and Lemmy has nothing but time. The bigger they are, the harder they fall in the end.
I vividly remember the Digg migration and Reddit is so very much like Digg these days.
The bot generated comments are training AI… full circle
It won’t be long before the internet is just bots talking to each other and advertisers paying them to do so.
