Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users

Comments

• alyaza@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  apparently, the path to profitability was “shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit”

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  • JRepin@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Well and behind is is stealing other peoples’ work (posts and comments) and selling them as yours. The oldest capitalist criminal trick in the book: privatization AKA primitive accumulation AKA enclosure of the commons.

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    • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      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.

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  • Rooskie91@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    TBH, it feels like social media always needed some back door business like this to make it profitable.

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    • Sabata11792@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      It’s almost like human communication is not supposed to be a product or something…

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  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Which is a good reminder to everyone to support your local Lemmy instances.

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• kibiz0r@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

  I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

  35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

  I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

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  • DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I know this might sound a little condescending, but why are you torturing yourself by not using an adblocker?

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    • kibiz0r@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I was using the mobile app.

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  • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Yikes.

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  • inverted_deflector@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I still browse reddit, honestly more than I do lemmy, but its mostly reddit old with adblock. Even on browser even though that is painful to navigate.

    With properly curated subs its not so bad, but there definitely is still something missing. Also holy cow the current algorithm on reddit is trash. It used to be that the front page changed and shifted but sometimes I see the same crap on my front page for 2 days. It’s insane!

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• barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Fuck Spez

  (Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)

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  • butter@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    This is important for everyone to hear regularly. Thank you

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• Pssdoff@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  The bot generated comments are training AI… full circle

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  • realitista@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It won’t be long before the internet is just bots talking to each other and advertisers paying them to do so.

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• thingsiplay@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  After selling user generated content to Ai.

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  • Midnitte@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Doesn’t seem like that gravy train will roll on forever

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    • darreninthenet@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      It cannot - more and more content is coming from AI so they are just “relearning” what one of the AI platforms has already produced… the endgame of that is convergence on nothing new being produced from AI

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• prex@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Image

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• Powderhorn@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  That’s all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.

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  • iii@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    NPCs don’t mind

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• Alice@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I really wanted that site to crash and burn. Oh well.

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  • Powderhorn@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Who the fuck is Alice? (if you do not get this reference, Gompie is what you’re looking for.)

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    • gwen@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      i get the reference but how does the song relate to this

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    • Alice@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I’ll take any reference that isn’t Wonderland!

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• NastyNative@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Just as we are all leaving for Lemmy. Reddit now makes you have an account to access some of their shit. Good riddance!

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• pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  ok now i am 100% sure im hoping for an ai bubble

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• NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I’m thinking AI-powered something is going on, for sure.

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• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value exploitation from a distance. Value exploitation typically generates a peak of profit in the short term, but it makes losses even harsher in the long run.

  As such I don’t think that Reddit is getting “bigger”. That profit is like someone who lives in a wooden house, dismantling their own home to sell it as lumber; of course they’ll get some quick cash, but it’s still a bad idea.

  In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature.

  Let’s pretend for a moment that we can totally trust Huffman’s claim here. Even human translations often get some issues, as nuances and whatnots are not translated, and this generates petty fights, specially in a younger userbase like Reddit’s; with AI tendency to hallucinate, that gets way worse. And even if that was not an issue, a lot of content is simply irrelevant for people outside a certain regional demographic.

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  • OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    this comment in one of the cross-postings seems relevant: lemmy.world/comment/13157556

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    • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Yup, it is 100% relevant! Selling user data is extremely profitable, specially with a large userbase. However, it lowers the value of the platform - it makes users less eager to genuinely contribute with it (due to privacy concerns, seeing it as a “they’re exploiting me!” matter, etc.).

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  • S_H_K@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    value exploitation

    I tried searching that term but had no luck any article I could use to know more?

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    • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I fucked it up and switched the terms, sorry. Look for “value extraction” instead; you’ll find multiple references to the concept such as this or Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything”.

      To keep it short: you create value when you produce desirable goods/services for the customers; however, when you extract it, you’re picking the value that was already created (by society, your customers, or even your own business) and turning it into profit. The later is faster but unsustainable, as that value doesn’t pop up from nowhere, so when a business shifts from value creation to value extraction it’ll get some quick cash and then go kaboom.

      In Reddit’s case, this value is mostly users willing to generate, curate, and share content with the platform, and other users knowing this:

      • someone recommends you a product/brand. The person might be wrong, but you were reasonably sure that they aren’t a corporation astroturfing their own product. Someone else might criticise it instead.
      • you hop into your favourite subreddit and, while the content there isn’t the best, it’s still good enough - because the mods gave some fucks about growing their subreddits;
      • you discuss some controversial topic. You might get dogpiled, but at least you know that the dogs piling you are human beings, that sometimes might listen to reason; a bot will never;
      • et cetera.

      All that value was being slowly extracted through the last years, but the changes in 2023/2024 did it the hardest.

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  • gwen@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    L3?

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    • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Shorthand for third language [English] speaker. I mean that I’m prone to switch a few words here and there, due to other languages interfering inside my head.

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• Moah@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Well I’m glad my leaving the platform had such an impact, I never said

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• haerrii@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Really wonder how they plan to increase their revenue on the AI training data, especially now that a significant amount of their data is “poisoned” by the models they try to train

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• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Boo!

  Whatever, this is far from the end of the story. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

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  • realitista@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I vividly remember the Digg migration and Reddit is so very much like Digg these days.

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    • ililiililiililiilili@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0[

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  • lud@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Lemmy has nothing but time.

    Isn’t Lemmy decreasing in numbers?

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    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Not that I’m aware of. AFAIK nobody collects hard data right now, and I’m actually working actively on a system to do it.

      Just based on me peaking at current federation stats every once in a while, .world has grown relative to the niche .m/heaxbear/lemmygrad sphere, which makes me think it’s growing overall.

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• mspencer712@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Deceased users’ estates still haven’t agreed to the new terms, have they?

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• Kratzkopf@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I’m looking forward to LLMs copying the gibberish german communities like to use. It is very common there to translate things word for word without any regard for correct german grammar or understandibility.

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  • django@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Who would have thought, that it would one day be a weapon against ai.

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  • Zoop@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    That’s awesome. I hadn’t heard about that. I love silly shit like that! :)

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• pineapple_pizza@lemmy.dexlit.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Dammit, all of you told me Reddit was going into the ground and I didn’t invest lol

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  • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Pffffffffffff…since when is it a good idea to get financial advice from randos on the internet?

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• Sibbo@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Congrats to them. Sad though that they had to go as low as selling their users out to AI training for that. And context sensitive advertisements in social media are also more a drag to society. But hey, they did it.

  Maybe now they can shift to more ethical business models?

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  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    They wouldn’t, even if they knew how. Because unethical makes more money.

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  • iii@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Maybe now they can shift to more ethical business models?

    You can’t honestly expect that?

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  • vodkasolution@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    That. Apart the last sentence, obvs.

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• vodkasolution@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  The loser remains a loser, but he’s not losing money.

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• Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Such a shame it turned out the way it did, but the writing was on the wall. Every single reddit announcement thread was a shit show aha. I guess in a way they were transparent about only being in it for the money. Their actions were always consistent

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