this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts

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First post in Lemmy (self.showerthoughts)
submitted 2 years ago by potato_pizzareca to c/showerthoughts
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Maybe spez is intentionally destroying Reddit. Because all their moves are illogical. It doesn't make sense.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There's no scenario where he comes out of this the hero, though. Their business model going forward is ads and charging generative model owners for access to user posts. Their most invested and active users -- that is, their most valuable ones from both an advertising and a model training perspective -- were using 3rd party apps.

They needed to get everyone in house under a 1st party umbrella, and they needed to peg API pricing AI training pricing.

This is what a profit-driven Reddit just looks like. Their only other option is to become Facebook and track and serve ads to users off-site, and they don't have the same kind of controls over user identity that Facebook has. Plus, it puts them in direct competition with Facebook, and Zucks will absolutely destroy them in toe-to-toe.

He's already looking at slitting Twitter's throat with Barcelona...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I was in no way implying he can look like the hero anymore. I was saying, had he used his brain, instead of his emotions, he COULD have made himself into one.

I believe that the actual motive behind the API pricing is the part he hasn’t totally said out loud yet, only eluded to. I don’t think it actually has anything to do with 3rd parties or AI.

One of the absolute biggest profitable businesses is information on people. So for Reddit YOU are the product. Your browsing history, click through, devices you’re using, browser, location, and a HUGE one, what parts of Reddit you’re using/your posts.

This info can be worth large sums of money, they just need to be able to capture it. Yeah, that’s where the 3party apps are really the issue, but at the core the Apollo’s of the world aren’t the actual problem. It’s that Reddit can’t collect your info with Apollo in the way. Ffs spez said in an article, which I can’t currently find, something to the effect of people post things on Reddit they won’t tell other people or only tell their therapist and it’s not fair that Reddit can’t capitalize on that info.

edit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html

"There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."