this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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[–] memex 63 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Can anyone explain to me, please, how is this good (financially) for the reddit investors? I mean, I ran from reddit since I only accessed it from sync. Didn't really care for the 'politics'. Now I get here and see there's a lot more to it than just the shut down of 3rd party apps (which I understood as a financial decision). If money's the motivation for all of this, how is it financially healthy?

[–] AlmightySnoo 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

If Reddit kills 3rd party apps it can absorb (or at least hope to do so) users of those apps and have complete control over how they access Reddit. Reddit can then feed them more ads, trackers and whatnot, all of which would translate into more revenue for Reddit, which is a net positive for shareholders.

There's also the fact that companies training LLMs would be interested in paying those exorbitant fees to get training data as they likely can afford those fees.

So in short, Reddit likely wants to become a content farm for LLMs. As for the users, Reddit doesn't care given their recent statements. So if some c*cks stay on Reddit, spez will just inundate them with more ads because why not, free money is free money, until everyone leaves.

[–] Pixelologist 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Please correct me if I'm mistaken but isn't the reddit dataset used to train LLMs from before Chat GPT became widely known? I was under the impression data from that point onwards was poisoned and not useful for training purposes

I can't seem to find it now but I remember there being a ~90gb .zip megadb upload that got passed around a lot on machine learning reddit subs that was a snapshot of reddit before x date

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