Imo Reddit has been the winner of the 3rd party apps and fuck spez protests. The users came crawling back. A few of us went to lemmy and formed quality communities, but for the most part, a large majority are on there.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Technology
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Did they? Other than /nfl most of the communities I followed went to shit very quickly and haven't recovered. They are mostly bots talking to bots or the same questions and post over and over with minimal new content
For me, it was politics that sank Reddit. I was banned from a half dozen news forums for criticism of the IDF in Gaza at the beginning of what most people now acknowledge to be an ethnic cleansing. I reported every account calling for murder and genocide of Palestinians, which is against the Reddit TOS. They permanently banned me for "report abuse" for doing their jobs for them. They have obviously shown that there's no freedom of speech, even when you follow the rules, if it goes against the feelings of the administration and the unelected moderators. Fiefdoms ruled by angry internet trolls shouldn't get an IPO.
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Similarly with twitter and mastodon. Generally, that's fine ... smaller niche online spaces are a good thing (as many who've remained have discovered I suspect).
But in the end, for those who see this fediverse project as a mission to "take back the web" ... so far only pretty minor movement has been made on that front. To the point that IMO I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter etc just "win" and the whole "alternative" social media thing stays "alternative" and relatively small. If there's a chance of this, I'd say to fediverse advocates that they should maybe rethink what the fediverse is and what it's good and not good for, because there's a real chance here that the fediverse kinda dropped the ball, especially mastodon which has been going strong for a while now.
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meh.im happier as a member of the federation and honestly if we got all the reddit users it would lower the quality fast.
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I mean, that was never seriously in doubt. The days of massive site migrations happening overnight are long over.
What matters is the momentum.
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No we didn’t. I happily left reddit the day Apollo stopped. They also lost my premium subscription.
I also stopped Twitter when musk took over. I use Bluesky or Mastodon and find both platforms to be superior.
Sure, some folks may have, but many of us have not. Does that matter to Reddit? probably not. Do I care? not really.
Modern Reddit is unusable, and old reddit isn’t mobile friendly.
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Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago... Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that's their problem, not the stock market's.
- Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
- The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
- Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
- Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
- The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don't have data to back it up)
Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate "synergy" with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.
Monetisation?
Licensing the site to AI when there's finally a ruling they can't just scrape the internet for training data while ignoring copyright.
I was told reddit has already been scraped for AI and all sorts of stuff. There is very little new value to sell.
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Good fucking luck with that
I've already left, but seeing them marching towards an IPO makes me even happier with my decision. I just fear that the mountains of helpful troubleshooting and advice on Reddit will be locked away forever soon, while the rest of the web falls to SEO and AI-generated nonsense text...
Reddit Was the only site Google could effectively search. Rip googling questions and adding reddit.
Man, and it works great. It is waaaaay more common to find good answers to a question from a bunch of randoms on the Internet than trying to get an actual answer from a random website. Sometimes you find bs but you can usually quite quickly filter it out, and it gives a good basis from which to then continue to search on the topic.
I hate that Reddit is so good for answering questions. The alternatives are usually AI written unhelpful trash.
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for that bot-infested shitposting dump?
Pardon me, but I believe you mean that bot AND AD invested shitposting dump.
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The markets are insane. There is no way Reddit is worth 5 billion.
watch the reddit ipo be a catalyst for a stock market crash.
To me it’s a sign of how out of whack the stock market is right now. Lemmy created the Reddit experience at a fraction of the cost. Yet Reddit spends millions a year doing it.
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I 100% can see it easily selling for that much.
You want to know why it's worth that much?
Petabytes of raw training Data for LLMs. Arguably atm reddit us one of the better gold mines of LLM training data on the internet, bazillion of posts already formatted as post-response chains, which is the exact type if format an LLM wants to train on.
Can you imagine how valuable those servers loaded with posts are to a company like OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft?
5 billion is quite reasonable to harvest every reddit post that has ever been made ever and cut it off from your competitors.
The worst part is that ai chatbots will start responding like redditers. I can't wait for chatgpt to regale me with a story about his dad beating him with jumper cables, or jolly ranchers, or hell in a cell.
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Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody's just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying "boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don't have to force an intern to scrape it for us".
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This data was out in the open for a decade and still is. People could train their llm without problems.
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$5 Billion for a chronically unprofitable, niche social media platform in an already crowded field. Yeah, Ok. You'd get a better return on your investment if you just burned the money for heat.
"niche" website in a crowded field....that is also the top 9th most visited website in the world, above tik tok.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
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Reddit is such a nice example of capitalism turning a genuinely nice thing into a pile of garbage.
Everyone here are thinking $5 billion means Reddit won. Wasn’t their evaluation at $15 at one point?
If the went from fifteen bucks to five billion, yes they totally won 😉
Well I guess I fully set myself up for that one lol
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Meanwhile tech is hemorrhaging.
Good luck Reddit! 😂
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