So your telling me that putting all of the power on the community and then pissing that community off is threatening to your revenue streams?
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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They didn't have that figured out weeks ago...? Of course they're going to need other revenue streams, did people think giant API fees from tiny apps were going to rocket reddit into profitability or something? AI scrapers will just use something else.
The density of people on this issue is astounding. Of course this is just the beginning of the monetization. They need all the revenue streams, not just fucking some of them. That, is why reddit has cancer. Because it's going to get worse.
Yeah, that's why I'm loving lemmy. It's not perfect but it's going to be pretty good.
Nah. The point of API costs was to kill 3rd parties to force all mobile users onto the 1st party app to ensure more ad views. They are marking subs back to SFW to ensure ad views, which is insane w/o NSFW cleanup.
Dunno what other revenue streams they can exploit. They've got ads, subs and paid awards, I'm sure they're selling our data.
They don't push their stuff very hard. But you're right, they do have all the basics nailed down.
Which means all they can really do is try to widen those already-existing streams more. Getting everyone on the official app is a great step one, but it won't fix profitability either. Need those streams wider yet.
AI scrapers never used the API. That's just a convenient scapegoat.
Don't believe Huffman's lies!
I would love to learn more. Can you share any links? My googlefu is insufficient to cut through the bs without knowing more about the terms I need to be searching for.
There's just no compelling reason to do it that way.
LLMs like ChatGPT are getting data from the entire web and then having humans manually tag and identify everything. Getting data from the API is actually less useful to that end, and they'd need to integrate separately with every individual website.
Most websites don't even have an API in the first place, either, so scraping would still be necessary for most sites.
It's just the way a large data gathering project works. If you want to get data from 100s of sites a scraper is universal and can work for all while using an API would require (assuming all the sites HAVE an API) custom code for each.
Funny how they could just do the reasonable thing and all these problems and headaches would be gone in an instance. The pride and ego is probably too big for Huffman.
The Find Out stage has been going well. Especially with how much they downplayed the impact of these changes.
@L4s. It's threatening their wallet. Who wants to buy ads if ads are disabled or all the discussion you were targeting is suddenly free for all/john oliver? Who will keep a subscription if their frequented subreddits are effectively useless because of protesting (assuming they aren't supporting the protests, etc).
If they had alternative revenue streams available they would already have them as maxed out as they could.