329
Reddit is in danger of a death spiral
(www.zdnet.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
329 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
34821 readers
16 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I think the word "data" also supports the theory that this is actually about training data for LLMs rather than ad revenue. If it was actually about 3rd party apps, then why not just require all apps to feed the ads? But according to the Apollo developer, there wasn't even a way to fetch the ads through the API.
I think spez saw what OpenAI/Microsoft were accomplishing using parsed data and got dollar signs in his eyes. The irony is that OpenAI probably already ripped every comment off Reddit up until now, and don't really need more going forward.
I mean it's also true that they could just have read the web pages, but the API actually cost reddit less than rendering the full web page for all the data.
Yea, it's clearly not about just money, because they could have fed ads via the API, or made it part of reddit premium for the user to keep using the API ad free. I can't say how many people would have rage quite anyway, but the way they're doing it doesn't give anyone who likes other apps any reason to pay reddit money, that's for sure. And does inspire people to leave.
I hesitate to say I have all these ideas that would have worked better because I haven't seen their research on their existing premium paid product or expected conversion rates for API access (at per user monthly subs), so maybe the research says they've got ALL the paying members they'll ever get and they need to force ever more ads instead for money - but given they've had years and years to think about this and have tried almost nothing makes me think they're either very unimaginative or just are bad at innovation or even just trying stuff other people already have except for tunnel vision on ads.
If it was actually about AI they would have solved the issue quickly by offering different prices for 3rd party apps. The fact that they aren't doing that clearly shows that they want to kill apps.