Huffman takes a "victory" lap: "As the AI era begins, Reddit is leaning into its humanity."

lvxferre, 4 months ago

says the web megacommunity is on a roll.

“Outside, pretty viola; inside, rotten wood.”

I don’t interact with Reddit any more so it’s plain as day for me to see, when I do visit it, that the place changed considerably from the APIcalypse to now. It’s the decadence from the last ~5 years, except on steroids; brain drained, bots going rogue, users screeching at each other based on assumptions and mods doing nothing to handle it. Those trashy and large subreddits are fairly active, but it seems to me that activity for smaller subs went considerably down.

As cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman explained to The New York Times’ Mike Isaac, the company was concerned by how AI giants such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft were mining the wealth of knowledge in its discussion threads to train chatbots, thereby creating new competition for Reddit while it footed the bill.

And based on how he handled the third party apps, he’s likely omitting critical concerns.

And also, you know…

• [User] I made something!
• [Reddit Inc.] You made something? [snatches it] It’s mine. My precioooous!

“Reddit is an open platform, and we love that,” he told me. “

Holy shit, Greedy Pigboy’s ability to lie with a straight face never ceases to amaze me. It’s almost like he’s telling the interviewer “you’re gullible trash, aren’t you? Yes, you’re stupid, so are the things reading your article. I’m going to smear some bullshit on your snouts and you’re going to swallow it, like the filthy animals lacking human-like reasoning that you are.”

Sorry folks here for the tone. I can’t be bothered to read it further.

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Potentially hot take: perhaps it’s time to punish Reddit Inc. and Greedy Pigboy, isn’t it?

Shhalahr, 4 months ago

And also, you know…

[User] I made something!

[Reddit Inc.] You made something? [snatches it] It’s mine. My precioooous!“

One of the most frustrating bits about this whole thing. No, spez, I didn’t share this for you. I did so for the community at large.

snownyte, 4 months ago

They're going to train those AIs to be as degenerative as the Reddit users themselves, lol. Glorious.

Uranium3006, 4 months ago

The small subs matter a lot. Same principal as grocery stores, everyone carries the most popular products but the large variety of storm moving products keeps people coming to a specific store. Likewise any old website can have your basic selection of memes news politics Etc but the smaller communities are what make the place unique. We're basically at the point where for a lot of people those Basics are already met so Reddit having problems with their smaller subreddits means I'll be less to keep people around. Once those communities all make their way over here then there'll be nothing but generic slop. An audience of normies scrolling past slop can just vanish in an instant

Shhalahr, 4 months ago

Yeah, I recently made a reference to /r/CrabsEatingThings in another thread. Where the hell do I go for such oddly specific content now?

Uranium3006, 4 months ago

Unfortunately I think that means it's our responsibility to start those communities and seat them with the initial content

novamdomum, 4 months ago

I'm very grateful for the APIcalypse. It made me realise that Reddit had become a toxic cesspool and that I was regularily contributing to the negativity. Huffman being insufferable is irrelevant from my perspective. I ain't never going back to that dump.

DeltaTangoLima, 4 months ago

he declares himself pleased with how things are going at Reddit. “It’s a nice time right now,” he says. “I think we’re executing really well.”

But… but… you’re still a cunt, u/spez.

But, seriously, how is this not just a puff piece aimed to improve Reddit’s fucked-up public image, before the IPO?

__, 4 months ago

Obligatory "fuck Spez." I'm sure I'm not the first.

Points two and three break my heart, and exemplify why I have no interest in contributing content over there. I don't go on sites like that to make money. There are a few - esp in niche hobbies - who do, and that's fine, but it's hardly the primary purpose and some folks from the FP sub have survived and thrived in the time since.

Somewhereunknown7351, 4 months ago

Obligatory "fuck Spez." I'm sure I'm not the first

And you won’t be the last

possiblylinux127, 4 months ago

It won’t let me log in on infinity for reddit on F-droid

KyoStarr, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Aside from the occasional Google search that leads me to reddit, I do not post on reddit anymore. Not going to invest my time in a site that will become more unstable overtime or recognize user/moderator contributions to said site.

wjrii, 4 months ago

For now, it's still a very good way to find reviews and rundowns that were (probably) written by real humans, and for the more niche communities it's often still the only community with a critical mass of people participating. Its content is a resource that was created by the users, and I'm not going to cut off my nose to spite my face.

Now that said, I never post anything there anymore, and I never browse without adblock, and I refuse to download their garbage app. It's a read-only resource for me now, and I'll survive just fine if it locks itself down completely.

1984, 4 months ago

They are executing really well yeah… Just not what they think. :)

jwiggler, 4 months ago

Humanity = maximizing ad revenue. All you need to know about reddit nowadays.

AudraTran, 4 months ago

deleted_by_author

sour, 4 months ago

memoji pfp

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Digg also still exists.

hoshikarakitaridia, 4 months ago

Also big platforms don’t die in a bang, they became awful and then slowly and painfully die or fade into irrelevance over the course of a few years.

AudraTran, 4 months ago

deleted_by_author

Shhalahr, 4 months ago

Exactly the point.

sentient_loom, 4 months ago

Training AI companies on our conversations.

athos77, 4 months ago

Thing is, he complained from the start of the protest that all these AI companies had trained their products on reddit's data, and that not only had those companies not paid reddit for it, but that reddit had actively ended up paying for all the bandwidth and everything to transfer that data multiple times to multiple companies. He knew from the start who was really sucking up all the API bandwidth. He could've gone after the corporations and worked with the app developers, given them time to adjust.

But he didn't. He didn't because he panicked when he realized how he had let reddit foot the bill for massive corporations, because he's always been butthurt that no one likes reddit's shitty app and he wanted to force them to move over, because he's too fragile in his masculinity to admit he's made a mistake and change course, yet he's too much of a pussy* to actually stand up to the corporations that screwed reddit over.

He's a shitty person and a worse CEO.

* term used deliberately, because he thinks of himself as this big alpha male "in charge" type but he's really really really not.

snownyte, 4 months ago

He's taking cues from his idol, Musk, though. He's failing upright. That's how it goes for them, doesn't it? The more shittier you are, the more you somehow project success! Who knew? /s

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

I seriously doubt that each company that wanted to train an AI on Reddit's data went and downloaded a fresh copy of the data from Reddit anyway. There were already pre-packaged dumps of Reddit's data floating around on archive sites. Still are, so making Reddit's API harder to use doesn't really change anything going forward either. It may make those archives slowly get more out of date, but there are better ways to make an AI knowledgeable about current events anyway. We've learned a lot about AI training in the past year and I think the value that was imagined around data sources like Reddit may have actually just been a brief blip.

IndefiniteBen, 4 months ago

There were never really any apps competing, some were so insignificant in user count that they still work (if you’re a moderator).

“I think I’m following the enshittification of platforms just like more successful people than me” he says; “we’re really making users our lowest priority!”.

mp3, 4 months ago

Let’s make Lemmy/kBin/the Fediverse great, and leave tis silly place behind.

iltoroargento, 4 months ago

Ew.

originalucifer, 4 months ago

reddit is just another twitter now. kinda sad. it had such potential