I’m at 10 year with about 500k combined. They sent me one. I laughed. Made me feel about as special as being given a pizza Friday at a job I’d been working for just as long. Actually, I would have been happier with the pizza.
that’s so weird because I got an email inviting me to participate and I haven’t ever been considered a ‘prolific poster’. I’m only at 60k and 12 years. I had no clue I was invited until I looked in my spam folder.
CBOE will create options for it pretty soon after IPO, probably that week or the next. You’ll definitely be able to buy puts on it before you’ll be allowed to short sell it.
They paid him just shy of 400k. The stock and options he was given have nothing to do with reported losses. It’s all monopoly money until IPO, them we’ll see what it’s worth.
Paying yourself 190 million in stock options when the company is running at a loss is pretty much blatantly admitting that the company is severely overvalued. My guess is that it will tank 90% once it goes public. If not more, Reddit produces nothing inherent of value and they are really hostile to their users.
And watch as being a shareholder confers no tangible benefits for owning stock in the website of which you are a user, or worse, you get benefits, but they are limited to how much stock you have.
So why does your CEO get paid quarter of a billion a year if they had to hike their APIs unreasonably and kill all 3rd party apps because “reddit wasn’t profitable” despite not paying a dime to the mods running their website niether to contribitors, posters nor users ?!?! Reddit is scummier than Uber
Honestly, I’m kinda looking forward to the IPO - because it might be the last enshittification straw that breaks the camel’s neck that will finally drown reddit for what it has become.
“Reddit isn’t profitable because leadership is wildly incompetent, so let’s pay them an exorbitant amount of money instead of using that money to properly fix things or make any genuine improvements to anything.”
The archive sites used to use the API, which is another reason they wanted to get rid of it. I always found they were a great moderation tool as users would always edit their posts to no longer break the rules before they claimed a rogue moderator had banned them for no reason, and there was no way within reddit to prove them wrong.
What about archive sites like web.archive.org and archive.today? Both still work fine for Reddit posts, and neither are blocked in www.reddit.com/robots.txt, so so far they haven’t shown an intent to block them.
Yeah, the Wayback Machine doesn’t use Reddit’s API, but on the other hand, I’m pretty sure they don’t automatically archive literally everything that makes it onto Reddit - doing that would require the API to tell you about every new post, as just sorting /r/all by new and collecting every link misses stuff.
You don’t need every post, just a collection big enough to train an AI on. I imagine it’s a lot easier to get data from the Internet Archive (whose entire mission is historical preservation) than from Reddit.
The thing I’m not sure about is licensing, but it seems like that’d the case for the whole AI industry at the moment.
I’m convinced there was more to it. Otherwise they’d have worked with the app devs to find a mutually beneficial solution. Instead they just acted like massive, deaf assholes through all the drama, blackout…
Of course, it’s totally possible they’re also insanely stupid, arrogant assholes.
It makes the ridiculous prices they were quoting make sense. Because giving API access is giving a key to all that data, which they can then turn around and covertly sell access to. So they priced it so that they wouldn’t have to sell the data at wholesale value to apps that could turn around and undercut their AI training prices.
It’s the same reason why they were considering blocking Google search because Google (or any search engine) uses a crawler to look at all that data and you can’t allow Google to continue without leaving it open to any other crawler, like say an AI training data crawler.
Same thing with any push to make users log in to view comment threads (and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what Musk was thinking of when he was doing/considering the same with Twitter). If only users can access the comment data, then it’s easier to see when a user is reading too much data, or rate limit them. Also the move towards only showing a bit of a comment thread by default.
But that data is the only reason people visit the site and provide more data, so I don’t see this problem ever fully going away for them. The problem they are trying to solve is how to give access to enough data to engage users enough to provide more data while preventing AI trainers from getting that same data for free. If I wanted to, I bet I could write something that would fill a database with comment data and metadata while browsing normally in less than a day and then a bit longer to automate the browsing entirely (depending on what kind of bot detection the site uses). There’s no way for Reddit to stop the manual browsing version and the automated one will be an arms race that will also end in no way for it to be stopped because it emulates a real user to an undetectable level.
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