Continuing the discussion from Deplatforming and Censorship Examples - #75 by JustinCEO
Elliot:
I don’t know (besides that he was a co-founder) but Reddit’s entire executive team has always been incompetent at making money. Their current plan that they are destroying the site over seems to be basically this:
They just figured out that OpenAI downloaded Reddit’s data a few years ago, and ChatGPT is worth a lot of money.
They decided their data is actually useful for something and worth a lot of money (a belief they did not formerly hold).
So they decided to charge a lot of money for access to their valuable data.
They failed to differentiate access by bots and humans.
They failed to take into account that OpenAI already got their data , and next year’s data isn’t that big a deal compared to over 10 years of historical data.
Yeah. This seems like “shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.”
Elliot:
What they’re actually going to accomplish, maybe, is gatekeeping the data to prevent other competing AI labs from accessing it (and also preventing humans from accessing it…). For that evil service to help OpenAI stay on top and suppress new AI startups, they will charge OpenAI nothing. (Don’t tell them about this idea, ugh.)
Imagine if OpenAI grabs all the data, then reddit burns it all down . Who wins there? OpenAI gets a big edge over any competitor who doesn’t have the data. But I think reddit is going to end up burning it all down while losing money…
Just seems so pointless and dumb. Pursue short term profits ineffectively to have an overall result of self-sacrificing your business for the benefit of an unrelated biz? Bizarre.
Elliot:
Also, they say things like that Apollo was costing them $20,000,000 per year in bandwidth but that is ~all coming from humans who would cost Reddit a similar amount if they used Reddit’s own app.
Oh interesting. Yeah I guess whatever client still has to access Reddit’s servers. I’ve seen lots of comments saying Apollo makes people usable for Reddit, so maybe Reddit’s plan was to save on costs by driving all the Apollo users away ;p
Gp.
Elliot:
Reddit is also killing all the porn subreddits, and they pretty much publicly said the reason is b/c they feel pressured by mainstream powerful people/groups/companies that hate porn. Obviously reddit knew some people dislike porn when they decided to allow it and lots of porn subreddits became huge. They are betraying their users and trying to sell out (but struggling to get paid for selling out). They also tried transparently lying by saying they weren’t really killing porn subreddits because old.reddit.com still exists and they’ll still be accessible there.
Tangentially, it’s kind of weird how porn is in one sense more acceptable than it’s ever been, but at the same time there’s huge pressure to ban it from various places (Tumblr did the same thing IIRC).