Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”
The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data.
Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an “Enshittification” community :-)
Is this a long term source of revenue for Reddit? Or will it loose value at some point, simply because LLMs are all trained sufficiently on user generated content. Is there more to learn at some point?
Also it seems that a lot of content on Resdit is already AI generated, so it would train on data from other LLMs, which I’m sure doesn’t improve quality.
LLM’s are a parasitic entity. They can only operate as long as they have a living host (us) on which to draw data. Without their host, they rapidly start hallucinating. Hell, the other day ChatGPT (and every business that relied on it) started hallucinating for no apparent reason.
The thing about the parasite is, though, that it endangers its host. At some point, the fact that anything you say can be plugged into a machine with no credit given back to you, will encourage creative people to stop bothering being creative, depriving them of income or even exposure.
It’s a funny thing, a few years ago I would say that the “anything you post here can be sold by us” clause on social media was very unlikely to get exploited, as nobody knew how to sell data en masse to make money off of it. I guess now we know that’s not true at all. If something bad can happen with your data… It will.
It’s the reason I can’t see this stock maintaining or improving its price after the IPO. I mean, sure, there will probably be a short term gain for a few stock holders. But, I just don’t see how it doesn’t tank afterwards. I mean, in the end, Reddit is Reddit. It’s just an aggregation site, how can it grow in value? The fediverse is slowly but surely gaining popularity. And even though Reddit calls itself the front page of the internet, it really isn’t.
*Not investment advice. Good god please don’t take investment advice from me. Knowing my luck that fucking stock will soar to Wall Street record highs, beating out Bitcoin by a large margin.
Supposedly in Reddit finance there’s something called the “Anarchy Chess/Ewan gambit”. If you post one grain of rice, and double it each time you reach a threshold you can farm near-infinite updoots! Probably works the same with money, idk.
Well, eventually LLMs will need to be fed new misinformation at some point, such as which minority was responsible for their own genocide