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 :-)
The issue really comes down to the infrastructure costs. The fediverse is by design significantly less efficient with hardware than a centralized system. It isn’t that it’s difficult to scale, it’s just that it’s expensive to scale. And since the hardware is maintained by generosity of donation…
This is offset by the higher interest in volunteer labour, though.
I think the “solution” is just to accept that instances will burst in and out of existence (and favour) based on time and generosity.
As long as user profiles and contributions can transfer between instances, especially if the process is easy, then instances coming and going won’t be that much of a problem.
I do hope that current and future open source tech moves towards monetization resistance if monetization can’t be done ethically. Donation and volunteers seem to be the working formula so far