AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦The Verge reacting to Reddit's spokesperson discrediting them
memexCan anyone explain to me, please, how is this good (financially) for the reddit investors? I mean, I ran from reddit since I only accessed it from sync. Didn't really care for the 'politics'. Now I get here and see there's a lot more to it than just the shut down of 3rd party apps (which I understood as a financial decision). If money's the motivation for all of this, how is it financially healthy?
If Reddit kills 3rd party apps it can absorb (or at least hope to do so) users of those apps and have complete control over how they access Reddit. Reddit can then feed them more ads, trackers and whatnot, all of which would translate into more revenue for Reddit, which is a net positive for shareholders.
There's also the fact that companies training LLMs would be interested in paying those exorbitant fees to get training data as they likely can afford those fees.
So in short, Reddit likely wants to become a content farm for LLMs. As for the users, Reddit doesn't care given their recent statements. So if some c*cks stay on Reddit, spez will just inundate them with more ads because why not, free money is free money, until everyone leaves.
TroyThird party app users only made up ~3% of total reddit traffic. The revenue potential there is miniscule. It was never about the money, but about control.
Maybe, the problem with old reddit is that it's as much about the comments as it is the content. Comments are hard to advertise on. Where card style scrolling content is great for advertising. Scroll a couple cards with a 20-60 second engagement, look at an ad, scroll a little more. . ..
However, I don't see this as being a great way to farm content for language models, the content engagement tends to drop significantly with the endless scrolling so my guess is that it's a short term play to prove they can sell ads before the IPO.
Reddit totally has the potential to compete with tiktok in the mindless scrolling for a much more massive audience.
They can consolidate all their users and better track their routines and serve them more mindless addicting content which advertisers love.
I expect there will be major changes to how the app works in a few months to the point it becomes completely unrecognisable. Kind of like how musical.ly turned into tiktok overnight