this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Technology

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[–] gapbetweenus@feddit.de 14 points 9 months ago

Reddit is such a nice example of capitalism turning a genuinely nice thing into a pile of garbage.

[–] nicetriangle@kbin.social 9 points 9 months ago (17 children)

Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago... Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that's their problem, not the stock market's.

  • Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
  • The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
  • Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
  • Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
  • The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don't have data to back it up)

Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate "synergy" with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.

[–] JillyB@beehaw.org 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media

I think you're overselling the importance of this one. When I've talked to friends about federated alternatives, they really aren't interested. Even if they hated Twitter/reddit and think they've gotten worse, they just don't really care about a federated alternative. I've heard some interest in threads, so maybe we count that?

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[–] PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They already make money with ads. Killing third party apps was part of this, now they can control exactly how you see ads. It's the same as any other social media now, they recommend you content, which is exactly not the point of reddit.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 8 points 9 months ago (9 children)

Imo Reddit has been the winner of the 3rd party apps and fuck spez protests. The users came crawling back. A few of us went to lemmy and formed quality communities, but for the most part, a large majority are on there.

Sure, it's been the "winner" if you were expecting reddit to topple from top spot as best aggregator - but it was never really reasonable to expect that.

Even now, the perspective that Lemmy should strive to be some kind of new reddit is really daft.

What we actually want, is for Lemmy to grow in a sustainable and manageable way with real actual content enjoyed by real contributing users.

The quality of Lemmy has improved dramatically in the last 6 months. Way more users, servers, content, and third party apps. The quality of reddit has decreased dramatically in the last 6 months. User counts may not have suffered, but the content and the experience most certainly has.

[–] criticon@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Did they? Other than /nfl most of the communities I followed went to shit very quickly and haven't recovered. They are mostly bots talking to bots or the same questions and post over and over with minimal new content

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[–] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mean, that was never seriously in doubt. The days of massive site migrations happening overnight are long over.

What matters is the momentum.

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[–] HubertManne@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago

meh.im happier as a member of the federation and honestly if we got all the reddit users it would lower the quality fast.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Similarly with twitter and mastodon. Generally, that's fine ... smaller niche online spaces are a good thing (as many who've remained have discovered I suspect).

But in the end, for those who see this fediverse project as a mission to "take back the web" ... so far only pretty minor movement has been made on that front. To the point that IMO I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter etc just "win" and the whole "alternative" social media thing stays "alternative" and relatively small. If there's a chance of this, I'd say to fediverse advocates that they should maybe rethink what the fediverse is and what it's good and not good for, because there's a real chance here that the fediverse kinda dropped the ball, especially mastodon which has been going strong for a while now.

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[–] Quadhammer@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Nah I've had a reddit account since the dawn of time and I've now switched completely over to lemmy. Can't remember the last time I logged onto reddit

Now we can watch this place grow into the thick veiny caterpillar reddit always should have been

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[–] Cratermaker@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I've already left, but seeing them marching towards an IPO makes me even happier with my decision. I just fear that the mountains of helpful troubleshooting and advice on Reddit will be locked away forever soon, while the rest of the web falls to SEO and AI-generated nonsense text...

[–] LittleBorat2@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Reddit Was the only site Google could effectively search. Rip googling questions and adding reddit.

[–] AnonStoleMyPants@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 months ago

Man, and it works great. It is waaaaay more common to find good answers to a question from a bunch of randoms on the Internet than trying to get an actual answer from a random website. Sometimes you find bs but you can usually quite quickly filter it out, and it gives a good basis from which to then continue to search on the topic.

[–] Empathy@beehaw.org 2 points 9 months ago

I'm trying out Kagi a little bit, and it has a federation search mode of some kind. I tried it for a search and it gave me results from Lemmy.

I don't know yet how Kagi compares to Google in terms of results quality, I barely used it so far. It's pretty expensive though.

[–] doom_and_gloom@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

All of the good stuff has already been scraped and uploaded to LLMs, don't worry.

[–] SpicyLizards@reddthat.com 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Sell it to musk, finish the job

[–] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Can't wait for him to rebrand it as Y

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[–] LittleBorat2@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Can't they blow Musk up by accident or send him on a rocket to Mars that orbits forever there (oops)? Something like the submarine last year but better.

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[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 5 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Everyone here are thinking $5 billion means Reddit won. Wasn’t their evaluation at $15 at one point?

[–] Threeme2189@lemm.ee 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If the went from fifteen bucks to five billion, yes they totally won 😉

[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 4 points 9 months ago

Well I guess I fully set myself up for that one lol

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[–] RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Ah... so they're shorting it.

[–] HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] You999@sh.itjust.works 4 points 9 months ago

Short selling, Wallstreet thing for making money when the stock. It kinda works like borrowing a stock and immediately selling it, then we it's time to return the stock you borrowed you buy a replacement and if the price has gone down you keep the profit.

[–] PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 months ago

shorting means to bet against a stock. instead of buying a stock and waiting for it to grow over a long period and selling it for more money (long position), you borrow the stock from somebody, sell it, then buy it back (for a lower price) after a short amount of time to give back to whom you borrowed it from. (short position). If the stock price rapidly drops in that time, you gain money.

If this sounds like a perversion of what investing was supposed to be, yeah welcome to wall street

[–] Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

Politics and whatever the other maladies are that infect Reddit aside: the app and the website are impossibly difficult to use. Ita just ads ads ads. Even if the place was a veritable utopia that’s a no from me dawg.

[–] pixxelkick@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

I 100% can see it easily selling for that much.

You want to know why it's worth that much?

Petabytes of raw training Data for LLMs. Arguably atm reddit us one of the better gold mines of LLM training data on the internet, bazillion of posts already formatted as post-response chains, which is the exact type if format an LLM wants to train on.

Can you imagine how valuable those servers loaded with posts are to a company like OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft?

5 billion is quite reasonable to harvest every reddit post that has ever been made ever and cut it off from your competitors.

[–] LittleBorat2@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

This data was out in the open for a decade and still is. People could train their llm without problems.

[–] pixxelkick@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Not legally / free.

And yes, that very very much matters if you intend to actually sell the service to companies that they themselves dont want to get hit in the crossfire of potential lawsuits for building their products on top of stolen info.

So if you can own the data itself (via buying reddit), you now have an ENORMOUS quantity of prime training data that you're investors and potential customers know is legally clean, because you literally own it.

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[–] MajorMajormajormajor@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

The worst part is that ai chatbots will start responding like redditers. I can't wait for chatgpt to regale me with a story about his dad beating him with jumper cables, or jolly ranchers, or hell in a cell.

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[–] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody's just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying "boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don't have to force an intern to scrape it for us".

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[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

$5 Billion for a chronically unprofitable, niche social media platform in an already crowded field. Yeah, Ok. You'd get a better return on your investment if you just burned the money for heat.

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[–] wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago (12 children)

The markets are insane. There is no way Reddit is worth 5 billion.

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