Reddit is getting bigger.

Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while “other” revenue reached $33.2 million on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.

In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now, Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.

  • NastyNative@mander.xyzEnglish
    12·
    7 hours ago

    Just as we are all leaving for Lemmy. Reddit now makes you have an account to access some of their shit. Good riddance!

    • Jure Repinc@lemmy.mlEnglish
      66·
      14 hours ago

      Well and behind it is stealing other peoples’ work (posts and comments, moderation and administration) and selling them as yours. The oldest capitalist criminal trick in the book: privatization AKA primitive accumulation AKA enclosure of the commons.

      • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
        10·
        15 hours ago

        I mean, to be fair, I’m nearly positive that the Reddit T&Cs will have said they retain rights to anything posted there for ages. And the AI bubble is already showing signs of deflation or bursting coming not too far down the line. Let them enjoy their first and hopefully only profitable year.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          2·
          4 hours ago

          A few years ago I started a blog where I can post lengthy stuff instead on Reddit. To have more control over my own posts and without the mercy of Reddit or any moderator. Little I did knew this was the best decision I could make, after I saw what happened after Ai hype. (I’m not much active, but still, the principle counts.)

          Anyone deleting their content there thinking this will avoid selling to Ai is probably a mistake. Because now Reddit can sell those deleted content from their backup (I assume they have backups…) and no normal user can access the information anymore, which hurts the normal users even more than any Ai or Reddit.

          I encourage everyone to start a blog and at least post the deleted stuff there for future access. At least you have more control this way.

        • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
          16·
          14 hours ago

          No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.

          But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.

          • BCsven@lemmy.ca
            2·
            7 hours ago

            It doesn’t really matter because there is not much content to train AI on in a worthwhile manner. The huge amount of content is mostly hostile retorts, and sarcastic meme banter. AI will be a mess after training on that

          • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
            2·
            14 hours ago

            I never was arguing against that. Also I’m pretty sure their moral compass was pushed by the feds until he topped himself, so nothing about their bullshit has surprised me since.

      • Sabata@ani.social
        23·
        15 hours ago

        It’s almost like human communication is not supposed to be a product or something…

    • qupada@fedia.io
      34·
      14 hours ago

      Indeed, you will note that they carefully chose the moniker “Daily Active Uniques” and not “Daily Active Users”.

      I think that speaks volumes, as humans are definitely harder to retain.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    58·
    16 hours ago

    A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

    I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

    35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

    I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    17·
    9 hours ago

    As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value exploitation extraction* from a distance. Value exploitation extraction typically generates a peak of profit in the short term, but it makes losses even harsher in the long run.

    As such I don’t think that Reddit is getting “bigger”. That profit is like someone who lives in a wooden house, dismantling their own home to sell it as lumber; of course they’ll get some quick cash, but it’s still a bad idea.

    In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature.

    Let’s pretend for a moment that we can totally trust Huffman’s claim here. Even human translations often get some issues, as nuances and whatnots are not translated, and this generates petty fights, specially in a younger userbase like Reddit’s; with AI tendency to hallucinate, that gets way worse. And even if that was not an issue, a lot of content is simply irrelevant for people outside a certain regional demographic.

    *EDIT REASON: I switched the terms, sorry. (C’mon, I’m L3.)

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        4·
        9 hours ago

        Yup, it is 100% relevant! Selling user data is extremely profitable, specially with a large userbase. However, it lowers the value of the platform - it makes users less eager to genuinely contribute with it (due to privacy concerns, seeing it as a “they’re exploiting me!” matter, etc.). As such the data being generated there becomes less useful, less relevant, and less profitable over time, paradoxically enough.

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          2·
          8 hours ago

          Over time yes, but then again those most likely to leave have already done so. At this point I don’t expect anymore large exoduses from it, but even if there were I’m not so sure that they would come here.

          Conservatives would not feel welcomed in the slightest (nor should they, hey-oh!:-), normies would not feel comfortable due to the heavy need to block every damn thing here just to survive it, and especially the people who think they are leftists (as I once naively thought, with zero evidence I should add!:-P who wants to bother actually looking up definitions of terms? especially if everyone around you is a conservative and thus it makes no functional difference) will find themselves most likely to become dogpiled onto by the people most ah… “eager” to look down upon their fellow human (and some as we so recently and unfortunately discussed go so far as to tell others to kill themselves - highly inappropriate language, especially coming from an instance admin).

          So even if some were to leave, where would they go? Twitter is dead, having been eaten from the inside by X and cancelled, then necro-birthed into its current undead existence. And Facebook… just… no. Threads then? Maybe in a few years but either way it’s not comfortable and familiar like Reddit is. So even if people left Reddit, I would expect them to go crawling right back into it, maybe just change their subs or some such. Especially when they roll out subscription model to avoid (some of) the ads, though it’s too soon still as they get people used to them slowly but surely… just like a frog in a pot being cooked slowly (except that’s a false story, bc irl the frog actually does have enough sense to jump out!).

          Or maybe they’ll simply touch grass, until they can’t stand that anymore?:-) Playing games rather than talking with people can be a real distraction from the grittiness of life - and then there’s Discord servers that so long as you only want a singular specific game, actually do offer a convenient method to discuss such a focused topic.

          So “less profitable”, I guess we’ll see. Probably somewhat less, but substantially so? That I dunno.

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
            4·
            7 hours ago

            I’m not expecting a big exodus, but rather a slow decline in both the number of users and their engagement. With a few peaks here and there that seem to revert the downwards trend, but each peak being smaller than the one before.

            They won’t be leaving for the same reason as most people here did, pissed at the IPO-related changes (such as killing 3rd party apps). It’ll be more like “…meh, why would I check Reddit? There’s better stuff elsewhere.” We can already see the decline of the content quality in Reddit now; it’ll get only worse over time.

            I think that most will end in Discord. Some in Bluesky, and some will simply touch grass. Conservatives might end in Minitrue “truth social” or crap like that.

            Facebook might perhaps absorb some of the former Reddit users. It feels disgusting for the privacy conscious, but for them it’ll be a simple matter of not finding interesting stuff in Reddit.

            The same applies to Reddit’s liquid profit - for now, that value extraction still creates a small peak on raw profit, to the point that the bottom line became positive; later on the peak will barely reach the surface; later on, value extraction will be necessary to avoid making the bottom line too negative.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        3·
        9 hours ago

        I think that most users there are still human beings, but botting has become a big enough problem that the platform can’t be seen as a place for genuine content any more.

    • S_H_K@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      10 hours ago

      value exploitation

      I tried searching that term but had no luck any article I could use to know more?

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        5·
        9 hours ago

        I fucked it up and switched the terms, sorry. Look for “value extraction” instead; you’ll find multiple references to the concept such as this or Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything”.

        To keep it short: you create value when you produce desirable goods/services for the customers; however, when you extract it, you’re picking the value that was already created (by society, your customers, or even your own business) and turning it into profit. The later is faster but unsustainable, as that value doesn’t pop up from nowhere, so when a business shifts from value creation to value extraction it’ll get some quick cash and then go kaboom.

        In Reddit’s case, this value is mostly users willing to generate, curate, and share content with the platform, and other users knowing this:

        • someone recommends you a product/brand. The person might be wrong, but you were reasonably sure that they aren’t a corporation astroturfing their own product. Someone else might criticise it instead.
        • you hop into your favourite subreddit and, while the content there isn’t the best, it’s still good enough - because the mods gave some fucks about growing their subreddits;
        • you discuss some controversial topic. You might get dogpiled, but at least you know that the dogs piling you are human beings, that sometimes might listen to reason; a bot will never;
        • et cetera.

        All that value was being slowly extracted through the last years, but the changes in 2023/2024 did it the hardest.

  • Hnery@feddit.org
    15·
    14 hours ago

    Really wonder how they plan to increase their revenue on the AI training data, especially now that a significant amount of their data is “poisoned” by the models they try to train