Reddit usage metrics fall thanks to CEO's plan to boost revenue
Reddit usage metrics fall thanks to CEO's plan to boost revenue
While CEO Steve Huffman may be dismissive of the thousands of subreddits going dark to protest his planned API changes,...
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Spez just got muskified.
He was thinking (or more likely, his hubris was babbling): "If Elon can do it, I can do it!" without realizing that reddit is the exact opposite of twitter.Meanwwhile in the real world, twitter's value is all about its users (as in, empty but famous shells making some noise) while reddit's value is in the content its users bring. On reddit the influence isn't the person but what they bring along, and if they stop bringing it along then reddit's just a second-hand internet time machine.
Not even talking about users who (like me) have deleted their "lifetime" contribution while keeping their account alive (in order not to find it restored with a dummy handle). Reddit is getting the Thanos treatment, bit by bit.
Reddit being a second-hand time machine is still profitable in the context of selling that data to LLMs. I genuinely don't think spez cares if reddit does, so long as he can sell the data.
I'm not sure this data's worth a lot though, as many users (likely most of them) are using anon or throwaway accounts with none to little link to the rest of their activity. Sure it can be processed for statistics but I don't think there's a lot to extract further. Reddit is no facebook where the average joe has its "average joe" account, and I don't think signing up with a google/apple/whatever account is the most common practice on reddit (or at least with your real, non-portmanteau anon account).
As for archived posts and comments they're already publicly available on archive sites. Why would anyone buy them?