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.

  • alyaza [they/she]OPM
    177•6 months ago

    apparently, the path to profitability was “shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit”

      • Sabata
        29•6 months ago

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

    • Jure RepincEnglish
      77•6 months 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
        15•6 months 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.

        • KichaeEnglish
          22•6 months 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•6 months 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•6 months 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.

        • @thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          3•6 months 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.

  • Pete Hahnloser
    31•6 months ago

    That’s all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.

  • @kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    72•6 months 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.

    Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

    But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

    • I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
    • Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
    • Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
    • Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
    • Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
    • Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.
    • @DdCno1@beehaw.org
      23•6 months ago

      I know this might sound a little condescending, but why are you torturing yourself by not using an adblocker?

    • @inverted_deflector@startrek.website
      1•6 months ago

      I still browse reddit, honestly more than I do lemmy, but its mostly reddit old with adblock. Even on browser even though that is painful to navigate.

      With properly curated subs its not so bad, but there definitely is still something missing. Also holy cow the current algorithm on reddit is trash. It used to be that the front page changed and shifted but sometimes I see the same crap on my front page for 2 days. It’s insane!

  • Sibbo
    11•6 months ago

    Congrats to them. Sad though that they had to go as low as selling their users out to AI training for that. And context sensitive advertisements in social media are also more a drag to society. But hey, they did it.

    Maybe now they can shift to more ethical business models?

    • qupada
      49•6 months 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.

  • @Kratzkopf@discuss.tchncs.de
    13•6 months ago

    I’m looking forward to LLMs copying the gibberish german communities like to use. It is very common there to translate things word for word without any regard for correct german grammar or understandibility.

  • Hnery
    20•6 months 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

  • @Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org
    10•6 months ago

    Such a shame it turned out the way it did, but the writing was on the wall. Every single reddit announcement thread was a shit show aha. I guess in a way they were transparent about only being in it for the money. Their actions were always consistent

      • darreninthenetEnglish
        4•6 months ago

        It cannot - more and more content is coming from AI so they are just “relearning” what one of the AI platforms has already produced… the endgame of that is convergence on nothing new being produced from AI