The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I’m not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn’t even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can’t tell you how many times now I’ve looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
The question is, does Reddit ownership believe the money is in LLM training data or not. We’ve seen tech leadership jump on all kinds of bandwagons in the last few years, none of which have panned out. I don’t think LLMs will, either, but every time one of these things gains some limelight, someone with an established tech company seems to believe they’re about to make a lot of money.
And in this case, they actually might. Just not off of the tech, but off of an IPO where they centre the tech as the opportunity for new investors.
But I have no idea if they’re smart enough to see the scam and run the play, or if they’re true believers or not.