You could tell they got scared when subs got the idea to go NSFW.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Such a great idea.
The two subs I have still left are now even sensibly NSFW. Many workplaces dislike what is considered IP violation in some jurisdictions. Shareholders frown on that kind of thing.
I still find astonishing that tech crunch buys the argument of ML model training.
No one in their sane mind would use the API (that have always been rate limited) for fetch data for text generation. People would use HTTP or, even better, archives of reddit.
Why? Because there is better or no rate limit, there is no need to write anything (only reading) and it will stay free 🙂 Also super fresh data is not dramatically useful (except in very specific corner cases when something in the news change the way we talk)
Web crawling has always worked through raw HTTP/HTML parsing, why create site specific API calls that require authentication and are throttled.
This excuse is pure bullshit.
Considering the Reddit API has a hilariously low limit, I fully understand why the AI bro's will use a scraping approach instead. I've built small discord bots that had a difficult time following the API because you had so little Requests available! I was in the process of building an event-driven system which used multiple API tokens in order to be able to keep up with multiple feeds. Its just terrible.
Another proof of Reddit's incompetence.
Wait an article I read earlier is claiming that subreddits are business as usual. Now, this article claims the opposite?
yeah, i want to know the reality not some delutional article
That’s the media for you 🙄
Could you share the link to that one? Thanks. Looks like this TechCrunch article is sourcing info from emails with advertisers partnered with Reddit, not just from public statements about visitor traffic published by Reddit themselves.
I wonder what the measured metrics are internally. Funny that those earning metrics would've been more readily available had they already IPO'ed on the public market.
Guessing it's this wired article
(Disclosure: WIRED is a publication of Condé Nast, whose parent company, Advance Publications, has a majority ownership stake in Reddit.)
LMAOOO
Hot damn now we know why
I think it’ll take a while for us to know the real overall impact spez’s decision has made on Reddit’s user base. Until then, it’s really just speculation unless something concrete comes out (like financial reports etc).
Love it, I deleted my 150k+ karma account last week and never visited again
I’ll do it on 1st July. But first I have to delete all my comments. Takes some time.
Those numbers hardly describe a "plunge". Much lower impact than I had hoped honestly
They're lining up an IPO. Anything suggesting that they can't maintain 5-10% real growth year after year (like other companies that investors could put their money) is truly damming. A sustained decrease in revenue, even a small one, is going to gut the IPO valuation.
I really doubt this will translate into a decrease in revenue, anyways. These numbers suggest very little sustained loss in traffic, and if that continues when the new API pricing kicks in they'll probably come out ahead
These numbers suggest very little sustained loss in traffic
You'll probably see a decent sized dip at the point where the changes go into effect. There are probably a lot of people using apps like Apollo until they can't: once they can't, certainly not everyone is just going to go install the inferior reddit app and start using it.
Also, it's possible the relatively small drop will have more of an effect than might immediately be obvious. Social media sites like reddit, Twitter, etc aren't really that profitable (when they're profitable at all) — but people are willing to invest in them because they're currently still experiencing growth. So in this case, growth has not only stopped, but reddit lost some ground.
Except we can be sure that the entire drop is due to humans deciding Reddit is dead. How much of the remaining traffic are bots?
Don't love the framing of this paragraph from TechCrunch. It's not that they're charging for the API. That's understandable and obvious, and we all wanted the platform to survive. I'll be happy to volunteer to contribute to lemmy development/server costs/app development one day. It's that they're grossly overcharging for the API to such an extreme degree that paid subscriptions to third party apps actually lose money.
In April, Reddit announced its plans to start charging developers to access data through its API. The move was obvious — to restrict third parties from accessing Reddit data that can help build text-generating machine learning models such as OpenAI’s GPT 4. Developers building apps and bots to assist people using Reddit and researchers who wish to study the platform for noncommercial purchases were among the few exceptions. However, as a result, third-party apps, including popular Reddit client Apollo, found it difficult to pay for those charges and decided to go offline. Various popular subreddit moderators came in support of those apps and developers and started protesting against the API pricing move.
My Frontpage has increasingly less churn since last week or so...
Just lovely
*Reddit ceos plunge user engagement