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Comment by jollofricepeas | Hacker News Reader

1. Reddit isn’t a non-profit.

I’m not sure why it’s user base doesn’t seem to understand this. They have to make UI changes to make money. It’s either that or everyone pays for subscriptions.

2. The AI threat is real.

It’s not even remotely fair that the large tech players of the world get to train their models on others content for cheap. It’s sad what’s happening to Apollo but they need to beef with Microsoft and Google. Reddit does not owe that guy a cheap pipe.

It’s no different from any other situation where market conditions shift and impact existing models.

Yes, it sucks but welcome to capitalism.

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> It’s not even remotely fair that the large tech players of the world get to train their models on others content for cheap.

Ironic for Reddit to be angry at this considering the reason their company has any value at all is because of both the free content provided by users and the army of moderators who aren’t paid a cent for their work.

I understand that some people think that these changes will "make them more money", but I don't think that you have to destroy the UI to do that.

In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users and will make them less money in the long-run, or maybe even run the company into the ground if people starts to migrate to some alternative with non-sucky UI.

There's also nothing about the UI that's related to AI.

If the two options are:

1. Make money while preserving the UI

2. Make money while destroying the UI

... then why would anyone bother to preserve the UI? It's completely irrelevant even in the best case scenario. But allow me to present another more cynical:

They both hate anything good/competent/well-made, and the users too, and also want to make money.

> In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users

When I first started reading reddit in early 2006, the web was a larger place with many thousands of fora. But reddit's growth was at their expense, most are dead or dying. It's depressing when you're looking for something specific, and you end up on one of the old phpbbs... no one's bothered to post a comment in months. If they have, no one ever replied. But in their archives, it shows that just 15 or even 10 years ago, an hour wouldn't go by without someone saying something.

They've solved the "chasing away users" problem by making certain there's nowhere to flee to. Some small fraction might just cut that sort of internet use out of their lives entirely out of spite, but not enough to matter.

someone should create a union a content producers and submitters, do that the biggest influencers on Reddit could easily migrate to a clone that's less shitty. it won't happen unless a large enough body leaves Reddit for greener pastures.

This has nothing to do with AI. Making your site less usable isn't going to make you more profitable in the long run.

I think Musk has shown that this is not accurate. Established players will play and smaller fish will die off as intended further consolidated a given field.

For the record, I am not happy about it, but I disagree with your assertion that LLM is not part of the consideration here.

Nah, it has a lot to do with AI.

Give it another 12 months when the rest of the web has been gunked up with AI written crap and reddit will be one of the few reliable sources of useful opinion out there.

Hell, it is right now given how frequently I and others append "reddit" to our google queries.

What you're describing is in a really rough spot already.

You need to append "reddit" to get any useful result, but unless you're on desktop, the mobile site is essentially broken if you're looking for answers. The app nag is omnipresent and the comment section is always broken after 2 or 3 comments with a "show more" button and lists of other posts.

If information is hard to glean from reddit, and the rest of the internet is AI blogspam, what is to be done?

What's the connection between Apollo and getting data from scrapping. Wouldn't issuing a license to the Apollo dev that forbids persisting the data solve this concern? They could also require that users login if they want to use a third party client and then rate limit the number of posts the user can fetch.

Except Reddit doesn't have a product if they don't have people reading it. The TERRIBLE UI and user experience means that a percentage of users will only use reddit via 3rd-party apps. Apollo is BY FAR the best client. This isn't capitalism, it's self-harm by stupidity. Reddit's only value is the user eyes and data. Remove the users and Reddit dies a quick death. Maybe they will still pull in users but having less value but charging more to drive away your Users sure seems like a dumb plan capitalism or not.

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