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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

So Reddit will help companies make perfect Reddit spambots and poison their own communities? Seems a bit shortsighted.

As I understand it, reddit as it has been has never not lost money. What, exactly, makes switching from a burn pit business model to one thst actually makes money qualify as "a bit shortsighted"? They've been doing this for two decades already. How does going from X-ten(?) billion cat photo comments to Y-ten billion open opportunities worth more than the cost of waiting yet more decades to actually make money?

If most of Reddit's new content is spambots pretending to have conversations in order to promote their product, why would anyone pay for that? Providing Reddit data to LLM trainers is directly encouraging this outcome, so it's shortsighted.

You've missed my point. Why would anyone pay for it anyway, and is that greater than the opportunity cost of waiting? They already have many billions of unadulterated comments that would work great as training data. How is a couple more, that everyine here seens to think will be corrupted anyway, going to improve the value calculation? Reddit's in the business of running a business, not a public benefit time capsule. You can't criticize just one side of the balance without mentioning the other, so to speak. (And actually, that's worth asking, tangentially: Do you think reddit's already being contaminated by spambots, or that the only way this happens is if reddit itself joins it?)

It's happening to entire internet. A lot of content generated in last few months is AI, some pretty good, but not great, all kind of on 'crappy' side. The 'crappy' feedback loop into training data is going to be real problem.

Wonder if internet will migrate back to each person having their own blog that they can control.

They just went through IPO. Doesn’t get much more short term focused than that

Reddit has been in the phase 2 of enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification for a some time now.

Here is how platforms die:

* first, they are good to their users;

* then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers;

* finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

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