We are the smart people from Reddit. Even if we don’t know everything, we know which way the wind is blowing.

Just add usenet on the front end there.

Does that mean we’re spamming your timeline when we reply here? 😀

What a great article. First it gave me a fascinating introduction to an approach I had never heard of before, and then it got me worried about it.

One point that they didn’t touch on is that one of the points of maintaining biological diversity must surely to be to maintain a diversity of behaviour. If we start to conserve wildlife by changing their behaviour, there’s a danger that we start to favour working with species who are amenable to this approach. Imagine a future where biodiversity consists of an extraordinary range of breeds of canids, pigeons and rats!

It will. It will make the mods and the power-users realise that Reddit don’t care and won’t change course. Then it’s up to them.

This would work especially well for sites that choose to use clickbaity headlines like “Is this the year of Linux on the desktop?”. On reddit that would inevitably end up with lots of “No” posts from people who hadn’t even thought of clicking on the link.

It’s nice to see you worrying about how to combat the spammers already too 😀

“It’s all LISP-based. And it’s astonishingly slow.”

There’s going to be lots of other challengers out there: I’m sure every ML postgrad with any nous has spent the last couple of months contacting every funder they can track down to explain how their model is going to knock the socks off the old fashioned models used by these lumbering corporations.

And even the established models have been shown to contain content obtained in violation of user licences and copyright laws, leaving them open to all sorts of legal and political challenges. They will all be scrambling now to demonstrate that they’ve got clean hands in future models.

It will be like the NFT gold rush all over again—the only sure way to get rich is to sell the shovels.

Great. Tesla Autopilot is busy killing people while ChatGPT tells us to chill out about it. They’re already ganging up on us.

Or for the paranoid, edit then delete 😀

Haha, you just reminded me of this cartoon:

Yes I was totally blown away when I saw how large that sub is. It’s incredible to see Reddit losing people with that much experience of managing and growing massive communities, but the board’s focus right is only on selling existing content to AI bros so they probably don’t care that much at the moment.

The active mod team of r/videos (nearly 27M subscribers) has agreed that their shutdown will now be permanent. https://reddit.com/r/videos/comments/145vns0/the_future_of_rvideos/

In a tildes post (I’m riding a lot of horses right now) one of the mods said:

I know this is likely a symbolic gesture because I’m fairly confident reddit will just kick us out and bring the subreddit back up, but after being on the mod team for over a decade its going to be interesting to see how things even function if they decide to take that route.

[Edit: just seen that’s there’s a top level post on this too]

I think this reply by spez has been badly overlooked:

“the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront”.

What he means here is that earlier this year the board realised they were sitting on a massive gold mine, and their single focus right now is to exploit that as ruthlessly as possible. Jacking up the prices to access Reddit data to eye-watering levels is intended to fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.

The fact that they have put no thought or care into managing the damage that this does to third party apps and to their own reputation with the Reddit user base tells me something else too. Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?

Do they even care if Reddit goes to shit in the future? Maybe not, especially now we are beginning to realise how easy it is for careful bots to poison the conversations with AI-generated replies.