Reddit Inc. has signed a contract allowing a company to train its artificial intelligence models on the social media platform’s content, according to people familiar with the matter, as it nears the potential launch of its long-awaited initial public offering.

Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO::Reddit Inc. has signed a contract allowing a company to train its artificial intelligence models on the social media platform’s content, according to people familiar with the matter, as it nears the potential launch of its long-awaited initial public offering.

  • dgmib@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    If it was just about monetizing scraping for AI models, they could have easily had different pricing for AI uses than they did for 3rd party apps.

    If it was about the lost revenue from the lack of ads on third party apps, they only needed to give existing 3rd party apps a longer period of time to transition their business models. 3rd party app users would have been paying way more than Reddit was losing from the lack of ads.

    No Reddit wanted to kill off the third party apps. They used the AI scraping as an excuse to shut them down. They wanted to force people onto their shitty app.

    I don’t know what their actual reasoning for that is, but there’re basically two possibilities I can think of:

    1. Their executive team and board of directors is ridiculously incompetent.

    2. Their shitty 1st party app is harvesting significantly more data about you than the 3rd party apps did, and they can sell that data for more than the $2-5 per user per month they would be getting if they gave the 3rd party apps time to transition to a paid business model.