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No casual browsing for you! (europe.pub)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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They login gated and banned the ability to criticize reddit on r/mildlyinfuriating. Reddit cucks

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[–] 94 points 2 months ago (9 children)

All of their business decisions for the past few years have been centered around monetizing Reddit content as training data for machine learning models. Most likely this recent decision is an attempt to block data scraping.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Why anyone would train an AI on Reddit is beyond me, the only worse platform I can think of is 4chan.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    Volume, and breadth of subject material. For language model purposes the specific content isn't really important, it's the wide variety of language samples from many sources, all in the same data format. You could get similar samples from other platforms, but you'd have to compile them from multiple sources and then standardize them somehow for input as training data.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    It's gonna block sign ups. Why the fuck do I sign up without seeing shit?

    Not like reddit is relevant these days.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Not like reddit is relevant these days.

    Even within the lemmy user community people still occasionally refer to reddit because there isn't a better source for some things. Outside of lemmy, reddit is a household name alongside facebook, snapchat &etc; people who don't use it still know what it is. I think your conclusion is more aspirational than currently real.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    The opacity is going to make the issue very real. A site like that goes stagnant without new blood.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Oh absolutely, I think that is already happening, but it hasn't reached broad public awareness yet. Reddit has 20 years of momentum, it won't stop all at once.

    I suspect the company is aware that user engagement is dropping, along with the quality of new content. Typical of most corporations, their response is to play defensive, to try to maximize the value of what they already have, to scratch and claw and squeeze every drop from the existing data and userbase. This will accelerate the decline, obviously, but when a company is in this state they consider any strategy besides protectionism to be too high a risk.

    They will ruin themselves with cowardice, to be sure, but they're still coasting on momentum for the moment. They will continue making the same types of decisions, at an accelerating pace, as the desperation sets in.

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