apparently, the path to profitability was "shamelessly sell out on AI hype bullshit"

A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

Edit: Okay yall... I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it's really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

• I'm a mobile dev, so I don't mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I'm going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn't bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
• Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
• Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn't logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
• Even if I was already logged in, it's an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I'm not sure it would've improved much.
• Even if I was on Android, I'd probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
• Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved... I didn't ask for that, and swarming people with "have you considered doing it the right way?" when they're just making a basic observation doesn't create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.

Fuck Spez

(Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)

98 million are bots

The bot generated comments are training AI... full circle

After selling user generated content to Ai.

That's all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.

I really wanted that site to crash and burn. Oh well.

Just as we are all leaving for Lemmy. Reddit now makes you have an account to access some of their shit. Good riddance!

ok now i am 100% sure im hoping for an ai bubble

I CALL BULLSHIT

I’m thinking AI-powered something is going on, for sure.

As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value ~~exploitation~~ extraction* from a distance. Value ~~exploitation~~ extraction typically generates a peak of profit in the short term, but it makes losses even harsher in the long run.

As such I don't think that Reddit is getting "bigger". That profit is like someone who lives in a wooden house, dismantling their own home to sell it as lumber; of course they'll get some quick cash, but it's still a bad idea.

In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature.

Let's pretend for a moment that we can totally trust Huffman's claim here. Even human translations often get some issues, as nuances and whatnots are not translated, and this generates petty fights, specially in a younger userbase like Reddit's; with AI tendency to hallucinate, that gets way worse. And even if that was not an issue, a lot of content is simply irrelevant for people outside a certain regional demographic.

*EDIT REASON: I switched the terms, sorry. (C'mon, I'm L3.)

Really wonder how they plan to increase their revenue on the AI training data, especially now that a significant amount of their data is "poisoned" by the models they try to train

Well I'm glad my leaving the platform had such an impact, I never said

Boo!

Whatever, this is far from the end of the story, and Lemmy has nothing but time. The bigger they are, the harder they fall in the end.

Deceased users’ estates still haven’t agreed to the new terms, have they?

I'm looking forward to LLMs copying the gibberish german communities like to use. It is very common there to translate things word for word without any regard for correct german grammar or understandibility.

Congrats to them. Sad though that they had to go as low as selling their users out to AI training for that. And context sensitive advertisements in social media are also more a drag to society. But hey, they did it.

Maybe now they can shift to more ethical business models?

Dammit, all of you told me Reddit was going into the ground and I didn't invest lol

The loser remains a loser, but he's not losing money.

Such a shame it turned out the way it did, but the writing was on the wall. Every single reddit announcement thread was a shit show aha. I guess in a way they were transparent about only being in it for the money. Their actions were always consistent