In interviews with multiple publications, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman defended business decisions made by the company.
From the article:
In response to Huffman’s comments, moderators are trying to find ways to make blackouts effective. Alternatively, some communities are also setting up servers on alternative sites like Lemmy and Kbin.
I think if they just wanted to serve ads to third party apps they would have worked out a deal with them to revenue share at the very least and do this.
My guess is that they want to pitch Reddit as this huge datasource for AI in the upcoming IPO and they can’t do that if they’re giving it away for free.
What’s to stop AI companies from just scraping Reddit’s HTML? The two big AI companies—Google and Microsoft—already do that as part of their search engine indexing!
HTML scraping is standard practice for AI development in most major companies. It’s not even actually that difficult, there are tools like Selenium that make it really easy and manageable to completely automate.
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As a user, I would have even shouldered my own cost. $2.50/mo for a no ad experience on the app I prefer? Seems reasonable.
I suspect this is the real reason spez wants third-party apps gone.
I think if they just wanted to serve ads to third party apps they would have worked out a deal with them to revenue share at the very least and do this.
My guess is that they want to pitch Reddit as this huge datasource for AI in the upcoming IPO and they can’t do that if they’re giving it away for free.
What’s to stop AI companies from just scraping Reddit’s HTML? The two big AI companies—Google and Microsoft—already do that as part of their search engine indexing!
HTML scraping is standard practice for AI development in most major companies. It’s not even actually that difficult, there are tools like Selenium that make it really easy and manageable to completely automate.
Shhh don’t tell investors when they IPO soon!