Technology

Yes, but it could have been handled better. If ai was the problem they could have gone the route of api only being allowed after an application process so they know who is using it and everyone else trying to use it would get denied until they were assigned a key

Charging for their api is reasonable in answer to the llm data scrapers. The amount they're chsrging, and the speed of the changes is not reasonable however IMO.

Could they have something to do with it? Yes, for sure. But the thing is that they didn't have to do any of this the way they did. They could have made an API plan that allowed third party apps to still exist/thrive, and also charge big companies that just want to use reddit to train LLM's. Change the pricing/terms based around this idea. They deliberately went after third party apps, and then double and tripled down on it in the face of massive backlash. If spez was competent, he would have been able to better pivot this conversation and make it about training LLM's for megacorps, but he didn't and even then it would have still been bullshit that is easily seen past.

Reddit data is public and can be easily web scraped. Reddit doesn't own it. Spez is just throwing random memes in to distract people.

The value of LLM's has changed drastically in favor of open source since the Meta weights leak. The proprietary model looks pretty much wrecked now, at least as far as I understand the leaked internal memo from a google researcher last month.

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

Training data gets gathered with scrapers

Yup. AI consumers are more profitable than 3rd party apps. why focus on tiered pricing when you can just name a price point everyone has to pay that only huge AI companies are willing to.

Reddit gets their content for free. Reselling it at a high price to AI/ML consumers is an easy way to turn free content into profit with almost no effort.

Why not both? I think they see this as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

I'm very sure that this is the case. Reddit is pissed they gave away all the content as training data for free while struggling to monetize their platform adequately.

But I suspect the damage is already done. There are projects like "Orca" from Microsoft that skip the learning process from source data for a big part by using chatGPT and GPT4.

They missed the timing but are too stubborn and double down on it

Honestly, I think so. It looks like all big tech collected enough data from us, so that they now can create AI models from it. Like a snapshot of humanity for some years

Like, why go after Selig like that if it was about AI?

Why not have a cheaper legacy tier (not even free, just cheaper) so Apollo and other third party apps could stay in business? Only AI needs to get charged the higher price. Instead, it seems there's essentially only one tier and third party apps simply can't afford to pay it.

Yes but imo it would be easy to seperate LLM and 3rd party apps since 3rd party apps have users sign in independently. They chose to also target 3rd party apps and take them down.

I think this is the main reason for the insane prices, but it could have easily been avoided. They don't need to have one price class for every type of use of their Data API. They could have easily had one rate for LLM and other AI training uses and another for third party client applications. I feel like at some point they realized they'd rather just kill the third parties while they're at it and this seemed like the logical moment.

Surprisingly tough question. On one hand, I don't think every ex-Reddit user should go "Nah, it's too late, fam" because then it wouldn't even make sense for the devs to make any changes if they had no chance of regaining their userbase. On the other hand, I feel like even if they made really good changes, I would still always be on edge waiting for the bad thing to happen (pretty much what I imagine an abusive relationship to be like).

Yes but nothings stopping scraping of reddit content from the front end

Reddit's business model was not founded on selling LLM data. Reddit got greedy and decided to change their business model to cash in on an unexpected revenue stream. What was also unexpected (to Reddit) is that you cannot cater to social media users and monetize their data for LLM training effectively at the same time. And now Reddit will have neither, and will die just like all other businesses that adopt Enshitification as a core operating procedure.

Let this be a lesson to them and all that follow: do not let your greed make you blind to the consequences of your actions.

I think the LLM wave hit, they saw dollar signs, and they made a change without thinking it through, but then they were backed into a corner between money and avoiding outrage, but greed won over.

It is, but reddit don’t own the content on their site according to their TOS, posters merely grant them a license to redistribute it. So it’s not really their call to shut off ChatGPT scraping, it should be a community decision

I think that was definitely the impetus - I first read about the changes in this article back in April: https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/18/reddit_charging_ai_api/

The closing statement is interesting:

The spokesperson we talked to also wanted to make clear the Data API was still freely accessible for appropriate use cases through the Reddit developer platform; hopefully app developers and other small-scale operators won't have any surprises ahead this summer.

I suspect they ran the numbers and started seeing dollar signs - they don't care about the third-party apps (which don't make them any money directly), they're just trying to cash in on Microsoft etc.

I have a sneaking suspicion they're going to end up back-pedalling, but it will be too little, too late.

They could have created better licensing models. It does rely on people honoring the agreements but besides countries that disregard IPs I think its a viable model. Their business is social media, not curating datasets.

I think both factors play a part.