After two weeks of demonstrations, some media buyers anticipate Reddit turning to alternative revenue streams.

  • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They didn’t have that figured out weeks ago…? Of course they’re going to need other revenue streams, did people think giant API fees from tiny apps were going to rocket reddit into profitability or something? AI scrapers will just use something else.

    The density of people on this issue is astounding. Of course this is just the beginning of the monetization. They need all the revenue streams, not just fucking some of them. That, is why reddit has cancer. Because it’s going to get worse.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Nah. The point of API costs was to kill 3rd parties to force all mobile users onto the 1st party app to ensure more ad views. They are marking subs back to SFW to ensure ad views, which is insane w/o NSFW cleanup.

      Dunno what other revenue streams they can exploit. They’ve got ads, subs and paid awards, I’m sure they’re selling our data.

      • sadreality@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Looks like Reddit thinks that they own millions of people and how we use internet.

        To be fair it aint just reddit… this is behavior we are getting across big tech, google, apple, samsung, netflix, microsoft… they all been tightening screws.

        On the bright side, open, free and decentralized ecosystems and software is on the raise but not quite ready for normie stream

      • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They don’t push their stuff very hard. But you’re right, they do have all the basics nailed down.

        Which means all they can really do is try to widen those already-existing streams more. Getting everyone on the official app is a great step one, but it won’t fix profitability either. Need those streams wider yet.

    • Noxvento@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, that’s why I’m loving lemmy. It’s not perfect but it’s going to be pretty good.

    • QHC@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      AI scrapers never used the API. That’s just a convenient scapegoat.

      Don’t believe Huffman’s lies!

      • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I would love to learn more. Can you share any links? My googlefu is insufficient to cut through the bs without knowing more about the terms I need to be searching for.

        • QHC@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          There’s just no compelling reason to do it that way.

          LLMs like ChatGPT are getting data from the entire web and then having humans manually tag and identify everything. Getting data from the API is actually less useful to that end, and they’d need to integrate separately with every individual website.

          Most websites don’t even have an API in the first place, either, so scraping would still be necessary for most sites.

        • cubism_pitta@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s just the way a large data gathering project works. If you want to get data from 100s of sites a scraper is universal and can work for all while using an API would require (assuming all the sites HAVE an API) custom code for each.