Reddit is getting bigger.

Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while “other” revenue reached $33.2 million on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.

In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now, Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.

  • Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org
    10·
    22 days ago

    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

      • Sabata@ani.social
        29·
        22 days ago

        It’s almost like human communication is not supposed to be a product or something…

    • Jure Repinc@lemmy.mlEnglish
      76·
      22 days ago

      Well and behind it is stealing other peoples’ work (posts and comments, moderation and administration) and selling them as yours. The oldest capitalist criminal trick in the book: privatization AKA primitive accumulation AKA enclosure of the commons.

      • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
        15·
        22 days ago

        I mean, to be fair, I’m nearly positive that the Reddit T&Cs will have said they retain rights to anything posted there for ages. And the AI bubble is already showing signs of deflation or bursting coming not too far down the line. Let them enjoy their first and hopefully only profitable year.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          3·
          22 days ago

          A few years ago I started a blog where I can post lengthy stuff instead on Reddit. To have more control over my own posts and without the mercy of Reddit or any moderator. Little I did knew this was the best decision I could make, after I saw what happened after Ai hype. (I’m not much active, but still, the principle counts.)

          Anyone deleting their content there thinking this will avoid selling to Ai is probably a mistake. Because now Reddit can sell those deleted content from their backup (I assume they have backups…) and no normal user can access the information anymore, which hurts the normal users even more than any Ai or Reddit.

          I encourage everyone to start a blog and at least post the deleted stuff there for future access. At least you have more control this way.

        • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
          22·
          22 days ago

          No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.

          But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.

          • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
            2·
            22 days ago

            I never was arguing against that. Also I’m pretty sure their moral compass was pushed by the feds until he topped himself, so nothing about their bullshit has surprised me since.

          • BCsven@lemmy.ca
            2·
            22 days ago

            It doesn’t really matter because there is not much content to train AI on in a worthwhile manner. The huge amount of content is mostly hostile retorts, and sarcastic meme banter. AI will be a mess after training on that

    • realitista@lemm.ee
      7·
      21 days ago

      It won’t be long before the internet is just bots talking to each other and advertisers paying them to do so.

      • darreninthenet@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        22 days ago

        It cannot - more and more content is coming from AI so they are just “relearning” what one of the AI platforms has already produced… the endgame of that is convergence on nothing new being produced from AI

    • qupada@fedia.io
      49·
      22 days ago

      Indeed, you will note that they carefully chose the moniker “Daily Active Uniques” and not “Daily Active Users”.

      I think that speaks volumes, as humans are definitely harder to retain.

  • NastyNative@mander.xyzEnglish
    27·
    22 days ago

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

  • Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
    11·
    23 days ago

    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?

  • Hnery@feddit.org
    20·
    22 days ago

    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

  • Kratzkopf@discuss.tchncs.de
    13·
    22 days ago

    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.