Reddit has filed for its IPO. They’ve been preparing for this for a while, squeezing profit out of the platform in any way that they can, like hiking the prices on third-party app developers. More recently, they’ve signed a deal with Google to license their content to train Google’s LLMs.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, we’ve made a Firefox extension that will replace all your comments (older than a certain number of days) with any text that you provide. You can use any text that you want, but please, do not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material. Reddit’s data is uniquely valuable, since it’s not subject to those kinds of copyright restrictions, so it would be tragic if users were to decide to intermingle such a robust corpus of high-quality training data with copyrighted text.
Here’s that extension link again. To all our friends at Reddit, we wish you all the success that you deserve!
Tech companies usually take backups y’know? There’s almost certainly older snapshots from before the AI craze, or at the first sign of trouble …
The main buyer is Google. Google actually ALREADY has all the data on Reddit, they scraped and cached it all long ago. Remember how Google used to offer mirrors of pretty much any site? Well, guess what, they probably will have all that valuable gold stashed. So it’s not like reddit is actually transferring terabytes to Google, it’s just a licensing deal, and the execs are having a fun chuckle about users trying to “delete their data”
I think there is still value in doing it.
Reddit is still the best place for info, and adding site:reddit.com is likely to get you the best results for many different things, even with the risk of astroturfing. While this is true, reddit will stay top ranked.
If Reddit stops being a useful source because all the older content was removed, then it’s short term annoying for everyone but longer term a new solution will arise and Reddit won’t have this special status anymore.
Reddit isn’t going anywhere, and they WILL prevent this kind of existential business threat, if it actually becomes one. It’s pretty easy for them to institute a policy like “no edits after a month” — or serving older content
If Reddit actually implements this, then I think that’s a sign reddit sees it as a real threat. All the more reason to do it.