Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base' (www.404media.co)

submitted 8 months ago by rinze@infosec.pub to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”

The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data.

Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an "Enshittification" community :-)

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[–] 4grams@awful.systems 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This has got to be the start of another bubble popping. It just has to, right? With essentially all online services doing everything they can to wring out every last penny of value without any eye towards the future (other than ai all the things)… something’s gotta give.

But then again, maybe it’s just my eyes being open after living in those spaces for so long. Granted I’ve been out of Facebook for years, been de-amazonning for a couple (it’s really f’ing hard) and I’ve been trying to de-google as well but it’s even harder (stuck with Apple though). But, now that I’m in the fediverse, where we’re talking about all this, maybe that’s why I’m noticing?

Nah, brace yourselves.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The start of the bubble popping was the increases in interest rates. We've seen several online companies shut down already because the free money isn't there any more and there is no path to monetization.

The problem with the Fediverse right now is that it is all run on volunteer labor and donations, similar to an early Reddit. It will be interesting to see how a distributed system solves this problem.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think the volunteer labor and donations strategy works much, much, better on a distributed platform like the fediverse.

[–] bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sure, but what happens if the population explodes? Primarily server costs will go through the roof, and then you're still relying on volunteer moderation. It works now because the fediverse is reasonably small, but a true user exodus for any major platform could overload existing instance resources. I think the saving grace here is that there is a bit of a learning curve with Lemmy that fends away the less tech savvy, but that could change in future updates

[–] urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 8 months ago

Maybe I’m wrong but I think the fediverse isn’t quite that fragile. Instances can always close new sign ups if they’re overwhelmed. More users means more donations and more people likely to self host, too.

I guess we could run into real issues if fediverse infrastructure doesn’t scale well (example: required server resources scale exponentially with more users instead of linearly)

In extreme circumstances instances can defederate from larger ones if their mod teams are overwhelmed (obviously this isn’t a good solution but it is something beehaw.org is doing/did with lemmy.world)