It is obviously based on an outdated concept of gender, but it actually is pretty useful to help match people to passports. If someone identifies as male but is dressed like a woman, it raises red flags. The answer to that might be as simple as “This is a 90s sitcom and I lost a transphobic bet” but it is there. Same with hair color.

Which, funny enough, is an argument for people to actually write down the gender they identify as. But it is also a lot like hair color or facial hair in that it is just too cost and time prohibitive to update a passport every time someone tries a new look. Because… genderfluid people exist.

I am looking at it froma purely financial standpoint.

Then let’s do that.

Reddit has three official and one implied revenue streams.

Of the official, we have:

Ad sales. This is where most “user data” actually comes into play and is the idea of building a profile of each user that can be used to put them into categories for targeted ads. That might be a simple as “likes video games, hates women, curious about learning to pee while sitting down”. Or it might be “doesn’t realize that guy at the bar took off the condom and is now pregnant”. This is demonstrably profitable and doesn’t seem to be effected.

The next is people buying reddit premium because they are idiots.

The last official oneis the actual topic of this thread. Reddit sells API access to, among others, companies training LLMs. ChatGPT has, allegedly, stopped using them. Thus, one of their major sources of revenue dried up and their stock dropped as a result.

As for the rest:

Otherwise reddit stock is just a volatile place to park your cash in the hope that you can sell it for more later.

Ah, so you DO know what the definition of a stock is. You just refuse to accept it because the word “reddit” is involved.

The vast majority of stocks are horrible to even consider purchasing as an individual. A general rule of thumb is the only ones you should even consider buying are those with dividends where you just buy a few shares and every couple years check your investment account and transfer the excess to your savings.

The rest you rely entirely on mutual funds (and similar). Where the idea is that an investment group has a large pool of money and they try to stay ahead of minor fluctuations and often outright bet against themselves. So you might have some funds earmarked at assuming reddit will go up and other funds that take the Oracle announcement as a hint that OpenAI spending on Reddit might decrease and sell the stocks ahead of time to buy shares in coca cola instead or whatever.

But the thing to understand is that that is happening to basically every single stock. Because the fundamental idea of the stock market is about leaving others holding the bag.

Homie? I assume you are just looking to hear “reddit bad” and… it is.

But if you are actually attempting to discuss things in good faith? You are just describing stocks and you should REALLY educate yourself on the subject if you ever intend to invest beyond retirement and mutual funds… which most people shouldn’t in the first place but that is an even bigger tangent.

see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it

So… it is a stock that doesn’t pay dividends? Like… that is what stocks are.

Companies pay for API access so profits go up and stock value go up.

I assume the reddit stock doesn’t pay dividends based on profits. But if you bought for 10 dollars and now it is 500 dollars? You can sell some of that stuck to people hoping it will go up to 1000 dollars for a solid profit. And so forth.

And if it DOES pay dividends (some kinds of stocks do) then a percentage of those profits are directly sent to the share holders based on how many shares they have.

Which is also generally very detectable (if you actually care) and is generally used to push (monetized) social media and not the answer to “what is the difference between normal and merino wool?” and so forth.

The vast majority of the “user” interaction and memes is not the product (at play. it IS useful for societal manipulation but there are better platforms for that). It is all those useful questions and answers that people get pissy about folk deleting the answers to.

Because people, generally, weren’t searching for team edward or jacob reddit but instead the fuck is a renesme reddit or LED versus fluourescent bulbs reddit and so forth. And the community labeling of the latter is generally REALLY good.

Things DO get messy when the question becomes best synthetic boxer briefs reddit but… it is incredibly rare for an astro turfing campaign to be strong enough to get a genuinely bad product “on top”. You tend to just get an overly expensive branded white label in the top slot which may actually be identical to the “real” best one anyway. But considering you are relying on human opinion regardless, that isn’t far off of what you were gonna get without said astroturfing.

While I don’t agree with the reddit valuation to begin with…

that is actually how the stock market “should” work? Reddit is a company that, at its core, produces data to sell to other companies. If other companies choose to (say they are not going to) use that data, then the value of reddit drops. That is literally supply and demand.

If Stanley’s Sprockets’ sprockets are a vital part of iphones then Stanley’s Sprockets is going to be a very valuable company. If Apple changes to the other dude’s product, Stanley’s Sprockets has now lost a lot of value.

I mean… if the reason you left is because you didn’t want your data scraped then… the fediverse is one of the worst places to go? Because anyone can run a modified lemmy instance to pull everything through the tools specifically designed to do that.

Let alone just scraping websites that don’t have teams of big corporate lawyers.

Version control mother fucker, do you speak it?

But, in all seriousness: That is what they use for the comments. It is why a lot of the mass delete tools were “accidentally” undone during The Exodus. Because it was literally just rolling back. Theoretically there might be a limited number of revisions available but if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. Because imagine if A Brown Person wrote a message then edited it five times so that Chloe couldn’t alert Jack Bauer to who to torture

For unauthorized scrapers? Definitely

For paid API usage? That tends to not be public for obvious reasons but, allegedly, people have, allegedly, done tests and found “deleted” content in the results.

People are going to cite the Kimmel cancellations until we legally aren’t allowed to. I… am skeptical.

A common talking point was that the real danger isn’t people who cancel out of solidarity: it is people who realize they have a disney plus subscription they haven’t used since Mandalorian Season 2. Because those are the bread and butter for these services and once people look at their bill and realize how much they have been spending over the years, they tend to not come back. And this all lined up with Disney (allegedly?) wanting to do a cost increase and enough “mainstream media” pointing out that Kimmel didn’t actually say anything even slightly controversial.

Contrast that with stuff like Sucker Punch firing the dev who made a Mario and Luigi joke and tripling down on it… and nobody giving a shit because Ghost of Yotei is coming out! Or all the attempts at encouraging people to support BDS boycotts. I mean, Palestine was the single biggest issue and the sole reason the Democrats lost, right? Then… why is everyone leaping at new gamepass deals and so forth?

Time and time again it is shown that people just don’t boycott luxury goods. If you can afford a luxury good you “earned it” and will find every possible excuse to keep buying it. What DOES tend to work is contacting the advertisers. Much like chuds contacted credit card companies to get gay games off Steam et al. Because, much like contacting your elected official, they understand that people actually caring enough to pick up the phone means a lot of people are REALLY angry.

To add on to this:

Look what happens when people protest or go on strike. Everyone SAYS they are in full solidarity with the workers at Starbucks. But they also gotta get to work and that picket line is really holding up traffic… and now they also need to drive three blocks away to a different Starbucks. Look, something something no ethical consumption under capitalism so fuck you I earned this coffee milkshake and maybe if you worked harder you could buy one too.

A General Strike requires a fairly overwhelming majority of support to begin with. And, if we had that… we wouldn’t be inching ever closer to a civil war.

The thing to understand is that… people are barely searching these days. The vast majority of people are fully dependent on The Algorithm to tell them what they want to see whether that is a youtube video or a reddit/facebook post or whatever. Google is for quick questions, not reading articles or getting educated on a topic. And… gemini is not horrible for those quick answers. And when it IS horrible, people don’t actually care. And the rest is SEO hell to whatever the first fandom wiki result is.

As someone who still very much DOES search for things on the regular? I have some concerns with the company (mostly they seem like bog standard tech bro “freedom of speech” libertarians) but damned if I don’t love Kagi. Feels like the internet I grew up with combined with the ability to prioritize or block websites (see: first fandom wiki result) and a halfway decent LLM for those “quick question” searches.

And, in theory, they are actively working to restart the government.

Like most things with the US (and, honestly, most countries) government, it is all based upon people acting “honorably” and in good faith.

LLMs/“Vibe Coding” is probably a little bit more useful than the average intern with some tasks bumping up to an early career hire (what would historically be a Junior Engineer before title inflation/stagnation).

As in: it can generate code that might do what you want. But you need (actual) senior engineers to review the code thoroughly. And… how do people get the experience they need to do that?

Which basically results in turning everyone into a manager. Except your reports aren’t humans and you don’t get more pay. Instead your reports are vscode plugins. Which… sounds like absolute hell but I can get why the (wannabe) management class loves that.

They actively sat on their hands waiting to see who would win when trump led a violent insurrection against Congress and the VPOTUS. There is no line.

But, to add on: In a past life, I had to interface with a lot of military folk as part of my job. And… there is basically a horse shoe effect.

The lowliest of enlisted? They “care” but they also “have no power” and “am legally obligated to do what I am told” and “Fuck you for not respecting the sacrifices I am making for your freedom”. The most senior of NCOs and the most junior of COs are the ones who actually have opinions and might actually “resist” but it tends to be “I got a mortgage and four kids” levels of resistance where they mostly just look for jobs elsewhere. Then you get higher up on the officer chain and it is just endless political toadied who will insist “I believe in the military, not in the politicians” all while looking for exciting new mouthwashes to give Ice and Fire blowies because they want a promotion.

All the generals in that room? Inside they might be rolling their eyes. Outside? They’ll be cheering and acting like an industry plant at a press conference because they know there are cameras on them and they wall are hoping that someone above them gets fired and they get that job.