this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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I'm not sure why anyone would ever buy Reddit stock. There is no money to be made in Reddit. They failed to make any money before they went public, and they're failing to make any money now.
They tried the whole NFT thing, failed. They're trying to sell the data to AI companies but once that's sold they can't sell any more of it because the benefit of Reddit data was historical data unpolluted by AI, but new Reddit data is polluted by ChatGPT posts and is therefore worth less.
It's not even about banning people, it's about the fact that Reddit was never a sustainable business model from the start, at least not in the traditional capitalist sense where you're actively trying to make a profit to please shareholders.
The only benefit to owning Reddit stock is if you have voting shares and can manipulate the algorithm to benefit you in some way. Suppress some voices, amplify others to back what you want to do etc. but you need money to burn in order to achieve that because you aren't going to be making money directly by owning Reddit stock and manipulating public opinion takes time.
its only use now is a propaganda machine, much like X is now, or it will be soon like X.
If they'd been stalwart about banning automation and keeping original, legit human content pure, they probably could have used it as a fountain of fresh data for AI, for polling, for engagement farming, and for promotion.
The site was still growing even despite the admin induced atrophy. But they just couldn't resist killing the Golden Goose.
the mistake was allowing mods to have too much power, and admins to become mods.
I disagree that Reddit would gain in value over time if they kept banning automation, because it is increasingly difficult to avoid AI-generated material polluting your dataset, no matter how much you avoid automation and try banning it. Inevitably, some AI-generated material is going to get in.
It's a problem in two ways:
I am firmly of the belief that sites like Internet Archive will be some of the most valuable companies in the AI space, because they hold an immense amount of untainted data created prior to 2019.
Except AI companies are already using data from Internet Archive wholesale with paying them a cent.