Where Reddit differs among its tech peers is in its striking dependence on its user base to keep things operational. Reddit must keep its users satisfied and its efforts to expand its limited (and already unpopular) advertising formats could send users packing. 98% of Reddit’s revenue is made up of advertising income. And of that, 26% came from just 10 ad clients in 2023. Investors will be watching this closely and expect more diversity sooner rather than later
  • Lvxferre
    50·
    9 months ago

    And of that, 26% came from just 10 ad clients in 2023.

    That’s interesting. Does anyone know which are those ad clients? It would be a shame if users were to shame them in public for advertising in a site full of nasty shit, like Reddit…

    The going rate for a content moderator around the world varies greatly, but for the sake of expedience, let’s say it might average around $50,000 a year. That’s $3 billion worth of free labor.

    …or if users publicly mocked Reddit jannies, oopsie moderators, working for free for a company that ridicules them as “landed gentry”…

    Reddit has a highly intriguing plan for counterbalancing these risks.

    “Intriguing” sounds like an euphemism for “experimental and with high chance to fail”.

    • towerful@programming.dev
      4·
      9 months ago

      “Intriguing” sounds like an euphemism for “experimental and with high chance to fail”. The flip side of the AI deal with google?

      They train on the dataset, reddit gets a free/cheap AI moderation system?

      • Lvxferre
        5·
        9 months ago

        Sounds like a bad deal.

        AI-only moderation simply doesn’t work - any sort of automated system can be easily circumvented, as users reverse engineer how it works. So you’d still need to rely on the fleshy jannies to not have the place imploding, except that those jannies already abuse the automod, so you’d have yet another system for them to abuse.

        • towerful@programming.dev
          2·
          9 months ago

          I never said it would be good moderation.
          But reddit saying to its shareholders “we have cut down our reliance on unreliable user’s free labour moderation by employing advanced state of the art AI moderation from Google specifically trained on our own content” is a big confidence booster, thus shares booster.
          Problem is, thats not what reddit is/was. Thats not the attraction of reddit.

          Good for the shareholders. Bad for the users. Likely short term profits for long term losses

          • Lvxferre
            2·
            9 months ago

            Sure, you never mentioned good moderation. But I don’t think that they’ll be able to exploit it - for investors risk assessment is bread-and-butter, and they know that anything “AI” might crash the following second. Plus the lower quality of the site would be visible as soon as they implemented AI moderators, generating even further risk almost immediately.

            I get your reasoning though - it doesn’t need to be good for the site, only passable enough for the suckers buying shares to trust it.