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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Of course they're sitting on a goldmine. If they weren't, they'd be absolutely mortified by what they're doing to their own website. I think by June 30th, it's going to prove to be a solid win for Reddit: they still have all of the data they ever had, and they'll have better ad revenue than ever. Unless the community can get a lot more creative, Reddit is about to be absolutely fucking rich (even though the communities will all be hallowed out.)

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The average Joe enriching the elites by voluntary unpaid work. What a time to be alive.

Certainly a time to be a landowner. For the rest of us, serfdom beckons even more inescapably.

It is sorta funny... I came to sili valley a moderate republican. I left it a marxist.

It's kind of funny to me, though, that the mods just recently realized that's what they've been doing all along.

There are signs that the blackout will have an affect on their bottomline if it's kept up [1]. I'd imagine that's why they're making these moves to remove moderators participating in the blackout so quickly. I think it'll be interesting to see if they can find other moderators who participate for free and bring as much value to reddit as the current mods do.

My guess is that the changes will still go ahead and the general quality of content on reddit will go down longer term although how much is an open question.

[1] https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-redd...

This is why anyone serious about "protesting" the changes should be deleting their account and overwriting/deleting all their comments and posts. Does it suck for the future, and for anyone trying to use that wealth of collective knowledge? Yes, of course. But that's also the only way to really hurt them at this point. Subreddit blackouts are completely ineffective, and drops in traffic with resultant dips in ad revenue are momentary blips. It's scorched earth or nothing.

Honestly, I think they're intentionally undeleting comments and un-editing them right now. Why wouldn't they? I'm pretty sure they legally can, and they clearly do not care that people hate them. I mean personally, I wouldn't feel safe if I worked for Reddit right now, but I am guessing the executives could absolutely not care less if anyone gets hurt over their amazing plan to get absolutely filthy rich.

If reddit doesn't do this, the bots will take over anyways. They probably already have.

AI is going to do a shitty job identifying AI, so all of your datasets are going to get worse and worse. I could imagine a bunch of generative AI bots just melting down every message board on the planet to the point where you have to stop training on recent data.

I was hoping for the bots to export their existential crisis' to the rest of the web. Bots producing a loop, where they train on the data that they produce, would create some insane results.

"Reddit is about to be absolutely fucking rich (even though the communities will all be hallowed out.)"

If the communities will be gone for good (not likely at this point) - who will they be serving ads to?

The users producing most of the value that made Reddit interesting when it was a small website that had a lot to prove have probably already left. The thing is though, it's now very well-established. Reddit shows up extremely often when you Google it, and undoubtedly there's a lot of people (possibly a majority) who will just kind of shrug this off after deciding they'd rather suck it up than be without something like Reddit for a while.

But while the ad revenue is probably fine, the API revenue is definitely what they think the cash cow will be, and practically speaking they could lose 75% of their users and still probably not lose a whole lot of value just due to the sheer amount of historical data they have (especially if they start selling deleted content.)

I believe you mean "hollowed out" and not "hallowed out." There's an important distinction between the two words.

Good catch, although now I'm outside of the edit window :)

Good enough just to verify your intent. I mean. It seemed obvious to me, but this subject matter seems to encourage people to wax poetic (and sometimes religious.)

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