Reddit CEO Teases AI Search Features and Paid Subreddits (engadget.com) 36
An anonymous reader shares a report: Reddit just wrapped up its second earnings call as a public company and CEO Steve Huffman hinted at some significant changes that could be coming to the platform. During the call, the Reddit co-founder said the company would begin testing AI-powered search results later this year. "Later this year, we will begin testing new search result pages powered by AI to summarize and recommend content, helping users dive deeper into products, shows, games and discover new communities on Reddit," Huffman said. He didn't say when those tests would begin, but said it would use both first-party and third-party models.
Huffman noted that search on Reddit has "gone unchanged for a long time" but that it's a significant opportunity to bring in new users. He also said that search could one day be a significant source of advertising revenue for the company. Huffman hinted at other non-advertising sources of revenue as well. He suggested that the company might experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features.
Huffman noted that search on Reddit has "gone unchanged for a long time" but that it's a significant opportunity to bring in new users. He also said that search could one day be a significant source of advertising revenue for the company. Huffman hinted at other non-advertising sources of revenue as well. He suggested that the company might experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features.
Nice dream, not likely though (Score:5, Insightful)
Reddit is a crap site, where random people go to comment until they find a smaller group of other random people have almost absolute control over the narrative.
There is no profit margin with the existing setup, so charging subreddits for professional moderation is the only practical way to improve the quality of discussion. And nobody's going to pay, certainly not anywhere near enough to support professional moderation teams, and it would also further expose Reddit to liability for posted content which is another headache/expense.
I just don't see it happening.
Re: Nice dream, not likely though (Score:3)
The Reddit echo chamber is impressive, but useless for actual discourse
Re: Nice dream, not likely though (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot's random mod/metamod assignment system seems to be at least slightly better. Then again, the site is nowhere near as popular which keeps out the crap posting from people just wanting to be popular in a popular forum.
Re:Nice dream, not likely though (Score:4, Insightful)
Reddit is a perversion of Digg, Digg is a perversion of Slashdot.
25 years and Slashdot's moderation system is still second to none, if you ask me. it has a much better balance, that even X's Community Notes has tried to somewhat emulate elements of Slashdot with limited powers and a meta moderation feature that feeds back into more mod points.
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Digg... Now there's a site that was never great but 100% committed suicide with ill-advised 'improvements'.
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Digg up all 2005, new interface in July 2005 http://web.archive.org/web/200... [archive.org]
First reddit archive.org capture Aug 2005, basically a copy of digg. http://web.archive.org/web/200... [archive.org]
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Did Fark fall in that list?
Their borderline-hilarious foray into monetization was putting a T-shirt link/image at the end of each and EVERY headline so you could by a shirt with the headline emblazoned on it. Duke Sucks.
You're just thinking about the political subreddit (Score:3, Insightful)
Now media subreddits are inevitably going to touch on politics because media touches on social issues. So the anime forums are going to do that. If you're on the right wing it's going to look bad because as the saying goes reality has a left-wing bias. Moreover any place where the right wing flourishes sooner or l
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... as the saying goes reality has a left-wing bias.
Well, no, and a better and more original quote: “The facts of life are conservative.” -- Margaret Thatcher
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Re:Nice dream, not likely though (Score:4, Interesting)
Reddit is a crap site, where random people go to comment until they find a smaller group of other random people have almost absolute control over the narrative.
That might be true for some of the political, news, or in some cases location subreddits, but the vast majority are more like traditional forums dedicated to specific topics like arduino programming or disc golf. For those, it's not about a "narrative", the mods basically just remove spammers and not much else. These are the types that are the most valuable on reddit, but the value comes from the community. If they were to go behind a paywall, they'd lose 99.9% of the community (which would likely just shift to a free version of the same thing) and then the original would be useless.
The only place I'd see this be successful would be subs dedicated to specific creators where people would be basically paying the owner for access to chat with them (and their fans). You see similar cases with traditional forums having exclusive areas or more commonly these days, areas of discord servers only accessibly to paid subscribers.
Re:Nice dream, not likely though (Score:4)
Re: (Score:2)
Reddit is a crap site, where random people go to comment until they find a smaller group of other random people have almost absolute control over the narrative.
There is no profit margin with the existing setup, so charging subreddits for professional moderation is the only practical way to improve the quality of discussion. And nobody's going to pay, certainly not anywhere near enough to support professional moderation teams, and it would also further expose Reddit to liability for posted content which is another headache/expense.
I just don't see it happening.
You just described IRC. Your only problem is the scale of terminally online morons. There can be like 10,000, 100,000+ people in one chat room and you complain about the moderators instead of making your own room. This is the same stupid online drama that played out in countless IRC chans with dozens of people. You're fighting over chatroom names like it's the 90's.
A small group of people control the narrative.. oh my gaaawd, why are you standing in a room with ten thousand fucking people then, just leave!
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In a place divided by something like 'subreddits', the name of the subreddit is how people find the correct topic. And the obvious names will draw the most people. It's the same reason businesses care about their domain names.
You don't post on social media to talk to yourself, it's for others to read your posts. If I want to talk to others about furries, I'm not going to go create a new "/AlsoFurriesHere" just for me if there's already a group called "/Furries" with hundreds of thousands of subscribers
low hurdle message base market spot (Score:2)
Speculating that the internet needs a low hurdle place to have a basic message base + links + images + links to videos with some sort of categorization by topic/interest area.
Low hurdle because the more onion layers around it, the less likely it is to have more active and different interest areas.
More close is the internet facilitating poor outcomes
- Dividing discussions into "people you agree with" and "everyone who is wrong and a (insert totalitarian ideology)"
- Enabling those who like to spread gossip to
I like everything about this (Score:1)
I'm going to open my Reddit® account today!
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Information wants to be free (Score:2)
but greedy tech bros make sure it won't be.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/10/27/1626208/internet-access-in-gaza-is-collapsing-as-isps-fall-offline?sdsrc=popbyskid
Oh yeah, I'm sure subscriptions will fly off the shelf. I mean look, serious newspapers with real, quality journalists like the NYT have trouble selling access to their quality content: what makes Spez believe anyone will pay to access Twitter-quality stuff?
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Something badly wrong happened to my copy/paste job...
If it's working and people like it, leave it alone (Score:3)
Your endless quest to increase revenue will end up enshittifying reddit even worse than it already is.
Look at slashdot. Code hasn't changed since the 1990s and it's still an active site.
Re:If it's working and people like it, leave it al (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also a site in rapid decline. It's mostly people who have been here since the 90's. New accounts are mostly bots and socks.
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Socks?
You mean, Some Other Cunt's Kids?
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It's short for "sock puppet", slang for an account created for deceptive purposes. A user might make a sock puppet account to push a particular narrative, post spam, farm mod points, etc.
It's over (Score:3)
and Slashdot (Score:2)
...doesn't even support Unicode. So pitiful.
Looking for gems (Score:3)
I was about to say stop fixing what's not broken. But yeah, a more powerful search might actually help in a couple areas. Like finding a kind of image or topic that is buried in unknown subreddits, finding threads that are collapsed and hidden past a click, and enabling more people to make wacky subreddits feeling better about people being able to discover them. So yeah, ability to mine it will maybe uncover more levels to the mines under the kingdom of Zork or whatever. It's like the deep into Youtube kind of thing.
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I left a while ago, but I doubt search on Reddit has changed since I did.
The best way to search Reddit is with Google. Though Google's been degrading recently, so maybe neither works now...
Let AI moderate (Score:2)
Reddit would see a vast improvement if they let an unbiased AI moderate vs the moderators they have in place now.
( assuming an AI can ever be unbiased of course )
I gave up on Reddit.
It is unlikely I'll ever go back to it.
Oh, hell no (Score:2)