I’d take it with a big grain of salt — it’s Forbes, they lube up people with money with pretty weak arguments. He is a billionaire, but mostly through overvaluation of the company he’s ultimately gutting for profit. (Although if it died, he is still rich, unfortunately, just not a billionaire).
Some of the arguments being made in the article though, like it being an “authentic place” and having more traffic is a little misleading. For AI, we already know 50% of the Internet is AI made now, in a remarkably short amount of time and a hefty amount of that is going to be on Reddit. If the 90% by 2026 prediction holds true, he’s basically an owner of a gold mine that’s already tapped out. Users won’t necessarily catch on, but they will be drowned out as a source of LLM data.
Admittedly, the traffic increase isn’t all bots but to classify it as organic is misleading too- iirc, they have a deal with Google to push reddit in exchange for Gemini training. Even unrelated searches are propping up Reddit as the first result; it’s like using SEO cheats. As with the poisoning of his data with artificial data, that deal may not last (and if the AI bubble bursts, that’s certainly gone).
Frankly, we need the bubble to burst but we also need heavy regulation on these industries. I’m not too hopeful of the latter and the former isn’t going to be pretty— it’s not like the .com bubble made the 90s a better era, for instance.
I’d take it with a big grain of salt — it’s Forbes, they lube up people with money with pretty weak arguments. He is a billionaire, but mostly through overvaluation of the company he’s ultimately gutting for profit. (Although if it died, he is still rich, unfortunately, just not a billionaire).
Some of the arguments being made in the article though, like it being an “authentic place” and having more traffic is a little misleading. For AI, we already know 50% of the Internet is AI made now, in a remarkably short amount of time and a hefty amount of that is going to be on Reddit. If the 90% by 2026 prediction holds true, he’s basically an owner of a gold mine that’s already tapped out. Users won’t necessarily catch on, but they will be drowned out as a source of LLM data.
Admittedly, the traffic increase isn’t all bots but to classify it as organic is misleading too- iirc, they have a deal with Google to push reddit in exchange for Gemini training. Even unrelated searches are propping up Reddit as the first result; it’s like using SEO cheats. As with the poisoning of his data with artificial data, that deal may not last (and if the AI bubble bursts, that’s certainly gone).
Frankly, we need the bubble to burst but we also need heavy regulation on these industries. I’m not too hopeful of the latter and the former isn’t going to be pretty— it’s not like the .com bubble made the 90s a better era, for instance.