<story><title>Reddit is OpenAI’s moat</title><url>https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/06/14/reddit-moat.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbmjertan</author><text>Given that sama is a board member of Reddit Inc, and that this is happening &lt;i&gt;after&lt;/i&gt; GPT-4 was trained on Reddit data, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t jump to conclude they&amp;#x27;re upset at OpenAI.&lt;p&gt;SO had publicly available, no-auth-required data dumps. This makes it difficult for them to know who is using their data. However, this surely isn&amp;#x27;t the case for Reddit who offered only API endpoints for this content, and I&amp;#x27;m guessing you couldn&amp;#x27;t use .json to get the whole site (rate limits, etc). I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be inclined to believe that Reddit would miss a new major API user.&lt;p&gt;This is purely speculation disregarding Hanlon&amp;#x27;s razor, but I&amp;#x27;m thinking that the API pricing comes down to killing two birds with one stone.&lt;p&gt;* Sama got to train his LLM on Reddit and some best-of-the-internet content there such as r&amp;#x2F;bodyweightfitness, informed discussions on niche topics etc for free. The catch-up players face prohibitive pricing.&lt;p&gt;* Third-party apps get killed, bringing the UX to Reddit&amp;#x27;s control. I think this is more important to Reddit than ad revenue, as they could&amp;#x27;ve simply built an SDK for probably less than this PR nightmare will cost us.&lt;p&gt;* Their new development platform, however, hints at the Reddit app supporting serving &amp;quot;redditor-made apps&amp;quot; which &amp;quot;can be seamlessly reused between communities&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The description (and the idea to have apps in your app) weirdly reminds me of WeChat apps, and given that Tencent is a major shareholder in Reddit, I would consider the possibility that apps are something they&amp;#x27;re pushing. That idea has no chance of success without the UX being completely in Reddit&amp;#x27;s hands, even then it&amp;#x27;s questionable how it would work on Reddit.&lt;p&gt;Spez couldn&amp;#x27;t actually be that detached from Reddit?</text></item><item><author>eggbrain</author><text>I think from Reddit&amp;#x27;s perspective, they are extremely upset with OpenAI, in the same way that I&amp;#x27;m sure StackOverflow is upset -- OpenAI took:&lt;p&gt;- The entire corpus of data the community had curated over the last XX years&lt;p&gt;- The &amp;quot;goodwill&amp;quot; that these platforms had developed towards third party developers in allowing developers to work with their data&lt;p&gt;- Potentially large amounts of traffic that would normally come to their sites via Google (e.g. site:reddit.com), that is now available instantly (and customized) via ChatGPT&lt;p&gt;Despite Reddit&amp;#x27;s probably closer connections to OpenAI than other startups through Y-Combinator and Sam Altman, I wonder how keen they are to actually work with a company that potentially destroyed a ton of their value, right before they were ready to IPO.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bckygldstn</author><text>While Reddit Inc didn’t provide data dumps, pushift.io published no-auth dumps of all site data back to 2008, which are still available on Academic Torrents.&lt;p&gt;Further, you could use the Reddit API to injest the full firehose of all site data in real time without violating rate limits. This is [one of the ways] how Pushift made their datasets.&lt;p&gt;Reddit was a lot more open that any other site approaching their size!</text></comment>
<story><title>Reddit is OpenAI’s moat</title><url>https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/06/14/reddit-moat.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbmjertan</author><text>Given that sama is a board member of Reddit Inc, and that this is happening &lt;i&gt;after&lt;/i&gt; GPT-4 was trained on Reddit data, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t jump to conclude they&amp;#x27;re upset at OpenAI.&lt;p&gt;SO had publicly available, no-auth-required data dumps. This makes it difficult for them to know who is using their data. However, this surely isn&amp;#x27;t the case for Reddit who offered only API endpoints for this content, and I&amp;#x27;m guessing you couldn&amp;#x27;t use .json to get the whole site (rate limits, etc). I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be inclined to believe that Reddit would miss a new major API user.&lt;p&gt;This is purely speculation disregarding Hanlon&amp;#x27;s razor, but I&amp;#x27;m thinking that the API pricing comes down to killing two birds with one stone.&lt;p&gt;* Sama got to train his LLM on Reddit and some best-of-the-internet content there such as r&amp;#x2F;bodyweightfitness, informed discussions on niche topics etc for free. The catch-up players face prohibitive pricing.&lt;p&gt;* Third-party apps get killed, bringing the UX to Reddit&amp;#x27;s control. I think this is more important to Reddit than ad revenue, as they could&amp;#x27;ve simply built an SDK for probably less than this PR nightmare will cost us.&lt;p&gt;* Their new development platform, however, hints at the Reddit app supporting serving &amp;quot;redditor-made apps&amp;quot; which &amp;quot;can be seamlessly reused between communities&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The description (and the idea to have apps in your app) weirdly reminds me of WeChat apps, and given that Tencent is a major shareholder in Reddit, I would consider the possibility that apps are something they&amp;#x27;re pushing. That idea has no chance of success without the UX being completely in Reddit&amp;#x27;s hands, even then it&amp;#x27;s questionable how it would work on Reddit.&lt;p&gt;Spez couldn&amp;#x27;t actually be that detached from Reddit?</text></item><item><author>eggbrain</author><text>I think from Reddit&amp;#x27;s perspective, they are extremely upset with OpenAI, in the same way that I&amp;#x27;m sure StackOverflow is upset -- OpenAI took:&lt;p&gt;- The entire corpus of data the community had curated over the last XX years&lt;p&gt;- The &amp;quot;goodwill&amp;quot; that these platforms had developed towards third party developers in allowing developers to work with their data&lt;p&gt;- Potentially large amounts of traffic that would normally come to their sites via Google (e.g. site:reddit.com), that is now available instantly (and customized) via ChatGPT&lt;p&gt;Despite Reddit&amp;#x27;s probably closer connections to OpenAI than other startups through Y-Combinator and Sam Altman, I wonder how keen they are to actually work with a company that potentially destroyed a ton of their value, right before they were ready to IPO.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>&amp;gt; and given that Tencent is a major shareholder in Reddit&lt;p&gt;Snoop Dogg owns more of reddit than Tencent.  The Tencent investment is very overblown.</text></comment>