Steve Huffman is now a billionaire after a profitable quarter for reddit
7mon 16d ago by lemmy.world/u/chunes in reddit from www.forbes.com
If you ever needed a sign to stop using reddit, this is it.
As bots and sponsored content crowd the internet, Reddit is often seen as a more reliable source of information, and its popularity has exploded in the past couple of years.
Lmfao reading articles like this makes me feel like I'm living in the upside down. The entire site is bots posting content for bots to updoot and comment. Yet here they are getting glazed as "the last site for authentic connection". Give me a fucking break.
They're about a decade and a half out of date.
I mean, before LLMs there were people trying to do the mass influence thing... but the only entities that could be effective were the ones that could hire a few hundred people to shitpost in the same direction.
Now any nerd with a graphics card and a python interpreter can operate hundreds of accounts. Large operations are probably creating multiple synthetic high 'subscriber' subreddits or buying mod accounts on large subreddits.
russian troll farms can just create large amounts of bot accounts, have them comment and then it either gets deleted or ban, rinse and repeat. since t hey can change thier IP, or device anyways, you cant really stop a troll farm, they are probably using the same methods as the of and link farming accounts to hide thier accounts from being tied altogether, but they dont care about warming up the accounts. just post -delete or ban account repeat again.
I'd go even further back, with hindsight. During the us elections 2016 it became basically transparent the platform was being manipulated, and it wasn't very sophisticated at that time. It's really only evolved since then - but there used to be real people to call out the BS.
All before we even get to the corporate fiefdom spez has decided he'd like reddit to be.
Remember in 2013 when reddit made a blog post about reddit meetup day with some statistics and they accidentally left in Eglin Air Force Base as the "most addicted city?"
Of course, can't have the plebs knowing that the site is manipulated by the US military, so they hid the truth, but archive.org remembers.
It's just as likely there's no conspiracy there. It's reasonable that Reddit was just big at that one particular place, more than other place (per capita), which can make sense given that those people actually talk to each other more than a typical city would.
I do think the US government was pretty good about not propagandizing its own people from within the government. There was a long period of time where non-partisan roles were expected to remain non-partisan. That's part of why the Biden admin didn't go after Trump like they should have. They didn't even want the potential appearance of partisan government. In hindsight, yeah, that may have been foolish. They were fighting a five alarm fire with dollar store plastic squirt guns.
Addicted to what? Reddit?
At least from particular subs, those users would get banned and their comment removed within seconds. 24/7. The response times is what convinced me it wasn't just volunteer mods handling that.
There have basically always been automods of varying capabilities and complexity. Without those no sub ever would have enough moderation capability.
This wasn't automod.
recently its done by REDDIT;s AI, removing comments or post automatically , not even the mods knew it happened.
2016 is when russian troll farms started to realize reddit was ripe for the taking, started taking off in 2017, and by 2018, political based bans were in fact, even misconstrued posts. plus r/conspiracy was started to be taking over by conservatives. after reddit banned many "donald trump" subs they went looking for next best one to take over.
also the same time i was calling out ragebaiting around the same time articles.
I noticed that r/technology bans some keywords, like if your comment says "PieFed" and you try to open it Incognito/Private then it won't show up, I have to say "Pie-Fed (without the hyphen)"
I think they also ban some mentions of Lemmy instances but I forget which ones, maybe lemmy.world
This is always the cycle.
Reddit was like Lemmy at one point, a little gem of a website that you only knew about if you participated in online culture (which, before smartphones was not a lot of people). Then the masses learn about it and it gets destroyed because the system that made it good can't scale to hundreds of millions of people.
So, now people 'in the know' move to the niche alternative. As the Fediverse continues to develop and gain users it will eventually undergo a similar phase transition when the population gets too high. You can already see it in popular communities on large instances, it's nearly indistinguishable from Reddit's comment section.
I think the Fediverse has the ability to branch out and grow in a more healthy way, but it's yet to be seen
Im hoping this. I hope people learned and choose the better option instead of showboating for internet points. There’s other places to do that.
its too small a nd scattered to grow like reddit, i dont think it will reach the same as reddit anytime soon.
That's fine with me.
Smaller communities where you can actually recognize people from other conversations are better, in my experience, and even the current Lemmy population satisfies my need to scroll random content and I don't have to suffer through the advertisements and political outrage content being inserted into everything.
Agreed! 🙂
50% are bots, the rest are just on the verged of getting banned, or responding to misinformation/disinformation.polotics to keep the site going. eliminating actual users like us, seems to have a effect on reddit as of recently, no ORGANIC posts anymore.
“BuT WhEn ReDdiT aLtErNaTiVe”?
Voat exodus imminent
I keep telling them about the Fediverse. I’m certain that because there’s more people on Reddit, they have a higher shot of engagement and attention. So they stick around.
It’s INSANE. The bot flooding started to become notably - and noticeably - bad around the time the API exodus happened. And it’s only accelerated. And most people seem to just be pretending it’s not even happening.
The most prolific posters left and/or came here.
Well, the humans anyway.
I used to comment 20+ times a day and was always looking for the best time to post my OC to get the most traction.
13 year account. Gone.
Couldn’t give 2 shits, Lemmy is way better.
I heard r/lemmee was shut down funny as how threatened they feel.
Lemmy shittymorph when
thats when AI's started to make thier appearance around the same time.
Which is my implied point. I started coming across services offering LLM posts designed to push grassroots engagement on Reddit around the same time too - pretty obvious writing on the wall
Maybe the article was written by a bot.
Almost certainly. The future is a line of megaphones screaming "It's never been better!" on autopilot while the world burns
happy studio ghibli AI characters dancing on a projector on a scorched earth with no living creatures and no oxygen
i always like to tell people to look up something they're really an expert at on these sites (or any kind of "news"/ad-mill shit, notice how wrong they are on the entire thing...then see if they put 2 and 2 together with regards to all the shit they're not experts on.
anything remotely mainstream and not behind a paywall is just ads and spin
To be fair, it probably looks a lot more human than all the microblogging socialmedias that are stuffed to the brim
You raise a good point.
Dammit.
Lmao what a joke. Glad I left that cesspool when I did.
there are 3 types of bots, propaganda bots, OF bots, and link farming bots. the prop ones are the trouble some, reddit has been going after the other 2 since the ban waves occured.
It's Forbes. One does not have high standards for Forbes content... They seem to write what they are told, not look very deep into issues.
Just a reminder if someone gave you $10,000 a day, youd be very rich and happy. Most certainly set for life.
And with that money alone it'd take 274 years to become a billionaire.
Nobody needs that.
Christ! This is a better description than the 'million seconds vs. billion seconds' one.
Even if you got $100,000 a day, every day, it'd take you 27 years to hit a billion with just that money. That's a working days of an 8 hour, hourly wage of 12,500 an hour. 27 years.
Billionaires need to stop being billionaires.
I can't even imagine how much easier life would be at ten grand a day. It's a baffling amount of money. And all we have is proof. Proof that more than that turns these people into something less relatable that an anonymous assassin that shot dead a health insurance company CEO.
Absolute madness.
And you will still never catch up to the billionaires of today because they use that money to make more money even faster than that.
Technically you could catch up.
Say, first month you spend all that money on stuff you've ever wanted. New car, new flat/house (mortgage will be super easy with $300k a month guaranteed income), etc.
Second month, you already have everything you immediately needed, and money left over, so you put all your daily income into investment accounts.
That is $3.3mil by the end of the year, not including interest - which would be around $69k (nice) given the much higher interest rates you get for high value accounts.
Mind you at this point the banks you use also change from regular high street names to banks catering for the actually rich. At a 3mil increase in net worth in a single year, you are now member of this club. You get a personal account handler, and much like the casinos in Vegas, the bank will keep throwing free shit your way just to keep you on as a customer.
That 69k interest is now spent on your mortgage and daily expenditure, so at the end of the year your account does stand at 3.3mil.
Another year goes by, and your interest increases by FIVE TIMES, to $320k, and your account now holds just shy of 7 million.
Let's say you get on with the rich life and spend a million, for a new, fancy flat, and a supercar, and some new clothes. Still, you're at 6 million.
Year 3? Your base is up to 10 million, plus 760k interest!
Year 5? Interest at 2.4mil, base at 18mil.
Year 10? Total interest at 10 million, base at 36 million.
Year 14? At this point, the interest you earn in a year is actually more than what you contribute, just a smidge over 3.4mil.
Year 20? 122 mil in your account, 72 of that you contributed, 50 is interest.
Year 30, and you're hitting 250mil, with "only" 108mil of that being your contribution.
Year 40? almost at half a billion!
Year 50 and you're reaching 750mil.
Year 55? You hit the billionaire landmark, with $1.008bn in your account.
Year 60? 1.3bn.
And mind you this is with a fixed interest rate account of 5%. In reality your investment vehicles would be anywhere between 20 to 40-50% a year, which could put you on the billionaire list in as little as ~15 years.
Reality is, the moment one can break out of the paycheck-to-paycheck living, and start saving up, without the hindrance of a sudden emergency spending, it's not that hard to get enough money to consider yourself rich. Problem is, breakin out of that cycle is being made extremely hard by those who've realised this loophole and don't want mere peasants like us in their fancy circles.
Even then, you wouldn't catch up because the billionaires would be doing the same thing, and probably be trillionaires by the time you make your first billion.
You aren't considering inflation which is about to go insane, and especially healthcare costs that become a much bigger deal in the years when you would come to rely on that million. A million is pretty much a bare bones retirement egg today.
The former mod of r/jailbait must be proud of himself
There is no justice. Aaron Schwarz is six feet underground while this pestilent boil of a man becomes a billionaire on the back of his achievements.
RIP Aaron
F
Just left Reddit. Ain’t going back.
Welcome.
Thanks! :)
reddit ban most of us, because thier AI decided some accounts had previous violaitons in certain subs. and the most recent changes is that now they are unilaterally deleting comments and posts for no reason at all(looking for keywords)
Yep happened to me too. AI claimed harassment 🙄 definitely some bullshit. Done with it.
Welcome!
newtolemmy@lemmy.ca can help you settle in
I wish more people converted over, but the user experience for the fediverse is very strange for many people, tech inclined folks I know included.
People are scared and angry... Lemmy has definitely gotten much less friendly this last year
Yeah there's some really angry people on here sometimes
None taken. Thanks for contributing.
I was just being thankful for the feature in Voyager to tag users. Just tagged a user exactly as you described as "Contrarian".
Tagging is such a nice feature. I used to do it all the time on reddit (many years ago).
I'd love to create a few niche places like the ones I enjoyed on reddit but when it comes to creating a community on Lemmy, the barrier to entry is steep for me. From what I understand I need an always-on storage medium to host and I don't really have a spare device that I can reliably keep on 24/7 to host a community on here. I wish it were easier but that's the nature of the beast I spose.
You only need a server if you want to run an entire instance (ex. lemmy.world). Anyone can create a community on most instances.
The graphics on this guide might help:
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/detailed-overview
Thank you! I must have gotten instances and communities confused. Still getting used to the fediverse 😅
You can create communities on an existing instance just by clicking "Create Community" in the top menu; no need to host anything yourself. At least you can on the instance I use; not sure about lemmy.world.
the problem is getting people to your community, some communities are quite a ghost town right now, most of them are on reddit.
Okay so im new here and I can't figure out how to view all communities in one spot on desktop. I can on mobile through the apps. Like reddit's /r/popular
Select "All" instead of "Subscribed" or "Local"
Also newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
Where else are people going besides here?
Probably a range of things. Like the fediverse is growing, but look at bluesky’s success. They forgo the real benefit of the structure, but people get a “just make a login” experience.
The kids are probably on something I don’t even know.
Blueksy is not comparable to Reddit though... not in structure, approach, or (initial) ideology.
I thought about making a bluesky account, but it doesn't entirely feel all that safe when conservatives are freely posting their misinformation over there too without any pushback.
When you say experience, do you mean the general UX (i.e. how the apps/sites work), or the communities (or lack thereof)?
it's all false growth. it's the same reason why the economy is tanking yet the exchange is "strong".
bubble economics.
AI, is largely an excuse by companies to deflect attention away form the layoffs, they are personally doing. because so much industries are now tied to AI, when it burst a shit ton of jobs will be lost outside of tech.
Fuck you spez.
I nominate spez for next neck piercing
Only further proving that he’s a greedy little pig boy.
I know who spez is but what is this meme about
Has to do with this old meme
lmfao
Still a greedy little pigboy, though.
ok
you could at least call him a cunt and drop the reddit-tier verbage.
Why would I want to insult cunts?
You are absolutely right. He lacks the warmth and depth.
Greedy little pigboys ain't, though.
greedy pigbou cunt?
Daily active users have approximately doubled since the summer of 2023.
Surely some of this is bots but... I have a hard time believing it is all of them. So much for the API protests in 2023... 😞
It most likely is.
Not ALL bots are Reddit-made. Sure, many are, but there's a growing interest by many states to increase their influence of social media.
Tons of Russian/Chinese bots pushing the tankie agenda for example, tons of bots pushing right-wing psy-ops and lies, lots of companies trying to push their own angles as well... and given the number of people who've left Reddit since, and who've been kicked off the platform, I'd say a majority ARE bots.
the main content creators and initial users have probably left.
I went back to Facebook recently, a very different and dire sight to back in it's hay days
I wish I could go back in time and tell my boomer family members to keep using email instead of Facebook. They were right and we were wrong. Now they're the only reason I still have a Facebook account.
What an absolute disgrace. I'm pissed that Aaron Swartz was the one who died, and that they fired Victoria. Steve Huffman can go choke on a bag of sweaty dicks.
Firing Victoria was really the end of the Old Reddit. It felt like the loss of that side of reddit - the un-guided AMA’s by famous people - just led to reddit descending further into bots and reposts. The site had nothing to talk about other than itself anymore.
Are people still saying fuck spez? Because... fuck spez.
Last I checked, yes. Along with the image of him getting drilled by busty Garfield.
Do you still have that? For science
EDIT: Nevermind, 'twas in this very thread already
Yeah lol. It’s one of those things Spez hates, so deserves posting for that alone.
Feels good knowing you aren't on a burning ship.
tbh, not for me. I just feel disappointed
it used to be a great place with tons of information and a functional interface. nothing has really replaced it in terms of content and accessibility to the masses
its popularity has exploded in the past couple of years. Daily active users have approximately doubled since the summer of 2023. Google searches increasingly surface links to Reddit: Organic search to the platform is up over 560% from two years ago, per data from digital marketing firm Semrush.
So depressing, I sure hope these stats are bullshit.
I'm willing to bet the new daily active users are largely bots. I remember Facebook pulling this shit last year: bots will count as active users, presumably so they can just keep adding bots and tell shareholders their active user base is growing. It's all such a scam.
and an of and link farmers, not even propagandas just can use 100s or thousands of bots at once(they use mutliple devices, proxies, fingerprint hiding broswers.
they are.
google is definitely helping reddit;s engagement, reddit is pretty might attached to the hip of google.
I got a permaban just for saying I didn’t care that Trump said Liz Cheney should be shot, because she’s called for the deaths of millions as a warmonger. Didn’t encourage anything. Just said I didn’t care.
He fits in with the other scumbag billionaries...
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.
A billion dollars doesn't make 15 year olds legal, spez.
How many dollars does that?
shit that reminds me to donate to the admin of my local instance
There's too many billionaires now, I think it's dinner time.
He'll always be a greedy little pigboy
Another billionaire nonce for the billionaire nonce club.
Congrats pig boy. You're now a billionaire and still an unlikable loser with no real friends. Enjoy.
"hes trying to keep up with the MUSKs" since hes been thirsting for him ever since.
Billionaire he may be, but he remains a cunt
Yay, another victory for enshittification!
The last year before the IPO he paid himself 200 million, same as the google CEO that year
Edit: it was the last year he could get away with it, I mean
Yea I mean he sold the whole site out to right wing propaganda peoples, that had to be worth a few billion
This guy is a total pos
Fuck spez
Do any of you know how I can get into 3d printing? It's for research.
We do we insist on creating these entitled special boys who don't give shit about us?
Fuck that asshole. No, Steve, this isn't envy, it's disgust.
Greedy little pig-boy ruined Reddit to get his. Fuck spez.
I'm less Reddit these days than Jerboa, mostly because of Reddit's extreme us-centricity. Jerboa is better, but our nutty downstairs neighbours still fill up every social medium in Canada.
I had to use Reddit a few days back because apparently that's the only place DuckDuckGo looks for search page bug reports
It felt bad
I used to spend a lot of time there but yeah fuck spez and the oligarchy dicksuckery he's blatantly committed to
We did it!
According to the latest quarterly earnings, there has been increase in user engagement. However, I also read somewhere that 15% of engagements are from bots. My suspicion is that, in spite of the tiny minuscule amount of fake users posing as genuine, these bots create inflammatory comments to trigger and drive real users into responding more and thereby inflate user engagement and algorithms. These small amount of bots create a snowball effect of increasing user participation. So, in essence, the level of user engagement is fake and inflated.
Spez knows what he's doing. He is talking to the tech bros to get ideas on how to amass power and now he's one of them billionaires.
I really doubt it's only 15% anymore, the internet is dead and social networks are leading the charge in that.
its 50% last i read an article a few years ago , reddit omitting the truth. plus with AI posting i thinkts more now.
Maybe let's not tell them?
Shittit