This will absolutely print money. Ad companies and normies will unironically loooove this.
Long term, I expect this will accelerate astroturfing and obliterate whatever credibility remains on Reddit. But, Reddit was already heading in that direction anyway and 99% of people couldn't care less, so this will make bank.
Fuck spez.
What percentage of "user"-generated content on Reddit is slop now? And that'll be fodder for the review AI?
Spez is seriously destroying Reddit.
That's one way to circumvent adblockers. Just turn your entire site into the ad...
Lol
From the website that recommended the use of PVA glue to increase the tackiness of pizza cheese.
3rd party ai companies were already doing that, so they went "why shouldn't i keep it?" meme
This makes a lot of sense for Reddit. Genuine discussions about things being turned into reviews is a pretty damn good use of AI. But I also really hate the idea as a user (well, not of Reddit anymore lol). If I was having a genuine discussion about Leatherman pliers, my target is the people I'm in a discussion with and not a general audience. It is invasive to turn that into a review. That candidness is probably extremely valuable though.
That said it's already being done by Google and everybody else. This is just being a bit more direct about it.
To be honest, even before AI it felt like a lot of product recommendations were fake.
The part that bothers me isn't the AI, it's that nobody in those threads was writing a review. They were talking to each other. Reddit took a conversation between people and sold it as a product, and the people get nothing, not even the choice to opt out.
I run a forum, so I thought about this when writing the terms. What we ended up with is simple. What you write is yours, you can export all of it any time, and it's out of AI training unless you say otherwise. It cost me nothing to promise, it would cost Reddit a product line. That's the whole difference.
A few years ago discovered excluding some usernames from a product search can turn reddit results from dozens of hits to none. I noticed those accounts were in all likelihood using keyword notifcations so they could reply to any post mentioning certain model numbers.
In the era of billions of different models of products, there really isn't many people writing about everything. What you get outside of the popular brands and models is nothing at all.
It's more of a red flag than anything if I go looking for reviews and find too much posting about a random product model that isn't a household brand name or obviously popular model. If it's a popular item then I wouldn't have needed to be digging through the internet for reddit comments anyway.
How can we poison the well?
Reddit has become its own worst enemy.
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