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by valine 1099 days ago
I’ve never seen Reddit the company as valuable. People are valuable, and they just happen to gather on Reddit. If Reddit goes away they will gather somewhere else.
2 comments

What makes reddit valuable are

1. The communities

2. The data that the communities havegenerated in the past

It seems like reddit is trying to monetize #2 to the point of alienating #1. It's bizarre how large the disconnect is between Reddit the corporation and Reddit the collection of communities

Isn't #2 freely available for anyone to scrape? And even if they shut down access now, presumably everyone training LLMs already has a mostly complete dump of reddit comments/links.
Yes, but actually scrapping it is a hard work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254485.
What would be funny is if as a result of this everyone moved back to Digg (where the Reddit users initially came from).
There's no Digg-that-was to move back to. Digg in 2023 is only connected to old Digg by a $500k check and domain transfer. They eventually added comments, but it seems sparse.

edit: apparently an ad company bought it in 2018. Doesn't seem to have affected the quality of links.