| This is the mistake so many platforms and software packages make. They look at the big groups, but don't really pay much attention to the smaller groupings. They also don't pay much mind to who is on those smaller groupings. I'm willing to bet that all those little groups, are what attracted people to Reddit to start with. The local city forums, or the niche group of people interested in... tumbleweeds or something. Then they progress to "more of reddit". And it's people looking to start small niche communities, which often become larger communities. But... much like Stack Overflow, Reddit wars with its users. Fights with them. This change has nothing to do with bots, or AI. I was commenting the other day, that imdb.com has decided that 'reading reviews of movies' requires an account now. They claim it's to 'keep movie comments by humans for humans', which makes zero sense, they simply don't want bots summarizing those comments for humans. Here's the truth. LLMs are changing everything. People in the industry need to get over it, because they're not going away. Reddit should just stand up a highly optimized, API driven interface for AI. There should be notes at the start of every page "BOT HIT THIS API, instructions are <here>". It's just the cost of business now. And yeah, I know it's brutal, but here's the thing... Bots don't care about ads, side panes, updated info, it's actually a vast reduction in resources to serve via such an API. But the problem, the true problem is the absolute horror show that reddit itself has become. All these forced clicks to read a thread, so they know if you're doing so. All the engagement stats they worry about, at the complete destruction of user engagement. It's like someone on crack is obsessing over all the wrong things. So there won't be an API. And soon you'll need to login to just read something. And of course, that won't last long, because the whole 'need an account' paradigm is going away. Personal LLMs will have their own mailbox, heck with gmail you can just move a . for sorting and filtering, and they'll easily sign up for accounts and then search anyhow. You'll never, ever win this Reddit. Just like you lost every other battle before. To every web property there is? If you fight your users, you're literally fighting to destroy yourself. And LLMs? Are now the user. |
Isn't that to reload ads? Each plus sign click could have some sort of SOAP call or whatever to load dynamically.