Things are getting rocky at Reddit. They’ve weathered numerous protests, community ownership challenged, threats from moderators, and pretty much gotten away with them all. Two quite challenging elements are coming to a head, right now; one a victim of regulation outside their control, the other a mess they’re complicit with. As one of the largest commercial entities both platformising the web, while deeply dependant on it, it’s in an odd place; the gorilla of AI data extraction and looms over this in the NY Magazine piece(via); people still using Google are adding ‘reddit’ to the search terms to avoid the SEO and AI slop Google has both been encouraging and funding over the years; but it is also turning Reddit into a space that will now attract those same bottom-feeders, stuffing it with more fake reviews and comments, making more cyborg and bot marketing accounts, as it (like Facebook and Twitter before it) replaces the web with itself for casual users of ‘Google’, the real front page of the internet, where people search ‘google’ for ‘google’, like once they did with Yahoo.
The regulation outside their control is interesting. This is the introduction of the Online Safety Bill in the UK, designed to teach kids to use bittorrent to access pornography ny making websites confirm the age of those accessing it. Reddit has partnered with Persona, a company based in San Francisco and so outside GDPR oversight, to validate either your UK ID documents or do live camera geometry analysis; both mean your private, personally identifying data is stored with a US company, only a few years old, and over which you have no control (nor redress should there be a leak, hack or competence failure). As someone with a 16 year old account, you’d think I’d be grandfathered in as old enough to access NSFW content on Reddit, but actually, I disgree: accounts can be stolen, lost, transferred, or sold, even if these things violate terms and conditions; an admission that enforcement is not always something that can be technologically achieved.
So I’m in a ridiculous place where I can still access plenty of porn without proving my age, which is difficult as the UK has no identity card, database or government API to perform this requirement underpinning the legislation. There are subreddits I read which are not pornographic but defensively flagged as NSFW, which are still shown to me in my Reddit app - but in an incredibly baffling way. The item is listed with the subreddit name redacted, and the title redacted; but the text in the article it links to is still fully visible. The SFW discussion about the article is also censored. I can easily go and search for it online and read it without having to prove my age, but I can’t talk about it on Reddit. it’s quite a mess of a solution.
Two ludicrous messes. To confound the first, Reddit sells all discourse on the site as exclusive LLM training data, so AI will be able to regurgitate automated content onto the site, undermining the one distinguishing feature it still has - that the discourse on there is authentic and human-produced. In a way, they’re a huge target and can’t really skirt UK governmental regulation, or stem the advancing domination by AI; it’s that looking transition point of ‘old content’ you could trust, and ‘post AI’ content that is propaganda at its most covert (in effect) and brazen (in scale). It is worth remembering that Altman, the next musk-in-waiting, owns 10% of Reddit. The question for many, at that point, is why are they contributing labour to a site that profits from them, but won’t stand up for them? It’s like watching Deja News kill Usenet, again, again.