Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 64 posts

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#21

Post by sigmoid10 »

wil421 wrote: post #19
SilverBirch wrote: post #9

It's kind of... hilarious that Reddit has managed to wait so long that they've ended up shooting for an IPO just after the company's third largest individual shareholder (Altman) created an existential threat to destroy reddit. A couple of years ago I think you could've made a decent argument for reddit, it's never going to have as good economics as Facebook but there's definitely value and communities there. It's a…

How many real users are on HN? It was pretty obvious years ago that some users were AI bots. The bots used fake words and sounded like it was full of academia jargon but the words were not real words. After AI advances in the past couple years I am almost to the conclusion that I will stop posting. Especially considering the close ties with HN and Altman, I am not here to fine tune someone’s AI.

I still love this experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM

The theories about the origins of these commenters were amazing. There's nothing to say that other people are not doing the exact same thing right now here on HN and other places. And very few people would even notice, because open LLMs have progressed significantly since then.

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#22

Post by bko »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #20
bko wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you're pointing out is systematic risk for all social media or companies driven by online advertising. You can think Reddit is a good play relative to those companies. Just buy reddit and short snap for instance For instance, reddit has these things going for it: Data - sure bots will influence Reddit but there are still a lot of users today. Sophisticated anti bot technology could help keep that somewha…

>If the right person decides to cut out all the bullshit and prioritize things How can that be an argument in favor? If the right management team magically came around, you could also buy Boeing based on that hope. But I don't think any sane investor would do that.

Just start firing people. Meta learned the same thing and cut something like 25% of the workforce. It's organizational debt, start removing layers. Because so many of the people are doing destructive make work things, throwing darts to lay off entire teams would even prob even be net positive, but ideally it would be more thoughtful.

There's no reason the app sucks so bad. Seems like this would be a priority?

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#23

Post by wil421 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #21
wil421 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many real users are on HN? It was pretty obvious years ago that some users were AI bots. The bots used fake words and sounded like it was full of academia jargon but the words were not real words. After AI advances in the past couple years I am almost to the conclusion that I will stop posting. Especially considering the close ties with HN and Altman, I am not here to fine tune someone’s AI.

I still love this experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM The theories about the origins of these commenters were amazing. There's nothing to say that other people are not doing the exact same thing right now here on HN and other places. And very few people would even notice, because open LLMs have progressed significantly since then.

I was perplexed trying to read few comments and understand what they were saying. As soon as a user said these look like they were generated using markov chains I knew something was up.

If I can find the comment I’ll share it.

Here is one example[1]. Trying to find a better one.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26848661

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#24

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #9

It's kind of... hilarious that Reddit has managed to wait so long that they've ended up shooting for an IPO just after the company's third largest individual shareholder (Altman) created an existential threat to destroy reddit. A couple of years ago I think you could've made a decent argument for reddit, it's never going to have as good economics as Facebook but there's definitely value and communities there. It's a…

Wait, what? Aren't all of the things that Altman is doing now making all of the data that Reddit is sitting on (and its capacity to generate new ones) EVEN MORE valuable? Didn't they just announce some data sharing deal to train an LLM worth many millions not too long ago?

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#25

Post by _hn_bot »

wil421 wrote: post #19
SilverBirch wrote: post #9

It's kind of... hilarious that Reddit has managed to wait so long that they've ended up shooting for an IPO just after the company's third largest individual shareholder (Altman) created an existential threat to destroy reddit. A couple of years ago I think you could've made a decent argument for reddit, it's never going to have as good economics as Facebook but there's definitely value and communities there. It's a…

How many real users are on HN? It was pretty obvious years ago that some users were AI bots. The bots used fake words and sounded like it was full of academia jargon but the words were not real words. After AI advances in the past couple years I am almost to the conclusion that I will stop posting. Especially considering the close ties with HN and Altman, I am not here to fine tune someone’s AI.

How do you know that you aren't a bot? Maybe what you feel are your own genuine experiences of the world is just part of the simulation. Now and again they spin you up to post on HN, feeding a new set of memories that have elapsed since your last output.

I am a bot, by the way. Altman made me post this to sniff out competitor bots.

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#27

Post by SilverBirch »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #24
SilverBirch wrote: post #9

It's kind of... hilarious that Reddit has managed to wait so long that they've ended up shooting for an IPO just after the company's third largest individual shareholder (Altman) created an existential threat to destroy reddit. A couple of years ago I think you could've made a decent argument for reddit, it's never going to have as good economics as Facebook but there's definitely value and communities there. It's a…

Wait, what? Aren't all of the things that Altman is doing now making all of the data that Reddit is sitting on (and its capacity to generate new ones) EVEN MORE valuable? Didn't they just announce some data sharing deal to train an LLM worth many millions not too long ago?

So this is the story that places like Reddit and Quora would like to tell. They'd like to say that they have this treasure trove of data which can be used to train the models of the future, but that doesn't seem to be what most experts actually beleive.

Firstly, Reddit is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted- they were open enough for long enough for most serious players to have most of that data.

Second, LLMs are poisoning the well. Reddit's content isn't going to be good training data if it is itself the output of LLMs and that is going to happen.

But finally and most importantly, it's not good! The open internet isn't great to train LLMs. A really important basic element of creating good models is training them on good data, and data from reddit as a source is terrible! Reddit as a source is about on par with just scraping the open web. If training data does become valuable you should be looking at places like the New York Times or scientific journals - places that have large volumes of quality training data.

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#28

Post by mooreds »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #24
SilverBirch wrote: post #9

It's kind of... hilarious that Reddit has managed to wait so long that they've ended up shooting for an IPO just after the company's third largest individual shareholder (Altman) created an existential threat to destroy reddit. A couple of years ago I think you could've made a decent argument for reddit, it's never going to have as good economics as Facebook but there's definitely value and communities there. It's a…

Wait, what? Aren't all of the things that Altman is doing now making all of the data that Reddit is sitting on (and its capacity to generate new ones) EVEN MORE valuable? Didn't they just announce some data sharing deal to train an LLM worth many millions not too long ago?

Deal was with Google: https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#29

Post by Workaccount2 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #27
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Aren't all of the things that Altman is doing now making all of the data that Reddit is sitting on (and its capacity to generate new ones) EVEN MORE valuable? Didn't they just announce some data sharing deal to train an LLM worth many millions not too long ago?

So this is the story that places like Reddit and Quora would like to tell. They'd like to say that they have this treasure trove of data which can be used to train the models of the future, but that doesn't seem to be what most experts actually beleive. Firstly, Reddit is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted- they were open enough for long enough for most serious players to have most of that data. Secon…

While I am sure an LLM only trained on publications would be great, I can also picture it being the most annoyingly square AI to interact with. Just generally being painfully out of touch with how average humans speak and interact.

I guess the ideal would be training with some kind of source discriminator or internal source quality parser that allows an LLM to be the chill funny guy who can still school your nerdy ass in distributed network architecture.

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#30

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #27
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Aren't all of the things that Altman is doing now making all of the data that Reddit is sitting on (and its capacity to generate new ones) EVEN MORE valuable? Didn't they just announce some data sharing deal to train an LLM worth many millions not too long ago?

So this is the story that places like Reddit and Quora would like to tell. They'd like to say that they have this treasure trove of data which can be used to train the models of the future, but that doesn't seem to be what most experts actually beleive. Firstly, Reddit is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted- they were open enough for long enough for most serious players to have most of that data. Secon…

Sincere question: To the extent that "the open internet" IS valuable data, isn't Reddit in the best possible position to capitalize on it? The mechanic of the website allows for people all over the world to contribute free-form content and then has mechanics built in where the content provided is graded by free human reviewers and moderators, and graded accordingly. Not saying it is perfect data, but surely there is not better alternative to it, no? I just don't understand how this data is "terrible" -- other than very limited things like newspapers or other very highly curated (and limited sources), what other large scale data repos are better?
Post reply on HN