this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users (www.theverge.com)
submitted 1 month ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while “other” revenue reached $33.2 million on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.

In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature. Reddit started letting users translate posts into French last year before expanding to Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. Now, Huffman says Reddit plans to expand translation to over 30 countries through 2025.

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[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 72 points 1 month ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (3 children)

A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

Edit: Okay yall... I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it's really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

  • I'm a mobile dev, so I don't mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I'm going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn't bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
  • Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
  • Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn't logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
  • Even if I was already logged in, it's an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I'm not sure it would've improved much.
  • Even if I was on Android, I'd probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
  • Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved... I didn't ask for that, and swarming people with "have you considered doing it the right way?" when they're just making a basic observation doesn't create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.
[–] DdCno1@beehaw.org 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I know this might sound a little condescending, but why are you torturing yourself by not using an adblocker?

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 11 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I was using the mobile app.

[–] DdCno1@beehaw.org 36 points 1 month ago

That app is a special kind of inhuman torture.

[–] fushuan@lemm.ee 7 points 1 month ago

Android Firefox has access to adblockers though??

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 4 points 1 month ago

Brother in christ, that thing is a spyware.

[–] inverted_deflector@startrek.website 1 points 4 weeks ago

I still browse reddit, honestly more than I do lemmy, but its mostly reddit old with adblock. Even on browser even though that is painful to navigate.

With properly curated subs its not so bad, but there definitely is still something missing. Also holy cow the current algorithm on reddit is trash. It used to be that the front page changed and shifted but sometimes I see the same crap on my front page for 2 days. It's insane!