Interesting read. I get where he’s coming from vis a vis training data for LLMs. But if those are the problem, negotiate a solution with those companies or block their crawlers. Don’t kill the apps making the site usable for everyone else.

No doubt, his comments are accurate as far as they go albeit completely out of context. I’d be much more interested in knowing how many of the top 100 subs (rather than top 5000) have reopened. I’d like to know what “top” even means here. I’m sure that 97% of mods don’t use 3rd party apps (according to Huffman) because they mod subs of a few dozen to a few hundred members or their subs are almost completely inactive.

In other words, this is interesting damage control, but it needs a lot more context. And NPR’s quality control and fact-checking are sadly lacking.

  • samick1@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site.

    Huffman acknowledged that if those users instead browsed with Reddit’s own app, it would shore up the company’s bottom line.

    Hmm.

    • CaptObvious@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Thanks for the info. I’ve been following the Reddark site, but it’s a broad brush without detailed metrics. I can’t help noticing that all 203 sites that Photon-Reddit has still marked as dark have more than 1m members. Many have a few dozens of millions. That must be having an impact.

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Is there a new dataisbeautiful that celebrates actual good visualizations, or are we just going to go back to jerking each other off to poorly labeled excel charts with trendlines going every which way?

    • CaptObvious@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Noted and my apologies. It seemed relevant in that Lemmy, and lemmy.world in particular, will be impacted by his decisions. I’ll take any future conversations to those communities.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
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    Meanwhile, companies that already copy the whole web for their search engines (e.g. Microsoft and Google) still don’t need to make API calls to get Reddit posts.

    More generally, anything that can be seen by a not-logged-in browser can be indexed by search engines and thus ingested into any training pipeline you can imagine.

    • FearTheCron@lemmy.world
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      This is part of my complaint against Reddit doing this. Google and Microsoft already have the data, they are just ensuring smaller companies and open source LLMs fail. I am also a little annoyed by the app thing, but I think it’s important that we don’t let tech giants monopolize this new technology.

      I deleted my reddit post history, it’s not their data to sell.

  • carzian@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Really a terrible interview. Bobby Allyn needed to have some pushback or followup questions, instead of just publishing a statement with little to no context.

    • CaptObvious@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      “Trash” seems a little strong in the current media landscape. And it’s hardly their fault that the Magliozzis wanted to retire.

      • Awwab@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        It does seem like a silly complaint. I get it’s hard for people who were used to car talk every weekend but at some point it gets stale and you move on. I’m sure there is a way to play them via streaming if you want to.

      • tallwookie@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        retiring is fine, but they stopped the reruns. Cartalk was literally the only beneficial thing about npr. npr is basically the cnn of radio and about as reputable.

        • CaptObvious@lemmy.worldOP
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          Honestly, it isn’t reasonable to expect a nonprofit to keep using bandwidth to distribute a dead program. And whether your local station airs reruns is a local decision, not NPR’s. Talk to your local station manager or program director. Failing that, see if WGBH (I think… it may have been WBUR who produced the show) have put the old programs on their website.

      • funkyb@kbin.social
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        Nope. I was a constant listener and eventually, a supporter. That stopped many years ago. They are not what they used to be.

        • CaptObvious@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          Agreed on all fronts. I even used to work for a member station. I got out just before they fired Bob Edwards for not being young/hip/confrontational/whatever enough. My relationship since has been very much on-again/off-again. Just when I think there’s a spark of the old NPR, they go and step in it. :(