Reddit, a platform founded in part on the premise of openly and widely sharing information, is ready to put up some paywalls. In a video Ask Me Anything (AMA) session hosted by CEO Steve Huffman following the company’s quarterly earnings report (which went poorly), the founder and exec said Reddit is actively testing ways to make some content require payment to access and plans to roll out a “paid subreddit” feature later this year.
I bet they figure paywalled areas will produce more consistent, high quality comments for selling to LLMs too.
It’s probally partly a data farming move.
It’s probably the other way around. I can see him saying that paywalled subreddits won’t have their data mined for LLMs so if you want to keep your content out of that mill, you better pay up.
I’d have to be delusional to believe that they won’t sell that data to LLMs despite what they may claim.
They’ll probably paywall NSFW subreddit because they can’t monetize those with ad revenue, and I doubt they’re selling that content for LLMs anyway.
Farm data, or sell the solution to a problem they participate in creating.