Looking at a company’s career page can really reveal its long-term strategy. In this case, Reddit wants to leverage the extraction of wealth generated by its users. This career page caught my eye:
Ads prediction team is the central team to handle machine learning needs in the ads delivery pipeline. Some examples projects that the team own:
- Improve our model through systematic model architecture engineering work including exploring different deep neural network architectures
- Systematic feature engineering work to build power features from Reddit’s data with aggregation, embedding, content understanding techniques
- Developing highly efficient retrieval ranking models with good balance between model performance and computation efficiency
As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in the ads prediction team, you will research, formulate and execute on our mission to deliver the right ad to the right user under the right context with data and ML driven solutions. Source: https://boards.greenhouse.io/reddit/jobs/4820729
I think Reddit will go through with their API plans no matter what. They want to eliminate all third party apps so that their machine learning algorithm can target appropriate ads to users. They can only do that if users only use their app.
… suppose these algorithms will be real efficient once they have significant less users to consider. win/win
The fact that a significant fraction of other ML jobs is just “how to most efficiently implant ads into people’s heads” makes me really glad I work in the healthcare sector instead. The pay is objectively worse and shit barely ever works reliably enough to actually put into production, but at least we’re not actively setting out to do evil.
our mission to deliver the right ad to the right user
So at least they’re admitting they want Reddit to be an ad service.
This is always the case with capitalist platforms. The business plan of every platform is to extract money from its users.
I’m so happy to be here. I believe that Fediverse is the future of Libre communities with a common goal: to connect people with each other without any capitalist profit as an end goal.
