Blockades or blockchains? As Reddit hits turbulence with a user boycott and AI threats, DanielGKuhn navigates the challenges and potential implications for the crypto world. An opinion:
Reddit is caught between a rock and hard place. With the emergence of artificial intelligence that threatens to disrupt how people find information online and a massive boycott brewing in reaction to a move the legacy social media platform took to bolster itself, the company, which counts an obscene 57 million daily users, is finding out that existence as a “tech darling” doesn’t get any easier even after you successfully “scale.
For years, Reddit has allowed web browsers to crawl its message boards, a mutually beneficial relationship for itself and services like Google – both of which became dominant platforms by establishing themselves as the places to go if you have a question. The rise of “large language models” by the likes of ChatGPT, which are built and can only improve by ingesting vast quantities of data , have turned this relationship on its head.
Third, AI chatbots grown fat on Reddit’s data are coming to eat Reddit’s lunch. While LLM-based chatbots today are most akin to parlor tricks with little engagement beyond superusers and prompt magicians, it seems like the entire tech ecosystem is preparing for a day when ChatGPT and Bard stop hallucinating and disrupt all of today’s existing online services.
Now, dear The Node reader, what does all this have to do with crypto? Or how can it help you earn money? Well, depending on how the situation shakes out it could have a few implications for crypto as a social movement. Obviously, the ability for a company to make unilateral decisions that severely affect users is a Big Plus for a movement that is advocating for transparency, open access and user control.
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