My relative works for a big DC lawfirm. He said the publishers have been salivating for last year over the recent NYT lawsuit against OpenAI.

Supposedly, the rumor he heard, is that OpenAI did exactly what you would expect them to have done....that is as a small startup they went to places like zlibrary and downloaded all the epubs they could get as part of their corpus.

Microsoft involvement makes it worse, as now the 'owner' has deep enough pockets to pay.

I think this ends in 1 of 3 ways: (a) Publishers reach deal with Microsoft and take part ownership of Open AI, (b) Publishers get a spotify-style 'streaming' deal from Microsoft (.00001 per use), (c) Publishers get a huge one-time payout.

Of course there are other possibilities as well but I think these would be most likely.

It's interesting to think about how much of this is bc of indirection -- if your revenue comes by packaging up users for some third party (e.g., the advertising model) then what does it take before you have material amounts of profit? Well, I guess we know what it takes, and we generally don't like it.

But when you don't have to be indirect anymore, and users can literally pay the site, and each other, then that's a whole other universe to operate in, which will have its own physics / dynamics. Though those dynamics will have to be discovered...

I’m always fascinated that twitter and reddit are relatively so terrible at monetizing compared to FB. The topics we’re interested in are right there in our subscriptions and post history… I would think it should be easy to perform targeting.

Short term: downsize + introduce paid subreddits Mid term: re-work tech to something that can run on less, if they're using AWS or similar I'd move off of that quickly Long term: Make the UX absolutely stellar

Hard to know for sure what to do without more information...

Ouch. Quite a haircut, especially considering a couple more years of dilution through stock based comp issuance.

They were incredibly late to develop their own mobile app (or even a functional mobile web view). The sign of rot to me was when this design came through, but not because it served users better - it was launched as a better interface for serving ad formats and avoiding ad blockers.

I was pretty new to Reddit having joined back in 2014 so I didn’t really notice it at the time. Looking back I would say the first major sign was when interim CEO Ellen Pao fired a very popular employee that was responsible for organizing popular AMA’s. There was a huge community revolt and the CEO stepped down after only 8 months.