athos77
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Spez has spent his entire time as CEO chasing the latest tech shiny - reddit crypto, reddit NFTs, reddit video a la TikTok. And he’s always managed to do it after the craze has started to peak. So now he’s chasing the latest shiny, reddit AI, starting a full year after everyone else already released their products.
He’s late yet again, and he’s proven repeatedly that’s he’s failed to understand reddit’s greatest strengths and value. This “reddit AI content” and the IPO is his last chance to get some value out of reddit, and his last chance to make money for nothing because no one is going to hire him in a leadership role ever again. I just wonder if he’s smart enough to understand that, or whether he’s just hoping to get enough money to fully build out and stock his personal doomsday bunker.
While I agree, let’s not pretend like this is limited just to Tesla. My feed lately has had numerous stories of crazy FSD taxis as well.
I also have to say that one of my concerns with FSD is the deterioration in people’s driving skills and their awareness of their car’s abilities (especially as those change over time). Leaving aside all the wisecracks about people’s normal abilities or not paying attention anyway, let’s take a snowstorm. FSD can’t drive in it, so you’re left with regular human drivers going manual in their cars. But they haven’t actually driven themselves in a while, so they’ve forgotten some of the lessons they learned like how to apply the brakes differently in ice and snow, they don’t know where the corners of their car are, they’re driving entirely too fast and - because their FSD car was compensating for mechanical issues - they’re not aware that their tires are near-bald and the brakes are iffy.
Thing is, I know this is something that’s going to happen. I just don’t know how we can mitigate the risks.
Just gonna hijack your comment for visibility. reddit started trialing a “Community Points” program in 2019 in /r/ethtrader, /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite , where posters and commenters could earn “Community Points” that were supposedly backed up with crypto that you could eventually cash out. They announced an expansion of the program in December 2021 but, afaik, they never actually did so. Which might have something to do with the fact that one of the /r/cryptocurrency mods made $10,000 by selling community points. I don’t know if the program has actively continued since then; maybe someone who was in the three trial communities can say.
My point is that reddit has been working on something similar to this program for at least five years now. And this article isn’t based on any announcement by reddit, but by someone examining their source code. It’s possible that this code has been present for a while and reddit has leaked it’s existence to try to attract back some of their lost contributors. Or even that it hasn’t been present but they included the old code in the newest app release and then pointed it out for the same reason.
In any case, this article isn’t based on any official announcement, and reddit has been “trialing” a similar program for over four years. I wouldn’t hold out any hope that this actually sees daylight anytime soon, or that it’ll work well if it’s actually released.
They said years ago that they only kept one previous version, which is why everyone overwrote and then deleted their stuff.
It’s possible that reddit changed that, but honestly? That requires a level of foresight that I believe is entirely beyond spez. He didn’t foresee AI products, he literally paid all the bandwidth for them to harvest the data, he didn’t foresee changes to API pricing, he didn’t foresee the protests, how long they’d last, or how many people just walked away.
Hell, in the previous big “closed subs” protest they’d never even considered a moderator rebellion: once the mods took the subs private, the admins were accidentally locked out as well - they had to negotiate to get them re-opened while they worked on backdoor changes that wouldn’t break reddit.
I just don’t see them having the foresight to add in preservation code, nor to allocate the database and storage space to keep up with it. I think if you overwrote and then deleted your stuff, reddit doesn’t have it anymore. Of course, it’s still out there, in Google’s cache and the internet archive and all the other snapshots she preservation schemes and the data already harvested for the various AIs, but at least it’s no longer indeed reddit’s control, and they won’t be able to profit from it.