Reddit’s Rolling Blackouts
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2023
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Across Reddit, thousands of forums have gone “private” and effectively disappeared. Users are protesting the site’s plan to capitalize on its data, which has been enjoyed for free by people making third-party apps for Reddit, as well as some of the world’s biggest companies training their A.I.
Guest: Sarah Needleman, reporter for the Wall Street Journal who writes about interactive entertainment and social media
Host: Emily Peck
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Where are you? |
| 0:01.1 | Asteroid City. |
| 0:02.2 | From director Wes Anderson. |
| 0:04.0 | Welcome to your stargazers and space cadets. |
| 0:06.8 | What are those pulses indicate? |
| 0:08.3 | The beeps and blips we don't know. |
| 0:09.8 | There's an alien. |
| 0:11.8 | That actually happened. |
| 0:12.8 | This June, place all witnesses under a group arrest. |
| 0:15.8 | How long can they keep us in Asteroid City? |
| 0:17.8 | I'm in O'Hurry. |
| 0:18.8 | I like aliens. |
| 0:19.8 | Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks. |
| 0:23.2 | What a strange experience this is. |
| 0:25.4 | Asteroid City, in cinemas June 23. |
| 0:28.4 | Booktickets now. |
| 0:30.0 | To understand what happened with Reddit this week, you need to go back to April. |
| 0:38.8 | That's when Reddit announced it would, for the first time, charge companies for access |
| 0:43.0 | to its data. |
| 0:44.8 | At the time, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman suggested the move was about AI. |
| 0:50.2 | Big companies were using Reddit's vast trove of data to train their large language models, |
| 0:55.1 | and that wasn't right. |
... |
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