What Next TBD: Reddit’s Rolling Blackouts

Slate Technology

Slate

Society & Culture, Technology, History

4.6 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2023

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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 If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I made you think you was real.
0:02.0	My name is Caden Sinclair.
0:04.0	Some people call us American royalty.
0:06.0	We were Liars.
0:08.0	A new series on Prime Video.
0:10.0	We were happy. We wanted for nothing.
0:12.0	Based on the best-selling novel.
0:15.0	Something terrible happened last summer,
0:17.0	and I have no memory of what or who hurt me.
0:20.0	No one in my family will tell me.
0:22.7	When you're left for dead, you want answers. We were liars. New series, watch now, only on
0:28.9	Prime Video.
0:33.7	To understand what happened with Reddit this week, you need to go back to April.
0:43.6	That's when Reddit announced it would, for the first time, charge companies for access to its data.
0:48.8	At the time, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman suggested the move was about AI.
0:54.5	Big companies were using Reddit's vast trove of data to train their large language models, and that wasn't right.
0:56.3	He told the New York Times, quote, we don't need to give all that value to some of the
1:00.5	largest companies in the world for free.
1:04.5	But Reddit's move didn't just affect the big guys.
1:07.7	Also asked to pay up were the smaller developers who make apps built off the site's API
1:12.6	or application programming interface.
1:14.6	Essentially, it's the door that allows developers to access the data on Reddit.
	...

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