A web crawler and an AI model are two completely different things. You're just assuming that an AI model can just easily grab whatever content it needs to learn from, but it doesn't work like that. Think about it. Why would a company pay Reddit $60 million per year if they could just easily scrape all that content off the web?
Thats what made me curious.I did assume that you could let AI loose on the web in general,without permissions etc. Would Reddit have been so forward thinking that they put measures in place to block AI scraping their site?
I assumed it was simply because of the legal right to do it. I know in the photo industry, lots of photographers are mad that AI models are trained on stock images that the photographers got no money for. I'm not sure if in the terms of service this is outlined, but I doubt it since some of these images are 5 years old or longer, and I doubt something like this came up when the business relationship began. So if an AI company is using images, but not paying for them, its a big problem. Someone like Adobe might be paid, but it seems not the photographers. So then I have to ask, if you ever sell out, will us posters get a check in the mail? ... I haven't actually read your terms of service with this website, but I bet that you probably need to spell this out. If all my valuable postings are going to be used to train the best AI trading model, can I get compensated? I think perhaps what Reddit was being paid for was any additional data that can be used to "identify" the poster. If for example you can match the IP address with the data, it might now geo-locate the poster, and this makes the postings of that individual far more valuable, and the webcrawler perhaps wouldn't have access to this. So in my opinion, the fee was simply for some additional data, but mostly to clear up any future legal disputes.
They make 3 dollars revenue per user. First earnings. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https://i.redd.it/giz9ndz6t2zc1.jpeg
It doesn't seem like they'll ever be able to make enough money to justify the current valuation or even a fraction of it. If they do make a lot more money on ads then it won't be a good experience for users anymore. I guess it could be like twitter and simply exist because there aren't any competitors -- which is currently true. Reddit does still have good communities for discussing microtopics on investing like thetagang, etc.