Daniyyel

Who should be regulated, Google or Reddit? Reddit updated there robots.txt to disallow everything. As it’s their site, I guess it’s also their right to determine that. They then made a deal with Google, which I guess is also not abusing a dominant position by Google, as Reddit could have made a deal with anyone.

It’s a bit of a dilemma reading their policy:

We believe in the open internet and in keeping Reddit publicly accessible to foster human learning (…) Unfortunately, we see more and more entities using unauthorized access (…) especially with the rise of use cases like generative AI. This sort of misuse of public data has become more prominent as more and more platforms close themselves off from the open internet.
We still believe in an open internet, but we do not believe that third parties have a right to misuse public content just because it’s public.

Being a open/public platform, but still wanting to protect user’s content from being used for AI could be a good thing, and I guess also what many fediverse users would want for this platform. Making a distinction between AI and search indexing could indeed be difficult. But then making content deals with Google for search indexing and AI training is a bit hypocrite.

Is this a long term source of revenue for Reddit? Or will it loose value at some point, simply because LLMs are all trained sufficiently on user generated content. Is there more to learn at some point?

Also it seems that a lot of content on Resdit is already AI generated, so it would train on data from other LLMs, which I’m sure doesn’t improve quality.

I agree that a lot of subscriptions are really overpriced, but updates to an app are also a sort-of service. Pixelmator explained it quite well when their app switched to a subscription model, mentioning some fair (I think) pros and cons of the succession model, both from the perspective of users and developers.

https://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2022/08/18/why-pixelmator-photo-is-switching-to-subscription-pricing-and-a-sneak-peek-at-pixelmator-photo-for-mac/

Autoscaling isn’t only used the grow the number of servers under load, but also to guarantee availability of a fixed number. If the max is set to 1, the bastion host is protected against hardware failure, zone outages, or just you screwing up. Accidentally killed your bastion host? No problem, within a few minutes autoscaling will have provisioned a new one and you’re good to go again.

Arstechnica runs on WordPress on AWS, and they have a really nice series of articles about it. Sure, you could use just one EC2 instance for everything, but on a high traffic website you would need a bit more.

One of the things wrong with platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the filter bubbles they create through their algorithms. I think it would be a mistake to again create filter bubbles through non- (or de-) federation.