What's happening at Reddit?
Plus, how Google wants to help you browse TikTok and Pinterest at the same time.
Well, June flew by! Summer in New York City has started with some dreary weather, not to mention some smoke-filled days even my time in Los Angeles couldn’t rival. June has made for many moments across the tech industry at large worth discussing, so for this month’s wrap up we’re dialing in on some stories I found particularly interesting — and June isn’t even over yet!
This week’s Day to Data will discuss the revolution at Reddit, the new season of Black Mirror, how to improve meetings, and how captions on videos are really valuable. Last month’s wrap up was well received so I’m excited to give my take again on a few events from June.
Unrest at Reddit
Reddit has been everywhere in the media this past month. Let’s break down what is happening at the company.
Who are the players? Reddit. AI companies training LLMs. Third party apps using Reddit’s API. Reddit users.
An API is key to this story. Read a previous Day to Data to learn what API’s are.
What happened? Reddit announced in April that their API, which has been free for the past 7 years, will now have usage limits, and anything beyond those limits will cost a fee. This change, on the heels of Twitter making a similar announcement earlier this year, was received with intense backlash by the Reddit community. Reddit has been known as a “town hall” social media platform, with its users being the backbone of not just content creation, but moderation and third-party-app development.
Reddit: One of the most crucial parts of training conversational LLMs is the data these models are built upon. Reddit is a jackpot full of a massive amount of conversations, from humans, that can help build better models.
AI companies training LLMs: Right now, companies can gather all that tremendously valuable data from Reddit for free. This is where Reddit is presented with a tricky situation — let companies scrape their user’s conversations free of charge, or profit (hopefully) tremendously from monetizing data usage at the cost of upsetting a lot of users.
Third party apps: Many developers build third party apps for social media platforms, like Reddit. These apps hinge upon the use of the Reddit API to bring live data into their third party infrastructure. Apollo, a third party app for viewing Reddit posts more seamlessly, would now cost the founder $20MM a year to run to pay for its 7 billion API requests made to Reddit last year. The app is reportedly shutting down June 30th due to the inability to respond to the new cost of API use.
Users at Reddit: Are mad. Thousands and thousands of subreddits went private on June 12 in protest of the changes (partially because private subreddits can’t be accessed by the API). Users also may feel that their data is being extorted for big AI companies to benefit from. They also can’t use some of the apps they love, like Apollo, to interact with the subreddits they know and love.
So what’s going to happen? Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO, is “not backing down” and believes “it’s time we grow up and behave like an adult company”, especially with plans floated earlier this year that Reddit was planning to IPO in late 2023. There is no plan to budge on the API policy that rolls out officially July 1. The outrage has continued with many subreddits still remaining private. We’ll have to stay tuned to see what happens next. Last week’s Hard Fork episode covered the conundrum and gave good context to how this affects all parties involved and what could be ahead.
Google launches a new search to show content from… humans.
Just this Friday, June 23, Google launched the highly anticipated updates to search they spoke to last month. Of the most notable was a new feature called Perspectives.
The Perspectives filter will expose a Pinterest-esq page of multi-media content from creators covering the topic you’re searching. Google is trying to be the one stop shop for “expertise”. Even if they aren’t TikTok, Pinterest, and Twitter all at once, if they can index across them all accurately, that means you don’t have to be a power user across all platforms to be able to reap the benefits of the content they generate. Perspectives relies heavily on Google’s quality rater system E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) to push forward information that meets those criteria so users can rely on what they see. The content that is pushed out by Perspectives could one day all be artificially generated, but for now, the use of AI to improve search and indexing through cross-platform content is something I see being well received by Google’s users.
Was Black Mirror a flop?
June meant the much anticipated arrival of Season 6 of the provocative and sometimes harrowing show Black Mirror which left viewers… underwhelmed? After finishing the 5 episodes in season 6, I felt disappointed. People felt like Black Mirror abandoned its use of manipulating the fears of reality to make some thought-provoking TV.
But Brooker, it seems, has grown weary of ripping from scary headlines. By setting so many episodes in the past, he explains in the season 6 production notes, “I didn’t have to think, ‘What’s the episode of Black Mirror about NFTs,’ which is an idea that depressed me greatly.” Instead, he “wanted to throw out some of the core assumptions of what a Black Mirror episode is” — from Time Magazine
Spolier alert!!! Two episodes caught my attention. Loch Henry, the eerie murder mystery that was filmed in the Scottish highlands, was a twist of events and quite chilling at times. And second best — Joan is Awful. I didn’t love the episode, but it was reminiscent of the “dang, is this going to happen in the next 10 years?” feeling Black Mirror is used to giving us. Without trying to spoil much, imagine that a streaming platform had access to all of your data: health data, GPS data, the texts you send, etc. And that platform then could transform that data into a “made-for-TV” episode that represents your everyday, with the image and likeness of a celebrity, or an AI-generated version of you. This hypothetical approach to making TV shows could scale at a rapid rate, making [insert name here] is Awful episodes about everyone on the planet, showing their day to day and streaming it in live time. Yeah, this one felt a bit spooky.
Designers take on San Fran
Figma’s yearly design conference Config brings UX designers, product managers, and Figma fiends alike to San Francisco. Conferences can be a hit or miss, but Config this year had some truly exceptional moments. Even if you’re not a designer, I’d give the on-demand content a look.
Highlights included:
AI and the future of design (watch here)
Leading through uncertainty — Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO, and his take on being a design led company, roadmap consolidation, and a slightly controversial mention about eliminating PM’s at Airbnb (listen in at 12:04 here)
Rituals of modern product teams — presenters from Figma and Coda talk about running effective meetings and the single thread vs. multi thread dinners hosted by Reid Hoffman
All about the captions
Sometimes two trending industries make for a natural supporting product to step up. With the podcast industry reaching an estimated $4B in value by 2024 while short-form content like TikTok and Instagram Reels continue to captivate users and garner far too much of our attention, the team at Captions has become a market leader in enabling the fast sharing of production level short-form content, primarily from podcasters looking to extend their reach to social. Captions has become an AI-enabled powerhouse with features like AI-powered speech correction, ability to change lip movements in post-production, editing eye contact to be looking at the camera, and voicing over with an AI avatar. The company recently closed a $25MM Series B led by Kleiner Perkins thanks to promising stats like 100K daily active users and a million videos edited a month on the app.
P.S. I think the Captions website is by far one of the best designs of a website I’ve ever seen. This style of interactivity while scrolling, popularized by Apple, is known as “parallax”. Give it a look!
Thanks for giving this week’s post a read! See you next weekend.
Seems to me that a number of sites/services that initially were free or inexpensive have started to charge or increased their subscription costs, respectively. It is painful to add up the cost of all my subscriptions/services.