My pet theory is that Reddit is trying the battleship steel approach. Let me explain: Battleships sunk before the end of WWII are special, in that their steel has never been exposed to the radiation from nuclear blasts. That is important in a series of applications, so there is a market for that kind of steel, and obviously it’s a very limited resource.

Reddit has one of the biggest collections of purely human-generated text that is not domain-specific. That is an incredibly valuable resource, especially now that we know that LLMs hallucinate worse if they are fed LLM-generated content.

I am thinking Reddit is planning to sell that text for the long haul, until changes in language and technology make the content irrelevant. What actually happens on the platform is not important anymore, as long as it doesn’t cause the ire of the powerful.

In fact, at this point, Reddit has a vested incentive in making the Internet worse, which means banning real humans from Reddit, too. Current Reddit content is not valuable, because of course it contains lots of bot generation, so making it visibly worse is a quick way to make the old content more valuable.

Basically, the company plans on getting rich on the backs of yesterday’s you and I.