For the folks who want to know the cause of the investigation without needing to click through to the article:
Why is Reddit being Investigated?
Reddit owns and operates the eponymous social news aggregation, forum, and social media platform. Reddit receives a significant portion of its user traffic from individuals seeking answers to questions using Google Search. During the relevant period, Reddit assured investors that Google’s use of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) in Google’s search results did not have a material impact on Reddit’s user growth.
In truth, Google’s use of AI dented Reddit’s user growth by eliminating the need for individuals to visit and click through to Reddit to get answers to their questions. Rather, the answers appeared through Google’s AI search results.
Reddit made it unmistakably clear that they don’t want traffic from people using their API and that they don’t want google or anyone else to scrape “their” content, which I’m pretty sure will have significant impact on SEO. They also have made sure to please potential shareholders by banning a ton of users and communities before their IPO.
As a result, the quality and quantity of discussion on the platform has lowered, some people even tried to mass delete their posts and comments which makes some threads to appear like ghost towns, which has also revealed the insane amount of inorganic communication (bots and the like).
So how exactly did google kill their userbase?
This is not about what Google did but rather how reddit presented what Google did in its financial statements.
IE misleading investors regarding the impact Google AI Seach will have on traffic
ELI5 version.
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Reddit Investors:
Google is deploying its AI summary tool as part of its main search engine now.
Prior to this, many people used Reddit to find detailed information about, answer questions pertaining to, or otherwise discuss, more niche topics.
Google has scraped Reddit and has basically all of its information, as well as the… basically the entire rest of the internet.
Will Google’s deployment of AI powered summaries as its default search tool impact the projected future usage and growth of Reddit?
Reddit CEO/Board of Directors:
No.
…
Current lawsuit is over that ‘No’ being a lie, as well as whether or not it was an intentional lie, as in, they knew it would, and lied, and said it would not.
More technically, the relevant term is ‘misrepresentation of a material fact’, which is essentially the legal term for ‘lying to investors’, though the exact standards of this can be different in arcane legal ways from other kinds of legal ‘lying’ such as defamation, slander, providing false info to a police officer, perjury, etc.
Google has scraped Reddit and has basically all of its information, as well as the… basically the entire rest of the internet.
This is a big problem in the making, not only for reddit but for everyone. Apart from the societal implications of people getting their information from a non-deterministic system, deployed by one of ~5 big corporations whose intentions clearly differ from the ones of the people, while also feeding back details about themselves, losing their ability to think straight for themselves, impeding connections to other humans, …
Apart from all that, it will render primary and secondary sources irrelevant. This kills reddits and everyone elses business model on the web as we know it today.
Current lawsuit is over that ‘No’ being a lie, as well as whether or not it was an intentional lie, as in, they knew it would, and lied, and said it would not.
So this might as well be a blatant lie. What I tried to say before is that this question in this particular case is far from being able to deliver a solution to the root cause of reddits own misery. They had a good run, better and longer than most other big platforms out there. But this lawsuit is only some millionaires feeling the need to blame someone for wobbly stocks.
To your first part:
Yes, your conclusions here are correct imo… but this is what literally all LLM models do.
It isn’t just Google.
Everyone who runs their own ‘AI’ is a gigantic plagiarism machine, this is how they ‘learn’, you have to feed them more and more and more data.
This is just one major problem with… technically, not LLMs per se, but with how basically everyone who is developing the… is using them.
Yeah, the idea is ultimately self-defeating.
Become the entire internet, centralize it, which fundamentally destroys it, or morphs it into a cyberpunk nightmare.
…
To the second part:
From a US legal perspective, … ok disclaimer I am not a corporate lawyer … as I understand it, it doesn’t matter if Google is the ultimate root cause of anything.
It only matters if the investors can prove that Reddit lied to their investors about the expected effect of Google going to AI.
From a legal perspective… the question is whether or not they lied, intentionally or through negligence, mislead investors. The degree of the impacts of that lie are nearly irrelevant to determining whether or not that actually happened (though they would affect the degree of legal punishment if found guilty), and I am just trying to give a broad legal explanation of what is going on.
Reddit seems to have said that they expected Google’s AI to have no impact whatsoever.
This is fairly obviously a … pretty definitive claim, and the normal way that Corpos avoid situations like this lawsuit is by making qualified statements, estimates within a range, non absolute statement, ‘we expect that…’, ‘our projection indicates…’, that kind of CorpoSpeak isn’t just an annoying dialect… it serves many functional purposes, a big one of those being preventing Corpos from getting themselves into legal trouble.
If the Reddit CEO/Board actually did make this kind of absolute statement… not only does it show that they are fools, potentially intentional liars… but it also shows that they have absolutely no idea how the big boy corporate world works at all, to a comical degree.
…
Finally:
For us to actually know the extent to what degree what kinds of things have financially impacted Reddit… we’d have to have their internal records.
Now again I am not a lawyer, but in many kinds of cases… well, anything that is entered as evidence, could potentially become public knowledge…
So, forcing this lawsuit may also serve as a way to make such records more widely available.
Multi-dimensional chess lol.
Thank you for your insights, they seem valuable at least to me, who is even further away from being a lawyer lol.
the normal way that Corpos avoid situations like this lawsuit is by making qualified statements, estimates within a range, non absolute statement
Would be nothing less than crazy stupid if they were to be found guilty for letting marketing be to honest / lawyers be to negligent.
Now again I am not a lawyer, but in many kinds of cases… well, anything that is entered as evidence, could potentially become public knowledge…
So, forcing this lawsuit may also serve as a way to make such records more widely available.
Would be great to see some antitrust level cases against LLMs using this - as well as hopefully even clearer and more qualified cases - as precedent.
Whenever I do searches now, through ecosia, any Reddit results come up with “we’d like to show you a preview of this content but can’t”.
Im not entirely sure why it happens (it’s not always on a pc with a VPN, so that’s not it), though I assume it’s to do with the API crackdown. It has been highly effective at keeping me the hell off Reddit for literally anything for the past several months.
Tried and succeeded.
The good old case of the mushroom eating the fungus.
Misleading, this is just some ambulance chasing law firm throwing stuff at the wall. It’s unlikely that anything will come of this.
While I, personally, also think the point brought up feels a bit dubious - I do wonder what perspective lawyers with an expertise in investment/financial law have there. An additional “second opinion” by an independent law office on the feasibility of the claim would be interesting to read, if someone knows of any.
$10,000 fine and a mildly worded letter is the best I can do.
Leopards Ate His Face?
Lol.
