Except no, they don’t.

Well… Until you get someone like Trump in charge and he decides that the stipend only goes to those that praise him and strips the stipend from anyone critical of him or his ideology.

If you only funded drugs through public funding, that means the government has a say in what drugs get funded and which don’t, meaning any and all drugs that don’t affect the broadest number of people simply won’t get funded.

Drugs will no longer be for all people, it’ll be strictly the people that vote for the government in charge. So… No hormone treatments, no birth control, no vaccines, no aids research, nothing that doesn’t explicitly align with the government.

I disagree that Reddit would gain in value over time if they kept banning automation, because it is increasingly difficult to avoid AI-generated material polluting your dataset, no matter how much you avoid automation and try banning it. Inevitably, some AI-generated material is going to get in.

It’s a problem in two ways:

1. The vast vast majority of data on Reddit has already been sold, so you can’t rely on that data for future revenue
2. The remaining data that’s current is polluted by AI and is therefore worth less than the historical data because the more AI pollutes your dataset, the more likely it is to lead to Model Collapse, where an LLM is poisoned due to unverified data generated by other LLMs

I am firmly of the belief that sites like Internet Archive will be some of the most valuable companies in the AI space, because they hold an immense amount of untainted data created prior to 2019.

I’m not sure why anyone would ever buy Reddit stock. There is no money to be made in Reddit. They failed to make any money before they went public, and they’re failing to make any money now.

They tried the whole NFT thing, failed. They’re trying to sell the data to AI companies but once that’s sold they can’t sell any more of it because the benefit of Reddit data was historical data unpolluted by AI, but new Reddit data is polluted by ChatGPT posts and is therefore worth less.

It’s not even about banning people, it’s about the fact that Reddit was never a sustainable business model from the start, at least not in the traditional capitalist sense where you’re actively trying to make a profit to please shareholders.

The only benefit to owning Reddit stock is if you have voting shares and can manipulate the algorithm to benefit you in some way. Suppress some voices, amplify others to back what you want to do etc. but you need money to burn in order to achieve that because you aren’t going to be making money directly by owning Reddit stock and manipulating public opinion takes time.

The funny thing is you can still buy Office standalone but you have to actively go looking for it and Microsoft doesn’t advertise it because 365 subscriptions make more money.

Microsoft doesn’t want you buying standalone versions of software, but they still have to sell it because there’s still a market for it.