Half the joke is that Reddit was ground zero for AI slop even before AI had gone mainstream.

The company got harvested back before the AI firms were overly worried with cross-contamination.

If it hasn’t already moved onto the garbage heap, alongside it’s precedessors, it’s not long now.

Scamming AI companies is a virtue

raise your prices to astronomical amounts

Prices for Recreational Books, 1997-2026 ($20)).

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for recreational books are 4.81% lower in 2026 versus 1997 (a $0.96 difference in value

Between 1997 and 2026: Recreational books experienced an average inflation rate of -0.17% per year. In other words, recreational books costing $20 in the year 1997 would cost $19.04 in 2026 for an equivalent purchase.

The “evil thing” is to sell a back catalog of physical books that they can’t move on the retail or wholesale markets.

Idk why people are heavily invested in books moldering in a warehouse. It’s not some kind of virtue that we have this staggering overproduction of physical media that we’ve horded for nobody in particular.

If doing this thing just results in people screaming at them, of course they’re going to take down their advertisements. But of course they’re going to keep doing it. Why would they stop? Who else buys a bunch of first print draft copies of books that never sold?

i have a rare first edition that i absolutely treasure. single run, too. it’s a local therapist’s little comic book he drew.

Cool, I guess. How many of these did the AI company destroy?

My niece wrote a ten page short story, had it bound, and added it to her school’s library - a project every kid in her grade level did. If she doesn’t claim it before she graduates, it goes into an archive. And eventually on to a dump.

if someone took my copy and pulped it

If they snuck into your room at night, sure. If they walked off with it from a yard sale, idk if you get to complain.

you want a specific used book, maybe you might have to spend ten to twenty to a thousand

Show me the thousand dollar copy that an AI company destroyed and we can revisit this.

Nothing in the article identities an actual valuable work being destroyed. They’re just “rare”, which can be anything from unpublished manuscripts of failed writers to drafts of screenplays that never got produced to limited run publications that never sold a copy.

Early iterations of the community did try to incorporate these features.

But simply tapping the sign that reads “Go read the wiki on this solved issue” doesn’t generate the kind of traffic and community participation that repeating the same copypasta every month or two does. Also, god forbid one of your mods does something like…

• post something unPC in a Politics community

• argue with content from a native advertiser

• piss off an admin… somehow

• sign in from a device in a way that triggers an automated unchallengeable ban

• fail to constantly scour your community of shitposts

Plenty of the old subs have been hollowed out, transferred, or otherwise denuded of their professional contributors for some stupid reason or another. And now the site is so aggressively policed that you can’t really join (much less re-join once you’ve been booted) to add anything useful.

This has been the OG Wikipedia’s fate as well, with mods getting older and links going stale and new contributors all getting hyper-policed for fear of bots, marketing accounts, and shitposters.

Small forums full of active users are more reliable for useful information than big forums full of lurkers and attention whores. That’s not unique to Reddit. Just very obvious, given the long and deplorable history of the platform.

Real “I grew up doing content farming in the early 2000s” energy.

They are buying up used books at rates that push up the cost of used books.

Used books are practically free to begin with. Libraries will often give away whole storage containers of books that they don’t want anymore. Bookstores will sell books for pennies on the wholesale market.

Half-Price offers Books By The Yard to be used entirely for decorative purposes. $50 for 40-60 books, largely organized by color and binding style.

a book that might have otherwise become useful in the future

We have vastly overproduced the physical reading material relative to consumer reading habits. We have vastly overproduced certain genres and subject matter material. We have overproduced individual volumes. These books are not useful in any material sense. No more than the clothes we overproduce or the snacks we overproduce or the automobiles and electronics we overproduce.

We are swimming in trash. We produce mountains of it. We fill ravines with it. Stop treating hording as a virtue.

Fucking 90% of the books I read are “rare”

That’s sort of the joke. These aren’t treasured first editions. They’re not shredding the Guttenburg Bible. These are single prints sitting in warehouses and abandoned libraries or dumps that nobody has read or carried about in decades. They’re rare because they never got a second edition.

And the process of digitizing the book means disassembling it. So the copy (that nobody wanted) is destroyed as a result.

The article is pure clickbait. These books aren’t valuable, save that they were produced pre-AI. That’s why you can get them in bulk on the cheap.

Beginning to think all AI training functions by scraping the publicly available works of other people.

I’ve seen from personal experience that the only thing worse than bad middle management is no middle management.

Getting called all the way up to the VPs office to try and explain some systems architecture to a guy who only knows how to say “But why doesn’t it work?!” at you over and over again is… not fun.

The primary role of the CEO is to solicit cheap lending from banks. A simple program can’t do that. You need a real human being at the business with another real human being who was friends with that first human being in college and who now works as a broker at a big financial institution to stamp the loan.

This is every billionaire’s path to power. Not via what they know but who they know.

threatens

But the owners of the website have no control over the administration of business infrastructure.

Like, its all very tongue-and-cheek, but it mostly illustrates that our economic model isn’t based on “efficiency” or “meritocracy”. The folks calling the shots have their positions by way of inheritance, influence peddling, and state-sanctioned violence.

Meta: “We’re getting into VR, it’s the next big thing.”

VR Market Crashes

Meta: “Well, no sweat, we can just pivot to NFTs”

NFT Market Crashes

Meta: “Shit, damn. Okay, we can just migrate all our efforts to AI. That’s booming right now.”

AI Market Tilts Alarmingly

Meta: “Fuck! Fuck! We should… uh… Fossil Fuels! We should do Fossil Fuels! That’s always a safe bet.”

But did they make the game any better?

This is an antedote to a bad policy, not a good policy.

A good policy would be “Rent Freeze, until we can figure out what’s going on” followed by “Rent Control as statewide policy, since you fuckers want a cartel so badly”

with a net worth below $100 million

Far fewer than you’d think, once hyperinflation kicks in.

You’ll be lucky if you can buy gum for less than $100M at the rate we’re climbing.