Shit move from Reddit. Glad I jumped ship to lemmy.
Honestly, lemmy has less users compared to Reddit, yet you still get more engagement.
The only engagement you actually get is on super-niche subreddits. Other than that, the “engagement” you get on reddit is largely indistinguishable from bot traffic.
I come to Lemmy to read threads of people arguing about whether or not they’re talking to each other at all. This is doing it for me.
Your stipud ! (both sic and /s btw) -> there, now you don’t have to go back to Reddit to recall the nostalgia, you are … welcome, I guess?:-D
Ahhh, that’s the stuff. 🤤 Do it again.
Your (sic) WRONG!
About EVRRTYHIGN! (sic)
I may know nothing myself, but I still have an opinion and will share it with you, consent be damned!
Why I… [Reddit cap exceeded, please deposit $10 to continue conversation].
You just engaged.
Or admitted to being a bot.
If gollum and Steve Buscemi had a secret baby
You are glad that you jumped to where AI companies can get the information for free, but are mad at Reddit for getting paid for it.
I can’t make any sense of this.
The difference is that Lemmy admins across the fediverse aren’t making the user experience worse so they can sell the data to corporations for LLM training
So it’s really that the user experience is getting worse. Feeding ai has nothing to do with it.
First of all, tacos are friends, not food…
Secondly, I think it’s more important what they did to achieve this goal, locking down the API behind a paywall was their way of creating value in their data. They knew then that it would be too expensive for independent developers to pay for but didn’t care. They knew the money would be coming AI data brokers.
It’s like the difference between volunteering and being forced to do community service.
In neither case are you forced to do anything so this doesn’t make any sense either.
I don’t miss the dipshits, pun spammers, and smug power mods of reddit at all. I do miss their niche subs and smarter users. Like it or not, they do have some brainy folks peppered among the shit posters.
We have some good folks here, too. Just need more of them.
It’s a shame reddit has been dialing up the shit faucet slowly enough that most of their users don’t notice how awful it is now. They’ve grown accustomed to the poor quality of the content and weaponized greed of the owners.
In all honesty, when I joined Reddit right after digg went to shit. It was amazing. Reddit was great, 3rd party apps were welcome, their interface was straightforward, and they had none of those NFT gold shit.
It just went downhill.
smug power mods of reddit at all.
Oh they’re here too. They’re not causing too much drama because there’s not enough going on, but they’re here. Some of them are admins of certain instances.
The ones that aren’t here yet will eventually find their way here when Lemmy continues to grow. And the most concerning thing about that is how many more tools Lemmy is providing them to fuck with users.
At least on Reddit, mods couldn’t see votes. Lemmy actually just made it easier for them.
Yeah that’s not good.
Going back to /r/all on reddit now just pure trash. It’s unbelievable how badly it’s declined, very recently.
I wonder how much of it is just bots and karma farmers pretending to talk to each other. It’s really awful.
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Called this awhile back, this is why Reddit has such a high evaluation.
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Poisoning your data won’t do anything but give them more data, do you seriously think reddit servers don’t track every edit you make to posts? You’d literally just be providing training data of original human vs poisoned. They’d still have your original post, and they have a copy of everytime you edit it.
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Whoever buys reddit will have sole access to one of the larger (I don’t think largest though) pools of text training Data on the internet, with full licensed usage of it. I expect someone like Google, FB, MS, OpenAI, etc would pay big $$$ for that.
“But can’t people already scrape it?”
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Well yes, but it’s at best legally dubious in some places
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Scraping Data off reddit only gets you current versions of posts (which means you can get poisoned dara, and cant see deleted content), and is extremely slow… if you own the server you have first class access to all posts in a database, including g the originals and diffs of everytime soneone edited a post, and all the deleted posts too.
Think about if you perhaps wanted to train an AI to detect posts that require flagging for moderation, if you scrape reddit data, you can’t find deleted posts that got moderated…
But, if you have the raw original data, you 100% would have a list of every post that got deleted by mods and even the mod message on why it was deleted
You surely can see the value of such data, that only owners of reddit are currently privy to atm…
They’ve also got vote counts and breakdowns of who is making those votes. This data will be worth more for AI training than any similar volume of data other than maybe the contents of Wikipedia. Assuming they didn’t have it set up to delete the vote breakdowns when they archived threads.
Why are those breakdowns worth so much? Because they can be used to build profiles on each voter (including those who only had lurker accounts to vote with), so they can build AIs that know how to speak with the MAGA cult, Republicans who aren’t MAGA, liberals, moderates, centrists, socialists, communists, anarchists. Not only that, they’ll be able to look at how sentiments about various things changed over time with each of these groups, watch people move from one to another as their opinions evolved, see how someone pretends to be a member of whatever group (assuming they voted honestly and posted under their fake persona).
Oh and also, all of that data is available through the fediverse but it’s free to train on to anyone who sets up a server. Which makes me question whether the fediverse is a good thing because even changing federation to opt-in instead of opt-out just covers whether your server accepts data from another. It’s always shared.
Open and private are on opposite sides of a spectrum. You can’t have both, best you can do is settle for something in the middle.
Which makes me question whether the fediverse is a good thing
I’d argue it’s good, because it means open source AI has a fighting chance with FOSS data to train on without needing to fork over a morbillion dollars to Reddits owners.
Whatever use cases the reddit data can train on, FOSS researchers can repeat it on Lemmy data and release free models that average joes can use on their own without having to subscribe to shit like Microsoft Copilot and friends to stay relevant.
What if reddit also kept all deleted comments and post, im sure there are shit loads of things people type out just to delete, thinking all the while it’ll never see the light of day.
They definitely do, it’s common for such systems to never actually delete anything because storage is cheap. It likely just is flagged
deleted=trueand the searches just returnWHERE [post].Deleted = Falseon queries on the backend.So it looks deleted to the consumer, but it’s all saved and squirreled away on the backend.
It’s good to keep all this shit for both legal reasons (if someone posts illegal stuff then deletes it, you still can give it to the feds), as well as auditing (mods can’t just delete stuff to cover it up, the original still exists and admins can see it)
I’d be surprised if they don’t keep all of that. There were a number of sites for looking at deleted posts. They’d just go and grab everything and compare what was still there with what wasn’t and highlight the stuff that wasn’t there anymore.
Which is also possible here, though the mod log reduces the need for it. But if someone is looking for posts people change their mind about wanting anyone to see, deleting it highlights it instead of hides it for anyone who is watching for that.
I think that site was unddit, but yes those were posted then later deleted. Im talking about just typing out a post or comment and never posting just simply backing out of the page or hitting cancel. Im not just if any of that is stored on the site or just locally.
Oh, yeah, I’ve wondered the same myself. Hell, that might have been a motivation for removing the API access.
Poison it by randomly posting copywrited materials by big corps like Disney?
Bee Movie script. Millions of times
sigh
So the old trick of “search term +reddit” no longer will work then huh?
I’ve already made a habit of adding date limiters to web results from before before LLMs were made public… The SEO ‘optimization’ game of before was bearable, but the LLM spam just ruins so many search results with regurgitated garbage or teaspoon deep information
search term +reddit
tossing site:reddit.com before any search will guarantee all results come from reddit, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Ahhh my bad, that’s what I meant
During the peak of the great purge, it was quickly becoming pointless. A lot of results were bringing up deleted posts. It took a while for search engines to catch up and start filtering a lot of those results out.
In regards to the editing part, sure, I’m sure they can track your edit history. However, on a large scale, most edits are going to be to correct things. To determine if an edit was to poison the text, it would likely require manual review and flagging. There’s no way they’re going to sift through all of the edits on individual accounts to determine this, so it’s still worthwhile to do.
Although they could sidestep the issue a bit by simply comparing the changes between edits. Huge changes could just be discarded, while minor ones are fine.
You could easily make a minor change that negates every single other fact.
request your reddit data and they deliver you every comment you ever made
Sounds like something a bunch of governments would be interested in. As you pointed out you get to see why human mods made certain decisions. Could you an edge in manipulation.
With respect to 2, it would stop others scrapping the content to train more open models on. This would essentially give Reddit exclusive access to the training data.
You’re not wrong. But on point #1, you’re just an asshole
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I barely post on reddit, just lurk but this made me finally sign up for an account here.
Welcome to lemmy.
Hey, welcome! It’s pretty nice
I stopped using reddit after they dropped the bomb on the devs and I’m not a fan of the company.
I understand the hatred towards them, but this is definitely expected from a company like reddit, and any other social media for that matter. As users we must be aware that we don’t own the content in their platform.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the same story comes from Instagram tomorrow, though I suppose there will be a bigger outcry then.
Don’t know if it was against usage terms, but I have been able to get chatgpt answers written ‘in the style of’ various subreddits since the initial release (or perhaps the second release)
If they build an AI based on reddit content it will be the devil incarnate.
If you thought gpt4 was confidently incorrect wait until you see this next ai.
Can’t wait to hear the fan fiction the AI bot generates
I bet they can scrape Lemmy content for free then. There are no legal mechanisms to prevent them from doing so.
Yes but i think reddit is many times more valuable than Lemmy. I just haven’t found the same level of very specific subreddits that have lots and lots of activity. Most of the traffic here is memes, politics, news and Linux lovin. On reddit if I needed to find a community about my local town it’s no problem and there are tens or hundreds of daily posts. The same community does exist on Lemmy but the last post was 6 months ago.
I rather my data I’ve chosen to make public is free and accessible to all, than it being sold to the highest bidder.
With that being said, I am not pleased that my content is packaged into a proprietary AI, and sold for money.
I think there are ways to opt-out of AI collection, at least for big companies. I wonder if it is implemented in Lemmy-UI and/or terms and conditions.
on the other hand, if there’s troves of free data, that takes the upper hand from the companies that can afford paying for it, and gives open source a much better chance at staying competitive.
You opt-out so that there is less free training data, making Reddit’s data all the more valuable. I’m sure spez will be thankful.
Hm but don’t you automatically own the stuff you create yourself, as long as you don’t consent to giving it away? I don’t know the terms and conditions of my Lemmy instance though.
When was the last time anyone read the T&Cs of a social media website?
They basically all have a clause to the effect that you grant them a permanent, irrevocable license do whatever they want with anything you post.
You might still own the copyright to any content you produce, but by posting you’re granting them permission to do basically anything with it, including reselling it.
Yeah I know but what about Lemmy instances?
Slightly unrelated question, but is there an easy way to delete all my Reddit posts and comments? I used the Nuke add-on in the past, but it doesn’t work anymore.
I wanna delete my Reddit account, but I’d prefer to erase my history before doing that.
back when I made my Lemmy account I used a tool called redact to masse edit my Reddit comments into gibberish and then after a few days of making sure it got them all, I deleted them all and then my account.
With their API changes I’m not sure.
This is what I used and was recommended during the great purge.
j0be’s version of Power Delete Suite was already broken before the APIcalypse, as Reddit imposed a limit of 5s between edits. Pkolyvas’ version will probably work better, if PDS still works at all.
Dang I wish I knew that at the time. I had to run it many times before I was satisfied that my history was properly edited before deleting everything
This userscript worked for me (in the last 24hrs): https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23605-reddit-history-sanitizer
I used Redact. It seemed to work.
If they hadn’t applied the same charges to legitimate 3rd party applications they could still do this and have avoided the massive community backlash.
Considering their horrible track record with advertising and selling Reddit premium this should be the single best way for them to finally monetize their platform. They didn’t need to destroy what little credibility they had remaining to their users to get to this point, but for whatever reason they did.
What I don’t understand is that they had the option of providing a free service to all third party apps provided there was no commercial use.
They could have easily asked for a cut from any AI company using their data for training.
Not only did they have the option, as I understand it the API was even configured as such since all requests from an app shared the same API key. They’re basically whitelisting like this now but only for the accessibility oriented 3rd party apps.
Damn. I keep meaning to use one of those things that deletes all your reddit data. I doubt it’ll actually do anything (reddit has no ethical framework so they won’t think twice about indexing “deleted” data) but I still need to do that.
I’d bet a year of my salary that it only deletes it from public view so people can no longer get helped from Reddit’s Google search results, but a copy (or more than one copy) is still retained on their internal servers.
The trick is to turn everything into randomized garbage and then delete it later. A lot of those purge services offer that feature. It just swaps the words with others; so on the surface it looks like proper written text, but it makes absolutely no sense.
Aside from removing your content that they’re profiting from, it also feeds AI scrapers pure garbage in the event that your content is restored.
Yep. I did that over a month to all of my posts and comments, then deleted it all a week later before deleting my account.
Me, I’d prefer to fill it in with fake news. Let them train their bots on ‘taylor swift is an alien psyop trained to infiltrate the highest levels of govt to fulfill the agenda of the radical left instellar warmongering fearlords …’
I can’t tell if this idea is chaotic good, chaotic evil, or chaotic neutral.
That’s assuming they update their backups, or that if they do update their backups they don’t keep historical versions.
IMO once the data has been shared it is no longer safe and there’s nothing we can do.
Maybe I’m miss remembering but weren’t they restoring stuff users deleted during the API protest?
They absolutely were, yeah.
Yeah, I deleted a banned account only to still find the posts I made still up. So I went in and manually deleted EVEY. SINGLE. ONE.
Guess what. They still show up.
Good, so let’s train crappy AI on posts by crappier AI, which was trained by posts from even crappier AI before it.
If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
And even when you pay for the product, you are the product, because capitalism requires infinite growth from a finite system.
And that’s why I edited+deleted all of mine.
FUCK REDDIT! FUCK U/SPEZ! The Red-exit shall endure, VIVA LA LEMMY!!
Just because the coffee is free doesn’t mean you have to drink the entire carafe
Yes it does. I’ll get bullet-time superpowers eventually, just watch…
que heart attack
¿Qué?
Queue*
🤗
I remember that episode of Futurama
And FUCK XITTER. Bluesky and Mastodon are waving!
Greedy little pigboy Steve couldn’t resist. Every day they seem to do something that reaffirms leaving was the best plan.
