Reddit started doing what they always wanted to do, sell user content to AI.

Shit move from Reddit. Glad I jumped ship to lemmy.
Honestly, lemmy has less users compared to Reddit, yet you still get more engagement.
- Permanently Deleted
  
  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.
  
  💍 Will you marry 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
  
  You just engaged.
- 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
  
  It's like the difference between volunteering and being forced to do community service.

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.
  
  At that point, they were also open source which was super cool. I always wanted that profile badge you got for submitting a merged PR.
  Reddit really went downhill fast after ~2015. I think Lemmy will get there eventually. I remember reddit being a lot smaller back then as well. It took a while to get to the point where niche communities could thrive and I do believe we'll see that happen here as well (even if it takes a decade or so)
  
  I joined maybe 6 years ago, and there was a bit of shit talking and most posts had a troll answer hitting the most votes for some reason, but it was usually pretty good to scroll straight past and find some really insightful comments. There was a lot of good stuff around reddit, but slowly the absurb number of awards, NFT avatars, reposts, and ads every third post started to corrupt it. It was simple enough to switch to a third party app for quite a while, but the garbage slowly took over.
  Even if they hadn't pulled 3rd party apps, it was getting pretty close a point where it wasn't worth scrolling past the bullshit.
- 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.
- I left Reddit. Had over 600k Karma after a few years answering all kinds of questions from Veteran help to complex engineering.
  Fuck Reddit. Will never go back. It’s a shell of what it was only a few years ago.
  
  Glad you're here with us!
- 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.

Called this awhile back, this is why Reddit has such a high evaluation.
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.
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?"
Well yes, but it's at best legally dubious in some places
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...
- Poison it by randomly posting copywrited materials by big corps like Disney?
  
  Bee Movie script. Millions of times
  
  Once again the day is saved by piracy.🏴‍☠️
- 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.
  
  The problem (for most) was never that people's public posts/comments were being used for AI training, it was that someone else was claiming ownership over them and being paid for access, and the resulting AI was privately owned. The fediverse was always about avoiding the pitfalls of private ownership, not privacy.
  It's exhausting constantly being "that guy," but it really needs to be said constantly; private ownership is at the core of nearly every major issue in the 21st century.
  The same goes for piracy and copyright. The same goes for DMCA circumvention and format shifting content you own. The same goes for proprietary tech ecosystems and walled gardens. Private ownership is at the core of the most contentious practices in the 21st century, and if we don't address it shit like this will just keep happening.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Ehh... I think manipulating people on the internet is so easy they don't need to dig down to that level.
  Though for security reasons things like "we should blow up the government" that the person later deleted probably are tracked.
- 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

I assume AI is training off the content here for free.
- Yes, but there's no contract to give them legal cover if anyone ever does anything about all the content they steal.
  
  And ya know what? Frankly, if AI is going to harvest all this shit, I'd rather fuckers like spez couldn't get rich off it in the process. Granted I'm not happy the tech bros running these AI companies are getting rich with these fucking things, but I can at least take solace that, for Lemmy at least, there isn't some asshole middle man making bank off the work and words of users they never paid a dime to.
  Genuinely, why does Sepz and Reddit deserve to make money off anything we posted? Why does any social media site? They make the site, pay for the servers, maintain the apps, sure, and they can get compensation for that, I don't see a problem there. But why does any social media company deserve to get rich when the only thing that makes their platform valuable is the people that post to it? Reddit didn't even have paid mods, the community did all the work on the content of that site, why in the fuck do we tolerate these assholes making profit off it like this?
  
  What do you mean? What legal cover do they need against what actions?
- I was curious if a robots.txt equivalent exists for AI training data, and there was some solid points here:
  If I go to your writing, I read it & learn from it. Your writing influences my future writing. We've been okay with this as long as it's not a blatant forgery.
  If a computer goes to your writing, it reads it & learns from it. Your writing influences its future writing. It seems we are not okay with this, even if it isn't blatant forgery.
  [AI at the moment is] different because the company is re-using your material to create a product they are going to sell. I'm not sure if I believe that is so different than a human employee doing the same thing.
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34324208
  I still think we should have the ability to opt out like we do with search engines and webcrawlers, but if the algorithm works ideally and learns but does not recycle content, is it truly any different from a factory of workers pumping out clones of popular series on Amazon? I honestly don't know the answer to that.
  
  The problem is not the technology, the problem is the businesses and the people behind them.
  These tools were made with the explicit purpose of taking the content that they did not create, repurposing them, and creating a product. Throw all these conversation about intelligence and learning out the fucking window, what matters is what the thing does, and why it was created to do that thing.
  Until we reach a point where there is some sort of AI out there that has any semblance of free will, and can choose not to learn if fed certain information, and choose not to respond to input given to it without being programmed to do not respond, then we are not talking about intelligence, we are talking about a tool. No matter how they dress it up.
  Stop arguing about this on their terms, because they're gaslighting the fuck out of you.
  
  Afaik the OpenAI bot may choose to ignore it? At least that's what another user claimed it does.
  
  This is kinda my take on it. However, the way I see it is that the AI isn't intelligent enough yet to truly create something original. As such, right now AI is closer to being a tool than a being. Because of that, it somewhat bothers me that I'm being used to teach a tool. If I thought that companies like OpenAI were truly trying to create beings and not tools, then I'd feel differently.
  It's kinda nuanced, but a being can voluntarily determine whether or not something is copyright infringing, understand why that might be an issue, and then decide whether or not to continue writing based on that. A tool can't really do that. You can try and add filters to a tool to avoid writing copy written text, but that will have flaws and holes in it. A being who understands what it's writing and what makes it plagiarism vs reference vs homage/inspiration/whatever is less likely to have those issues.
- It's all federated, so it would be strange the bots didn't scrape anything off.

I barely post on reddit, just lurk but this made me finally sign up for an account here.
- Welcome to lemmy.
- Permanently Deleted

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.
- Honestly over the last year since the great migration, the discussions on lemmy have really grown and matured to the point where i don't really see the value of reddit anymore
  
  The real value of reddit for me lies in its cache of information contained in answers to questions from over the years. Whenever I'm looking online for a solution to a problem I'm trying to solve I'll eventually add "reddit" to the search and I almost always find the answer that way.
  
  The only use I have for Reddit anymore is for super niche information. For example we were planning to go to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom today but it's going to rain this afternoon. I checked their site and it said they were open 11-6, my BIL checked their app and at 11:30 it said they were currently closed. Found a Reddit post from someone confirming the park was closed for the weekend, and we didn't waste a trip up. (as an extra annoying aside, apparently this information was posted on Six Flag's Instagram page, because expecting a huge company to maintain a website is I guess just too much when they can offload it to social media.)
  
  For me there's still value in the niche communities like r/rimworld and the like, but for everything else I'm firmly on Lemmy now
- 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.
- A devil incarnate that makes a lot of puns.
- Can’t wait to hear the fan fiction the AI bot generates
- This

I bet they can scrape Lemmy content for free then. There are no legal mechanisms to prevent them from doing so.
- 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.
- 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 completely agree. There are lots of communities on Reddit that are missing on Lemmy. Have you tried posting your community? It might entice people to participate!
- Well there's copyright law. There's already lawsuits happening so we'll have to see how this shakes out.
  But even if the AI companies lose the lawsuits, I think it's likely they'll still have access to content where the T&C of the site says they're allowed to sell the data.
- 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.

Well of course, that's the #1 reason why everyone stopped providing free-to-use APIs last year. Because AI companies were getting all that data for free via those APIs.
- oh, really

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.
  https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
  
  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.
- 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.

Who cares? Fuck reddit. Half the content is bots anyway. So, bots stealing content to train AI to make content, which the bots will steal and repost. Circle of death for reddit. Good luck with that IPO.
- AI training on bot content? What could go wrong??

I just Googled my reddit handle and it's appalling that I found websites on the internet that archived a bunch of my posts on there including pictures I posted. I'm not sure what I expected, but it's still kinda annoying. Even though I deleted my comments after editing them and deleting my entire account
- That's been an issue for a long time. Fake "blogs" made of scraped reddit posts.

Glad I deleted all of my content over there, then.
- This may shock you, but it's not deleted.
  
  Yeah. There was this guy who deleted his account but Reddit restored it. Apparently he was going to take them to court based on some GDPR article.

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.
  
  Maybe I'm miss remembering but weren't they restoring stuff users deleted during the API protest?
- 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.
  
  You posted on their site. It’s their property now.

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.

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...
- 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.

So I need to run any comments I make to reddit by chatgpt before posting, it seems. I heard ai training ai leads to a poisoned data set.
- For text, AI training AI wouldn't be all that great for giving data sets a little poison ivy rubdown, because at the end of the day, the message is still moderated by a non bot. I think a better way would be to write more unconventionally, but heavily contextual so that if specifics texts are ripped and tossed into the bot blender, it'll make no sense without the context alongside it.
  Slang, edge case wording, and verbing non verbs would likely do a lot of heavy lifting in that department.
  
  Using LLMs for corporate communications - automatically-generated complaint responses, and the like - usually has swearing disabled, so if you want to fuck up their shit, be sure to express yourself with as many fucking swears as possible. Let's get that shit into those cunt's language models ASAP.
- Yeah, I heard that, too. Consider that people who don't like tech may not have very reliable knowledge of tech. Regardless, OAI would appreciate your business.

And that’s why I edited+deleted all of mine.

I am willing to bet the most active subreddits that are not too bot infested are the NSFW ones. Reddit AI is going to be creepy and horny.
- AI trainers do a lot of work filtering and reformatting the training data. Often that's the most expensive part. There's a lot of synthetic data used these days too, reprocessed by other AIs.

The next move is to use AI to generate posts and comments
- spez says that's how he got reddit off the ground in the first place: faking content/engagement (well, genuinely engaging with his account(s?), but essentially shouting into the void and hoping enough people heard and wanted to stick around.
  with a RedditUserBot trained on reddit users, you might be able to fake another decade of growth.
- I honestly think that has been happening with all these publications websites.

We should have been posting factually incorrect information instead of deleting posts this whole time.
Although I think Reddit does a good job paying factually incorrect information on its own.

If you aren't the customer, you are the product. Congrats on being monetized and kinda sorta immortalized as a series of weights.
- I am now a poorly copied and totally underwhelming digital god! MUAHAHAHA-oh wait...

Our collective toilet thoughts are going to fuel the future of robot rhetoric guys

If user content belongs to the service provider, one would think that they are responsible for it.

I've just deleted my Reddit account. That's the last straw for me.
- Deleting doesn't actually delete it all. I remember a Reddit user once filed a GDPR for restoring his information after he deleted them.
  
  Yeah, I figured as much. At least they can't count me as a user when they go public.
- Before they shut down the APIs, I deleted all my posts and edited all my comments.
  Spez doesn’t get to profit from me anymore. And hopefully I’m poisoning the well.

Just going to replace all my old posts with AI generated poison data.

That's why spez the hurensohn "refreshed" the T&Cs very recently.

I don’t mind to give my content for AI training. But with my approval and for free.
- You can't put conditions on it retroactively. You already published.
  
  I am not trying to do that retroactively.

i stopped using reddit and deleted my accout and posts when they introduced those fucking nft-avatars and it seems that they've been going downhill ever since that.
- they were headed downhill loooong before NFTs became a thing.
- Those NFT things were just a bad move.
- When you delete your account and posts now, unless you edit them first, all deleting them does is hide their visibility in the database. The post is still there.
  
  well damn

So nothing realy new after alls half reddit is repost bot .
- Lol, what do you think Lemmy is? There's a lot of posts on here directly scraped from Reddit by bots.

Went ahead and started running redacted on my old account.
Nothing says we're just another brick in the wall like writing posts that wind up being used to train a plagiaristic corporate unemployment machine.
- What prevents people from training a model with Lemmy's data?
  
  Nothing, but the lemmy admins can't be the only one's profiting from it. Reddit killed 3rd apps and academic research so they could be the sole profiteers of the user data.

That post reminded me that lemmee exists. Accounts didn't work that great when I first got here but I made one today and got verified. Logged out of Reddit for the last time and replaced my comments. Eff that place right in it's a-hole. Good riddance.

TBF for many things I write on the Web, I'd actually want to have a bot that writes them instead of me.

It will get trained on some comment posts.
Let reddit die. Join Lemmy or /kbin. https://join-lemmy.org/ https://kbin.pub/
- Um, we're already here. You should be posting this on reddit instead.
  
  I did that some months ago already, changed all my comment posts.