- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”
The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data.
Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an “Enshittification” community :-)
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I wonder if they would use the data on all my old accounts that got banned for promoting violence against the billionaire class.
Don’t forget kids – all rights are won through violence.
The forgotten truth nobody wants to remember.
With all the changes that Reddit has made recently esp with the API changes, it definitely did leave salt in my mouth alongside how increasing toxic the Reddit community had become in comparison to when I joined the community but the small niche communities that existed on Reddit did honestly made it harder to quit due to the lack of communities outside, which is another big problem with centralisation, esp in the modern internet as it makes you rely on platforms you may not necessarily like due to big issues like social isolation etc.
When I found out about this, this isn’t simply excusable anymore and I would rather delete my account over having my personal data being sold for profit (which goes completely against the early ethos of Reddit as a whole but being semi owned by Conde Nast, this would have been inevitable) despite the fact that I have been thinking about deleting my Reddit profile way before this issue.
Surprisingly, I honestly have had no regrets deleting Reddit out of my life and honestly I do wish I would have done it sooner, I’m far less frustrated, I’m starting to think more constructively again and I feel way way less dependent on it.
Can say, I made a good choice there tbh.
Is this a long term source of revenue for Reddit? Or will it loose value at some point, simply because LLMs are all trained sufficiently on user generated content. Is there more to learn at some point?
Also it seems that a lot of content on Resdit is already AI generated, so it would train on data from other LLMs, which I’m sure doesn’t improve quality.
It’s the reason I can’t see this stock maintaining or improving its price after the IPO. I mean, sure, there will probably be a short term gain for a few stock holders. But, I just don’t see how it doesn’t tank afterwards. I mean, in the end, Reddit is Reddit. It’s just an aggregation site, how can it grow in value? The fediverse is slowly but surely gaining popularity. And even though Reddit calls itself the front page of the internet, it really isn’t.
*Not investment advice. Good god please don’t take investment advice from me. Knowing my luck that fucking stock will soar to Wall Street record highs, beating out Bitcoin by a large margin.
It’s just an aggregation site, how can it grow in value?
Supposedly in Reddit finance there’s something called the “Anarchy Chess/Ewan gambit”. If you post one grain of rice, and double it each time you reach a threshold you can farm near-infinite updoots! Probably works the same with money, idk.
LLM’s are a parasitic entity. They can only operate as long as they have a living host (us) on which to draw data. Without their host, they rapidly start hallucinating. Hell, the other day ChatGPT (and every business that relied on it) started hallucinating for no apparent reason.
The thing about the parasite is, though, that it endangers its host. At some point, the fact that anything you say can be plugged into a machine with no credit given back to you, will encourage creative people to stop bothering being creative, depriving them of income or even exposure.
It’s a funny thing, a few years ago I would say that the “anything you post here can be sold by us” clause on social media was very unlikely to get exploited, as nobody knew how to sell data en masse to make money off of it. I guess now we know that’s not true at all. If something bad can happen with your data… It will.
Well, eventually LLMs will need to be fed new misinformation at some point, such as which minority was responsible for their own genocide
If you are planning to kill your reddit account, there is an app, Redact, which is available on the Apple and Play stores, that will allow you to nuke all your posts before you close it completely. Deny them your data.
Surely that just removes the public data.
They will have backups that will retain it all
For better or for worse, Reddit has a super valuable archive that has basically replaced Google search for me, it’s insane how many times it has helped me solve small and big issues. I understand the logic, but it would still be a big blow for the internet if many people did that.
Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an “Enshittification” community :-)
There is, its called !enshittification@lemmy.world
They permabanned my 14yo account because my anti-nazi rhetoric was “encouraging violence.” I guess Nazis are a class of humans dumb enough to give them money so they don’t want to scare them off. The post that got me banned had more than 60 up votes when it was deleted and I was permabanned. A reply post in the same vein was not deleted.
Remember that video where Ron Perlman talked about there’s a lot of ways to lose a house?
I lost my 11-year account because I said something to the effect of ‘If Ron Perlman pulled up and said get in the fucking car we’re going to go burn down Bob Iger’s house I wouldn’t hesitate.’
They had been getting very weird near the end there anyways? I kept getting these stupid warnings over the most petty shit. At one point somebody said respond to this comment and I’ll gild you. I simply responded fuck you because I thought it would be funny to see that have gold, which it got. Got an official warning for harassment.
I had said a lot worse over the years.
Same. This.
Edited to add: fuck redtit
I got permabanned for inciting violence too about a week ago too. You know the deluded asshole who killed his dad, Justin M whatever his name was? Well it was in the r/all news for a day so I figured people would want to see it. Posted it in a gore sub with the nsfw tag and put a neutral title. It wasn’t politically motivated or anything, it was just a video that was recently talked about and interesting to me and maybe others, I thought. Well, it got deleted. Several fucking days after it was removed did I get a random permaban message and banner. No inciting violence anywhere.
I’ve been banned specifically for things too when a whole thread of similar comments weren’t.
I’ve also had random warnings and bans for weird shit like u/EdibleFriend. I wish I left reddit sooner but reddit has a huge userbase and well established communities. A monopoly on everything sadly. I spent my time writing comments for others, not for spez or “reddit”.
If anyone’s deleting their comments, make sure to edit beforehand. If you’re not banned, use powerdeletesuite. If banned, you’ll have to use redact then shreddit. I don’t want to advertise them but those were the only two I could find after some hours of trying to delete my data. Nuke reddit is gone. Redact doesn’t delete but rather edits and I think shreddit actually deletes. I left mine up so all the scrapers can override any previous data, or so I hope. I don’t trust redact honestly so I did it in a vm. Make sure to remove all saved, hidden, blocked, etc. posts, comments, users, and subs and replace it with random shit.I wish people could learn from my comments or read their contents but there were too many comments to selectively delete. fuck spez and fuck reddit.
To be fair, advocating violence on any platform will not get you very far even if the idea is justified, eg) nazis
Curiously, Nazis seem to get away doing just that, under their clear name even! Reported a few of those on Twitter a while ago before Elons takeover. Got a message that the reports are unwarranted and if I continued to make them they’d disable my ability to report.
I’m in the early stages of becoming a billionaire. Now I just need approximately a smidge less than a billion dollars.
that’s great. most of us are more than a billion dollars short of a billion.
See, most companies would do this before they went public.
Reddit has long had an issue with confidently providing false statements as fact. Sometimes I would come along a question that I was well educated on, and the top voted responses were all very clearly wrong, but sounded correct to someone who didn’t know better. This made me question all the other posts that I had believed without knowing enough to tell otherwise.
Llms also have the same issue of confidently telling lies that sound true. Training on Reddit will only make this worse.
I would come along a question that I was well educated on, and the top voted responses were all very clearly wrong, but sounded correct to someone who didn’t know better.
This can be said to https://news.ycombinator.com/ as well. I wonder how much of this is due to sock puppets and bots.
Yeah all of my most down voted reddit comments were the ones where I replied about something I’m an actual expert in. Scary stuff
Downvoting was always just fast food validation that you’re better than someone else without having to actually back it up.
I spent 20 years as a producer, developer, and project manager in the lottery and games industry.
Trying to explain how lottery and games work to people and have them hear me makes me want to cry.
Fascinating! I’d love to hear a little about it, if you don’t mind.
Certainly, I’m always happy to share with inquisitive minds.
Is there any particular question you’d like me to address?
Not really, I never paid much mind to it. I’m curious about the whole industry I guess, or anything you’d like to share or set the record straight about.
Oh there’s lots I have to set the record straight about and there’s lots I could talk about, but without being asked a specific question that would just leave me to write an open-ended essay and I’m not up for it right now
Wow. You’re extremely on point. No logical counterarguments but rather several downvotes for a field I’m very familiar with. Downvotes determine the validity of a comment, not their content.
The voting system let’s people push comments to the top that they want to be true, not necessarily things that are true.
There’s also the issue of reddit comment sorting being entirely dominated by time. In something like 90% of posts, the top comment is one of the first five. Literally all you have to do is just comment first, and it’ll likely be the top.
Because it’s like old forums where the first person to comment gets engagement
Some of the better subreddits tried to mix it up and change how this affected upvotes. There was Muxing,…etc etc… But then,… Spez came in (back) and didn’t give af about anything at all except money.
First time I’m hearing about this, can you give any links? Maybe we could use something similar in lemmy
Muxing upvotes , “balances”, etc.
Even hiding all upvotes of every comment thread until ~12 hrs after posting.
I noticed from the beginning that Lemmy’s default comment sorting improves visibility of a variety of comments including newer ones. Gee, I wonder who could have helped make it that way ;)
Over the years I ended up getting a Reddit habit of replying to one of the top comments so that it could attain some visibility. I still do sometimes but less often on Lemmy.
This tends to give more influence to people who spend more time on it and write more. And they are less likely to be subject matter experts.
I strongly agree with this comment. To show my appreciation, you have my upvote. Had I only agreed a little bit, I might have not voted at all. If that comment had made me angry, I might have downvoted.
Actually calling these things votes instead of likes makes a lot of sense. I might not like a comment, but I might want it to be higher. I might not hate another comment, but I might want it to be lower because of other reasons.
@Fubarberry yes I saw this a lot too. Highly upvoted confidently incorrect comments, with the real answer or an answer debunking them with links to factual sources less upvoted.
Happened to me as well.
I am a lawyer and I would get down voted for posts explaining the law that contained citations to the actual applicable statute if people didn’t like the statute. Using reddit up votes as a measure of correctness is fundamentally a dumb idea.
@collapse_already yeah Reddit also tended to mistake explanation for agreement and savagely downvote it.
The problem is that SEO has made it impossible to find accurate information easily, since even “old, trustworthy brands” can’t be trusted online. [This is an excellent article that explains the problem thoroughly, and brings receipts] (https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/).
Great article, thanks for mentioning it!
That’s a really good article, and it does a good job of highlighting the issues with modern day search results.
I’ve been guilty to use “best x” pages before, but if the website with the “best of page” doesn’t have specific reviews linked I usually look up individual product reviews for the good sounding items on other websites.
This is a great example of why it’s so important to emphasize teaching critical thinking in school right now. Misinformation and disinformation is just going to continue to grow.
Literally why I bookmarked it. I’m an online teacher, so I’m going to advocate for adding that article to a grade 10 course that’s used by thousands of students each year.
I’m a student teacher right now in elementary! I try to get my kids to think critically whenever I can. I hear kids talk about insane shit they saw/heard on tiktok (I got into an argument with a student who thought Slenderman was 100% real because of something they saw on tiktok) and I try to really get them to think and actually justify why they believe things.
Somewhat related:
A recommendation about teaching controversial topics: you need to build connection first.
I mean, that’s true of all teaching, but when you start to question the (prejudiced) things they’re hearing from trusted adults at home, you really need to have a strong relationship with the students.
Being an anti-racist pro-SOGI educator in conservative communities is hard.
I wish you success in your career! Teachers have such an opportunity to make a huge impact on the world.
An uphill battle for sure. I wish you the best of luck.
but sounded correct to someone who didn’t know better
specious /spē′shəs/ adjective
Having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious. "a specious argument."and then the real answer will be hidden or something silly, or in some cases where money is involved the correct answer might have been removed
Read: that means things are gonna get much worse around here
When Reddit go public we gonna see some serious shit.
Yeah as I have already written the site off, at this point I just kinda wanna see how bad it gets how fast.
Aaron Schwartz is rolling in his grave
I’m still happy that I went through the effort to delete all my old posts when I left Reddit a while back. I periodically check if they’ve restored them and luckily it hasn’t happened so far. I do miss some of the bigger communities but overall I’m having a good time on Lemmy.
I am glad it makes you feel better but the reality is they still have your data. Just because you don’t see it on the front end doesn’t mean it isn’t still in the database with a “deleted” flag set. They aren’t hard deleting your comments.
I’m sure they have a backup somewhere that they will use to train the AI, but agreed, it is time to leave reddit for good.
Unless you are in the EU Reddit absolutely did not delete your data.
Reddit is dumb enough that they probably have a backup they kept of EU users.
Your PII isn’t being sold here and you gave Reddit an irrevocable license to your content, so being in the EU doesn’t matter.
No, GDPR applies to all data, not just PII.
The GDRP explicitly only applies to “personal data”
- This Regulation lays down rules relating to the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and rules relating to the free movement of personal data.
which it defines as follows:
‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person
Please provide a quote where the GDPR says that it applies to anything but “personal data”.
Well, if you want to be sure that Reddit deleted your data, the time to bring it up is now. Ask questions, contact journalists, demand answers.
I can vouch for that.
I wonder what the risks are to including deleted and pre-edited content in training data. Most of the edits are going to be typos and formatting, do you want 2-3 copies of the same message with typos in them for training data? Similarly, deleted comments are mostly nonsense, unhelpful, duplicate, or highly controversial things.
If someone wants to dig through and find individual users to restore that’s one thing, but I don’t think I’d immediately choose to train off of that other data unless I had to.
It should be very easy to distinguish edits and deletes which were made within a few minutes or hours after writing a comment, from those made months or years later right around the reddit blackout.
Only shadenfreud I have is that my deleted banter that they will assuredly include, will hopefully increase the stupidity of whatever model gets trained on it. Ugh, what a dystopia we’re building.
Lol YoU ShOuLd HaVe ThOuGhT oF ThAt SoOnEr
LaNgUaGe FoR tHe MaChInE!!?:/;1
After deleting all of my posts and comments Reddit decided to undelete them three days later and then proceeded to lock me out of my own account. Fucking bastards.
I just left my comments on. I still use reddit when searching actual human responses from Google. Maybe one day someone might find my archived comments useful in the future.
Deleting your messages is just another data point for them. Reddit can train an AI on the originals and categorize you as a “comment deleter” to give them more information.
Aye, and that’s why I left. As an author, fuck you trying to monetise my writing when I can’t even do that myself.
Hey another author?! How you doin? Lol
Same as you fuck them.
Yeah, hi!
Can I have a link to your work?
May i see both of your works?? Id love to give em a read!
I’m wondering how many open WriteFreely instances there are.
Gotta buy me dinner first! Lol
Jokes aside I’m fairly private when I’m not so I tend to not openly share my writing. I’m building up for when I retire from corporate IT to unleash a lifetime of it.
I did that, too. I published my first novel in 2019 after leaving my career as a UX designer/softwaredev/db admin/etc.
Hit me when you’re ready, no matter how many years that is – I’d love to read your stuff.
monetizing the most racist community outside of twitter what could go wrong?
???
Something something sweet summer childrens
They’ve finally gone full /HailCorporate, become the thing some of the original people of the site would probably not have agreed with in many ways
That is a story as old as time. Greed is strong.
