Reddit

Title. Like to download old posts, comments and saved images/comments/links.

Thing is, since reddit took down their 3rd party apps api, most of the ones I find seem to be broken. And most of those 'apps' are from reddit posts created before the enshittification.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/8775123

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 :-)

reddit is telling it's future investors with recent news and more info on their IPO, that they're currently selling and looking to sell their user's data to companies wanting to train their LLMs, including Google.

This is a direct violation of the GDPR for any EU based users.

Legal Basis?

Under Art. 6 GDPR reddit may only really use p1 (f) (p meaning paragraph) processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.

All other options are impossible, as they don't have consent, nor do they have contracts with their user base to allow for this. Art. 5 p1 (f) is a touchy subject and clearly requires extra provisions being made in case the data subject is a child. Reddit has tons of children (meaning anyone under 18) using their site daily. See for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/

What's being processed

Due to the nature of reddit, they are also processing huge amounts of data of special categories Article 9 such as data on sexual orientation, health information, ethnic info, union information, etc. (basically everything in Article 9 can easily be found on reddit):

(note users have not given explicit consent according to the requirements of consent under Art. 7 and 8, which would allow for such processing under Art. 9 p2 (a))

• racial or ethnic origin: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ethnicity/
• political opinions: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/
• religious beliefs: https://www.reddit.com/r/religion/
• philosophical beliefs: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/
• trade union membership: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unions/
• health: https://www.reddit.com/r/Healthadvice/
• sexuality: https://www.reddit.com/r/sexuality/

These are obviously just a tiny selection of the hundreds of subreddits that are concerned with these types of data, not to mention the unencrypted "private" messages, chats, etc.

My lord, is this legal?

Article 9 p2 (e) states "processing relates to personal data which are manifestly made public by the data subject;"; so they're out of the woods, right? After all, users posted this stuff and it was made public! Sadly, this doesn't work with processing data of children, especially with 9 p4 allowing member states to introduce additional limitations and conditions for further processing.

The real kicker comes with Article 5 p1 (b) though for 9 p2 (e). 5 p1 (b) requires the personal data be: "collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes; further processing for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes shall, in accordance with Article 89(1), not be considered to be incompatible with the initial purposes (‘purpose limitation’);"

Yeeeah... People have posted their stuff publicly, BUT with a clear understanding that the processing of the data ends there. Reddit may process the data insofar they serve the data to the public. That's it. Turning around and selling the data now is a crystal clear violation of Article 5 p1(b). There's no two ways about it. As per Article 5 p2, reddit needs to be able to prove they are in compliance with 5 p1.

They're also processing data under Art. 10 relating to criminal convictions and offences

• https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/ (not joking, this one is a gold mine for GDPR violations)
• https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5eexva/police_officers_of_reddit_what_criminal_actually/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1vug9e/criminal_masterminds_of_reddit_what_is_the_worst/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/18lp04/criminals_of_reddit_how_did_you_get_caught/

Processing of such data shall be carried out only under the control of official authority or where processing is authorized by Union or Member State law. Rugh-Roh. I'll admit, that this one might be reaching a bit, as it could easily be considered only to apply to "official" type of data here, rather than just criminal talk overall, but fuck it. Throw it on the pile.

Your rights and how they're being violated (not in a kinky fun way)

Now let's look at the Rights of the data subject! Those are always fun :)

Art. 12 p1 "The controller shall take appropriate measures to provide any information referred to in Articles 13 and 14 and any communication under Articles 15 to 22 and 34 relating to processing to the data subject in a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language, in particular for any information addressed specifically to a child."

This is my favorite. Articles 13 and 14 are provisions on informing the data subject where they had data obtained directly from them or not directly from them. For reddit it mostly applies 13, but since people also talk about people they know, 14 also applies.

Let's check in there real quick. We'll keep it to Article 13 for brevity. Reddit needs to:

• give info on contact details of the controller and the controllers rep (in the case of selling data to Google for LLM training, that's info for Google, not reddit; anyone got that info via DM maybe? No? Oh shit)
• contact details of their data protection officer (both reddit and google, anyone was informed on that for the LLM stuff? No?)
• purposes of processing including the legal basis. Love this one. Anyone know that for the sale of their data to Google to train their LLM? No? Shucks.
• Since they're likely hinging on Art. 6 p1 (f) they need to tell you what the legitimate interest is - in our case MAD MONEY, not sure if that'll hold up.
• recipients or categories of recipients -> so "big evil data churning, election influencing, minority silencing, union busting, mega corp" Sweet.
• Transfer to third countries -> likely doesn't apply, as reddit servers are in the US (I believe, no idea if that's true) if not, weeeeeeell...
• right to lodge a complaint with supervisory authority (anyone got that notice?)
• whether the data is provided due to a contract or statutory -> doesn't apply, users give their data "freely"
• existence of automated decision-making, INCLUDING PROFILING (as per Art. 22 -> non of the exceptions in that article apply to the current situation) - I'm sure no LLM will ever be used by the largest Ad company on the planet to help profile users, noooooooo, that's craaazy!

Article 13 p3 clearly states in relation to Article 5 p1 (b) that the data subject must be informed about the data that is being collected for further processing BEFORE such processing occurs, including all the info I just listed above from Article 13 p2.

Article 13 p4 states "Paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 shall not apply where and insofar as the data subject already has the information." yeeaaah... No reddit user knew about their data being actively sold to LLMs (sure LLMs might have scraped it, but that's an entirely different can of worms - in which reddit has a hand, too under GDPR as they're supposed to establish safeguards against such things, but reddit directly selling now without any upfront info... tut, tut..)

Another element of Article 12 p1 is this bit "in a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language, in particular for any information addressed specifically to a child." I'm sure they'll find a cool and hip way of explaning to all the teens on reddit what an LLM is and how it's using their data.

Send reddit a little e-mail

For added fun, I urge anyone who still has a reddit account and is a EU citizen to contact reddit and make use of their rights under the GDPR to be specifically excluded from any use for LLM training, etc. Which is your RIGHT under Article 12 p2 specifically Article 21 right to object. You can contact them via "[email protected]"

Let's be really petty and assume that reddit and Google are shit at what they do, so they're likely not even engaged in a Data Processing Agreement required under Article 28 p3 and if so, I'd love my supervisory authority to take a look at that one.

Delving into the Arcane

Let's kick it up a tiny notch and go into the more arcane bits of the GDPR with Article 35, Data Protection Impact Assessment. I'm sure you'll love p1:

"Where a type of processing in particular using new technologies, and taking into account the nature, scope, context and purposes of the processing, is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons, the controller shall, prior to the processing, carry out an assessment of the impact of the envisaged processing operations on the protection of personal data. 2A single assessment may address a set of similar processing operations that present similar high risks."

New technologies you say? Likely to result in a high risk, you say? Remember how most chatbots and AIs turn super racist, super quick? Or AIs being easily triggered into revealing their training data 1:1? Oh I'm sure there's nooooo such risk with LLMs run by evil mega corp known for exploiting the shit out of exactly this kind of info for well over a decade now.

But we needn't even argue that point. Article 35 p3 (b) clearly states:
"processing on a large scale of special categories of data referred to in Article 9(1), or of personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences referred to in Article 10;"

Oh nooo. Remember my list from the start? LLMs are 100% definitely large scale processing all that with reddit data sets.

Any assessment carried out would clearly indicate risk and thus Article 36 would apply, where reddit has to consult with supervisory authorities in the EU BEFORE starting this. Knowing reddit, if they ever even did such an assessment, they've come out with "low risk, nothing to see".

Then there's Article 32 of the GDPR: Security of processing. p1 (b): "the ability to ensure the ongoing confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience of processing systems and services;" yeeeaaah, good luck with that on an LLM there, buddies.

Cool, what now?

Here's what you do to exercise your rights and defend your data against the highway robbery and continuous violation by US Tech-Bros:

• Find your supervisory authority (just use google, for added irony) by searching for "Data Protection supervisory authority [the state you live in]".
• Find their contact info, usually they have a form to complain ready made
• give the company info applicable for your state, I've gone ahead and fished those out for you (see at the end here)
• Tell them about the upcoming reddit Google partnership: https://apnews.com/article/google-reddit-ai-partnership-a7f131c7cb4225307134ef21d3c6a708
• Tell them you're an EU citizen and reddit user (or former and they still have data of yours)
• Tell them you believe them to be in violation of Articles: 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 32, 35, 36, and possibly more.
• Link to this thread, if you like

US

Reddit, Inc.
548 Market St. #16093
San Francisco, California 94104

EU

Reddit Netherlands B.V.
Euro Business Center
Keizersgracht 62, 1015CS Amsterdam
Netherlands
[email protected]

UK

Reddit UK Limited,
5 New Street Square,
London, United Kingdom,
EC4A 3TW
[email protected]

Good luck!

Sure, spez, tell us again how reddit's just never managed to make a profit ...

NEW YORK, Feb 7 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Social media platform Reddit, which helps its users “dive into anything,” may finally plunge into the public markets. The 19-year-old company made over $800 million in sales last year, at least 20% more than in 2022, according to Bloomberg. But a dearth of profit this late into its existence portends the lack of a real business model, suggesting it’s still not ready for public company life.

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/investors-will-say-ok-boomer-aging-reddit-2024-02-07/

Original link: https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/investors-will-say-ok-boomer-aging-reddit-2024-02-07/

https://redditforcommunity.com/Directed-Share-Program

Just received the following email from Reddit...

u/[REDACTED],

tl;dr -- you're invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock at the same price as institutional investors when we IPO. Details about eligibility and next steps follow. This (long, dense) email has all the info we can provide due to legal restrictions.

As you may have heard, Reddit has taken steps toward becoming a publicly traded company with the initial public filing of our registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2024. Yes, it's happening.

And because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors.

We're offering a Directed Share Program ("DSP") that invites eligible users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to participate in our initial public offering ("IPO"). (Including you!)

Program Requirements

While being selected to pre-register is the first step, there are certain legal and regulatory requirements to participate in the DSP that are outside of Reddit's control. Bear with us here...

To be eligible for the DSP, you must:

• Be a current U.S. resident;

• You will be asked to provide the DSP Administrator a valid social security or permanent resident number, along with other personal information. Reddit will not have access to this data.

• Please note that U.S. residents using a VPN may face application limitations if the VPN locates them in certain non-U.S. jurisdictions.

• Be at least 18 years old;

• Provide your full legal name and an email address; 

• Not be a current or former Reddit employee (FTE).

When the DSP launches (a few weeks after pre-registration ends), individuals who have been confirmed for the program will be contacted by our external DSP Administrator. You will then be asked to provide additional information securely to the DSP Administrator to confirm your eligibility.

How to pre-register

The number of people who can participate in the DSP is limited; we will offer this opportunity to as many redditors as we are able to accommodate. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist. Based on demand, we may also limit the number of shares available.

**If you are interested in being part of Reddit's DSP, please go to https://reddit.com/dsp on desktop to complete the pre-registration form. **If you are one of the confirmed participants, we will follow up with an email with more details in the coming weeks. You can also refer to the Frequently Asked Questions for more information. Due to regulatory restrictions (yeah... we know...) we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions.

Pre-registering does not guarantee that you will be invited or able to participate in the DSP; it also does not obligate you to purchase shares.

As with any investment opportunity, you should make an individual decision based on your own personal circumstances and risk tolerance. Therefore, we urge you to review the preliminary prospectus, when available, before deciding whether to invest in Reddit.

The deadline for pre-registering for the DSP is March 5, 2024. If capacity is reached before the deadline, you will be added to the waitlist.

What happens next?

While there won't be a confirmation email immediately after you pre-register, everyone who pre-registers will receive an email in the coming weeks from “[email protected]”, telling them whether they can proceed with the next steps for the DSP.

This is an automated message (beep, boop, beep) and does not receive replies. Please refer to the FAQ for more information. Per our lawyercats, we are not able to respond to further inquiries or questions.

Prospectus and Important Disclosures

The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. When available, a copy of the preliminary prospectus related to the offering may be obtained from: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, New York, New York 10014, or email: [email protected]; Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, New York 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526, facsimile: 212-902-9316, or email: [email protected]; J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Attention:c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, telephone: 1-866-803-9204, or email: [email protected]; and BofA Securities, Inc., NC1-022-02-25, 201 North Tryon Street, Charlotte, North Carolina 28255-0001, Attention: Prospectus Department, telephone: 1-800-294-1322, or email: [email protected].

A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This notification shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

No offer to buy the securities can be accepted and no part of the purchase price can be received until the registration statement has become effective, and any such offer may be withdrawn or revoked, without obligation or commitment of any kind, at any time prior to the notice of its acceptance given after the effective date. An indication of interest in response to this notification will involve no obligation or commitment of any kind.

And here's the message when I visit reddit.com/dsp, along with a form:

Want to own a piece of Reddit?

Reddit Directed Share Program

We can't imagine a Reddit IPO without redditors. You Rickrolled Rick Astley. You gave us Mr. Splashy Pants. And r/Place… (you're welcome, internet). And now you can become one of our (non-corporate) overlords. Yes, it's really happening this time, and as we take the next step toward becoming a public company, we're inviting all eligible redditors to participate in Reddit's IPO.

“Eligible” you note skeptically? Yes. Unfortunately, there are a ton of imposed legal restrictions defining when, who, and how we do this. So while our goal is to give all redditors the same access to stock as institutional investors (why should they have all the fun?), our lawyercats tell us we must follow specific rules listed below.

Our Directed Share Program (“DSP”) is set up to let eligible users and moderators own a piece of Reddit by purchasing Reddit stock at the same price as institutional investors when we IPO. We will offer this opportunity to as many redditors as we are able to accommodate, and the number of people who can participate is limited.

Then there's a pre-registration form with First Name, Last Name, Email.

Google is getting AI training data from Reddit as part of a new partnership between the two companies. In an update on Thursday, Reddit announced it will start providing Google “more efficient ways to train models.”

The collaboration will give Google access to Reddit’s data API, which delivers real-time content from Reddit’s platform. This will provide “Google with an efficient and structured way to access the vast corpus of existing content on Reddit,” while also allowing the company to display content from Reddit in new ways across its products.

When Reddit CEO Steve Huffman spoke to The Verge last year about Reddit’s API changes and the subsequent protests, he said, “The API usage is about covering costs and data licensing is a new potential business for us,” suggesting Reddit may seek out similar revenue-generating arrangements in the future.

The partnership will give Reddit access to Vertex AI as well, Google’s AI-powered service that’s supposed to help companies improve their search results. Reddit says the change doesn’t affect the company’s data API terms, which prevent developers or companies from accessing it for commercial purposes without approval.

Just last week, a report from Bloomberg said Reddit struck a $60 million training deal with an unnamed AI company. Google Search is currently expanding the test of a “forums” filter that lets you browse through results from sites with human discussion, like Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Hacker News.

Despite this deal, Google and Reddit haven’t always seen eye to eye. Reddit previously threatened to block Google from crawling its site over concerns that companies would use its data for free to train AI models. Reddit is also poised to announce its initial public offering within the coming weeks, and it’s likely making this change as part of its effort to boost its valuation, which sat at more than $10 billion in 2021.

Seems like there are some real outages going on, right now.

I don't want a mass delete because there is one community/topic that I don't want to delete.

But going manually through my comments is hard because I have to scroll, move cursor to delete, hit delete, move the cursor to yes, hit yes, scroll to next comment, etc. It would be much better with one click per comment without any scrolling or moving the cursor. Is there such a tool to go through like that?

*Never found one, ended up using power delete suite.

When you try to edit a Reddit comment in their mobile web app, it deletes all line breaks from your comment so you have to remember to manually put them back before submitting.

The other big issue I have is that when you type in and edited comment, it will omit spaces between words at random. JFC, there's no reason to use anything but a vanilla HTML input element (because only markdown formatting is supported), but they somehow fucked up basic text input anyway!

My last little gripe is that nothing in the interface tells you that markdown is supported, which is extra dumb because the desktop interface tries so hard to hide the fact that markdown even exists.

(And yes, there are a host of other annoyances, but I'm trying to limit my criticisms to things that can only be explained by incompetence.)

https://old.reddit.com/r/help/

I got the new reddit UI - I think it's horrible. How can I get back to the "middle UI"?

if Reddit cannot find anything for the website designers to do maybe they should just fire them rather than have them invent new ways to circumvent the geneva convention article 33.

Another post about awful redesign, and wondering how to prevent this spreading to my app?

Make a subreddit and set it to private. Then 3rd party apps should work. I currently use boost for reddit. You might need to look for a binary on apkpure or smth.

Let's be rebellious!

Happened to me a few days ago, and I just can't believe how bad this redesign is!!

It's hard to comprehend what goes into the heads of that dev team, but they basically ruined everything nice about the platform. The API changes were pretty much a fatal shot already, but this new redesign seems to be what tipped the scales for me, and hopefully many more.

It's a great time to switch to Lemmy, and I think I'm going to make the effort to stick around and abandon the habit of opening reddit multiple times per day.

Do you think forcing this re-design will bring more people here? I'm hoping for that. Reddit betrayed us and I can't find it me to keep forgiving them for every horrible, anti-user decision.

I noticed in some moderator subreddit, that it is planned to kill new.reddit.com as well. Old will likely stay for longer, but new is what I got used to, and if they take it down I won't bother getting used to the newer, garbage UX.

screenshot of a tweet that reads: “going on Reddit for me is like going into Spencer’s in the mall. I need to find something very specific but I’m uncomfortable the whole time and don’t want anyone to know I’m there.”

[...] a dearth of profit this late into its existence portends the lack of a real business model, suggesting it’s still not ready for public company life.

Posting the updates here because most of the users of RDX come from lemmy community only.

1. Compact mode (smaller thumbnails, faster loading) is here,
2. Infinite Scrolling is here. If that's your thing enable it from the settings page.
3. All GIFs now load faster than ever.
4. OP's comments are labelled.
5. New themes and fonts. (not just the default dark and white, go colorful)

Previous posts:

https://lemmy.world/post/10428140

My reddit web viewer still works! Story: When reddit killed 3rd party apps, I uploaded a web viewer I have been using for myself to Github pages for everyone to use...

If you want to lurk on Reddit, you can use this web reader I built for myself when I got inspired by the Apollo app years ago