this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company

That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service.

Ouch

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[–] impulse 116 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that what really made me delete my account early (I initially wanted to wait until the 30th to see how things play out) was the ridiculous number of people defending this bullshit and promoting the official Reddit app as the superior option.

Some going as far as saying 3rd party devs are leeches and scammers.

I can only tolerate so much stupidity and ignorance before I bail.

[–] LittleKerr 55 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Wait, you mean there's people -actual real and not-paid by who knows people- who believes that the official Reddit app is superior?? I know a few that believe it's not thaaat bad, but 'superior'? Lmao

[–] balder1991 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I see this kind of behavior happen a lot online, and asked ChatGPT about it:

Yes, there is a term that describes this phenomenon. It's called "oppositional belief perseverance" or "belief polarization." This term refers to the tendency of individuals to cling to their initial beliefs even when presented with evidence that contradicts those beliefs. In the context you described, someone may initially take the opposite side of a discussion due to an opposition bias, but over time, they may start to internalize and genuinely believe the opposing viewpoint, thereby demonstrating belief polarization.

[–] gorillakitty 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This chatgpt comment brought to you from comments on reddit

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

and they said Reddit bots would die

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

See also: sunken cost fallacy

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[–] Spacebar 15 points 1 year ago

People can convince themselves of anything.

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[–] funkyb 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

there are are lot of idiots, a lot. I don't know how to fix that, so I just ignore them and move on.

[–] WorldBear 16 points 1 year ago

You have to promote education as a primary value if you're ever going to have a chance at reducing the idiots. Something at least large portions of the US aren't interested in because dumb people are easier to control.

[–] wheresyourshoe 105 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

spez should start paying the redditors, especially the mods, with that logic. He gets it all for free and now he wants to profit while we would have to pay.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pay the unwashed masses? Please. They should be thankful his highness deigned to create such a platform similarly to the way the landed gentry should be thankful for their high position.

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It’s over u/spez I have the high ground

[–] Archer 22 points 1 year ago

Let the shitposts flow through you

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It's nice to see an older author on a more traditional platform have such a clear and informed opinion on something deeply steeped in internet culture.

I recognize this is agism on my part, but I was surprised when I saw his picture.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Why would that surprise you? It was people his age who created the Internet and the World Wide Web. (Of course they weren’t that age back then, but you get the idea. :-)

There are fewer Internet-savvy old people, for sure, but when you do find one, they are more likely to be pre-web or web 1.0 “information wants to be free“ types. Younger users may have grown up in a more corporate space with a very different philosophy towards the Internet.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For sure. Like I said, it's totally my bias showing. Maybe it's seeing too many congressmen fundamentally misunderstand the tech. I've also run into a lot of older programmers that are highly technical, but still kind of out-of-touch when it comes to the Internet culture that sits on top of the technical layer.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

100% with you. Watching any kind of congressional hearing that relates to technology is so incredibly frustrating. I was also really happy to see mainstream journalism specifically acknowledge that Reddit is really just a web-enabled version of old newsgroups or discussion boards, and that all the value is provided by users. If only everyone thought that way!

[–] Finkler 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Defiantly a pre-web here I recall running two BBS on a couple of Compaq 286's. Being here on the fediverse reminds me a lot of those fun times and certainly looking forward to the future here.

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[–] dhork 30 points 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don’t really understand this whole fediverse thing yet, but what I do know is… screw Reddit and screw u/spez.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

People often compare the fediverse to E-Mail, for a good reason

E-Mail doesn't need to live all on the same server, or be made by the same provider. I can use ProtonMail, you can use GMail, somebody else can use Outlook, but in the end it doesn't matter, as we can all talk.

The "Fediverse" - short for "The Federated Universe" - follows a similar concept, but it doesn't do this over Email; The Fediverse does this using the ActivityPub standard instead.

Activitypub allows all the servers we have our accounts on (in your case kbin.social and in my case forum.fail) to talk to eachother so that content can show up and be interacted with on ALL servers.

This is also why I - someone from a different server/instance - can reply to your comment and up/downvote it if I want to.

This is essentially all you need to know to get started. To see where somebody's account or a magazine/community is hosted, just hover over their username / check the magazine out. It should have something like @[email protected]. We are currently talking in @[email protected] for instance.

[–] witten 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Except email is hugely centralized now (with Google and Microsoft) even though it's technically a federated protocol. So there's a huge barrier to entry to spin up your own federated server if you actually want to send/receive any mail with it... I think the lesson here is that we need to be constantly vigilant about potential centralization in the Lemmybin Fediverse as well.

[–] whitehatbofh 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There's no more barrier to spinning up one's own email server than there has ever been. One simply needs, at a minimum, a server in the internet, a DNS domain, and know how.

A server on the internet has never been easier, thanks to cloud providers. In fact, many cloud providers will give you a working email server, so that you don't need to do all the sysadmin things to get software like Bind or Postfix up and running. These hosting providers make it pretty simple run your own personal email server and domain.

The big providers are successful because most folks don't want to stand up their own email server, they just want to use email. But anyone can go it, if they have the time and interest.

[–] witten 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I think you're right about the ease of spinning up a cloud server, but I respectfully disagree on the rest of it—and it's for one simple reason: IP address reputation management. Spinning up a server such that the Big Guys will actually trust it and willingly receive mail from it is not a trivial thing to do in 2023. I've been running mail servers for years and I think there are still blacklists I'm on.

[–] mrspaz 16 points 1 year ago (6 children)

This is why I gave up trying to run my own email server. It became clear it was turning into a racket quite a while ago. I would hear from someone that they didn't receive an email, so I'd check with their provider and sure enough I'd been blackholed.

I'd go through all the steps to clear everything, re-send the message and it would go. Send a second message and my server was instantly blackholed again for "spamming" or "suspected open relay" or some other reason. All the "Big Guys" as you call them of course carved out exceptions for each other, but no matter how many security signatures or other measures I implemented it was basically an instant lockout.

It got to the point where I was forced to sign on with a "Big" provider for routing.

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[–] randon31415 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The way I like to explain it is with World of Warcraft. You sign up on a server and go out and mine some copper ore. Your player and that copper ore are only on that one single server. If you wanted to trade it with a friend, they would have to be on that server. However, if you went and posted that copper ore on the auction house, people from dozens of servers can see it and buy it. Those servers are in the ''lemmy'' sense federated with one another, but instead of virtual copper ore, it is cute pictures of cats.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The fediverse is basically just a bunch of Reddits that can all work with each other.

It needs some streamlining work, but it's heading in the right direction.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My favorite things about this whole debacle is how transparent they're being about how the plan the whole time was to actually just hope we would keep giving them content and moderating for free forever so they could package it up and sell it to wall street. And not just them but all social media companies seem to think this will just work and nobody will mind.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Wide op for ai scraping and nothing are not the only two options. They could easily limit api calls to what would be good for single users or mods and have each user generate their own key. Apps could let users input their key. Most users wouldn't bother and would switch to their app anyway so it would get them 95% or what they claim to want without being a dick about it.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Plus AI companies can just scrape reddit without using the API. It's still a website after all.

[–] JustZ 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They want the timing of how long a user looks at something. They can't scrape that from third party apps.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

If they are going to capitalise on our content and data, are they going to start paying out to users like YouTube and other platforms?

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[–] Nix 60 points 1 year ago (9 children)

It is rather interesting to note that this Corpus of data may not be as valuable if it cannot be used without always being legally in several grey areas (perhaps even red areas in some jurisdictions).

Currently, an increasingly large pool of artist/writters/singers and other people (even corporations such as studios and large right holders) are exercising their rights to not have their creations and derived works be used or slurped into AI models without their express consent.

Corporations making use of those AI models may find themselves in expensive legal limbo now and the foreseeable future.

Considering no redditor imagined nor consented to have their post and comment history be comprehensively abused (as in "improper treatment or usage; application to a wrong or bad purpose; an unjust, corrupt or wrongful practice or custom").

We may enter a period where lawlessness pervades AI models (just like any gold rush, for example the current crypto craze). Eventually, the legal framework will catch up and will probably make any dubious Corpus of data untouchable.

How long this takes is anyone's guess. I surmise several large profile lawsuits would suffice.

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[–] MargotRobbie 53 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Funniest thing to do is honestly replace your old comments with ChatGPT refusals. If you put "As an AI language model" everywhere, it'll really mess with the ML algorithms to make your data useless.

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[–] solidgrue 52 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I removed my content on that site in protest, and will continue to do so as it creeps back in right up to the day when either my every last comment is scrubbed, or I am locked out of my accounts.

No quarter.

[–] Evono 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Should check if it stays removed, reddit started to restore removed comments and posts and even removed edits

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[–] Killer 15 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Don't just delete your comments, use a script to over write them.

[–] solidgrue 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used power delete suite and edited the comments to read, "This content was removed by its creator in protest of Reddit's planned API changes effective July 2023."

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[–] wotsit_sandwich 50 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I am enjoying being able to observe this story from the beginning, before the media started writing about it. It's been an interesting few weeks.

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[–] Zerlyna 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I said it with Facebook and would do the same for Reddit, I would happily pay a little each month to not have my data sold or used inappropriately and be ad free.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s all user generated content,all they need to do is to shut up and let people run

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This was my thought as well, I actually don’t mind OpenAI trawling my content to train their models, I’m benefiting from their end product in so many ways already. The internet was always public, no one asked for stupid ceos to step in and stop that. How is it Ok for Google webcrawlers, but not OpenAI? Also it’s not like I can monitise my posts and comments myself on my own anyway.

The whole locking down the API due to AI model scraping excuse was poor, it should be a decision for the community of reddit.

Starting to wonder if Reddit are going to train their own AI models or have already started.

Also, that journalist from the guardian, if you go to the website linked, looks like an older John Oliver or John Oliver’s dad 😂

[–] MiddleWeigh 12 points 1 year ago

This whole thing is fascinating to me. It's like the creation of a universe laid out before us. I'm striving to be better, better than the one before, so the next one can be even better. I don't need no money in my soup. I only need my hands, if that.

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