5 ms·

First some facts and then some news. The first rule of social networks is you can't touch them or they will die. Proof: Aol MySpace Twitter Facebook (Zuckerbe

First some facts and then some news. The first rule of social networks is you can't touch them or they will die. Proof: Aol MySpace Twitter Facebook (Zuckerberg won't touch it now) Reddit This is obvious except to billionaires. Now for the news: the only content you see on social networks is designed to reinforce your supposedly persistent self and sell ads. There is no other purpose for social media. All social media content on the internet since the internet began will be deleted, lost and forgotten as there will be no profit motive to do otherwise.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Which is fine. These people are digital hoarders, desperate to save threads of puns on pictures of cats. None of it matters. You're not going to go back and look at all the pictures and threads you've posted. Life goes on.
- social_ism 3y ago
  The US congress would never bother regulating "icanhazcheezburger.com" These things and by things I mean the dumpsterfication of social media content or internet content because it has no value. Those same things don't "influence elections" and traumatized children and supposedly destroy society. Social media is a fancy dumpster fire and that's all it will ever be. It burns out and starts anew from some other source.
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  I disagree, there's tons of valuable content on Reddit that people regularly reference years later. Tech support, product reviews, and similar. You'll often see people on HN recommend searching with `site:reddit.com` based on the valuable information it holds and the degradation of search result quality. Saving content from forums is the same idea. Reddit is just a collection of forums.
- social_ism 3y ago
  I agree with the hoarding bit. I'm not an fan of that either. But I'm much less of a fan of the self importance of tech pretending this "data" has any more use than temporary ad surveillance until they delete it or resell it.
- Loughla 3y ago
  Holy shit is this a wrong take on this. Do you think that, at no point in the future, it would be valuable to know how regular people thought and what they talked about today?
  - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    There's more than enough evidence of that in a billion different places. And we're not exactly suffering from not having those records of the past, either. If keeping records long term were actually important we'd have done it well before the sites end up deleting all their content. This is just a fear of the unknown with no concrete examples of cases to justify it.
kleinsch 3y ago
Thank you for taking the time to reinforce your supposedly persistent self by posting this reply on a social media site.
shmatt 3y ago
Facebook and Instagram have historically shut down API with 0 days heads up. Breaking apps that depended on them. This is pretty normal for a social network trying to commercialize
jve 3y ago
> the only content you see on social networks is designed to reinforce your supposedly persistent self and sell ads. There were TONS of comments on HN about how reddit is still safe place for product reviews (or just opinions). Plus they are kind of forums where niche knowledge can be found.
BowBun 3y ago
What about the fact that OpenAI used Reddit as a dataset for training GPT? Seems like the data was valuable.
- capableweb 3y ago
  What about the fact that reddit closing API access does in no way stop others from doing the same? There are multiple archives of reddit all over the place, and it hardly won't stop just because they make the API paid. Instead people will scrape the HTML and extract the data there, which will surely be more costly for reddit than the simple JSON API they have (for now).
  - BowBun 3y ago
    What about it? You're arguing a point I haven't made. I was merely saying the data set is valuable or they wouldn't have trained on it. GP was saying the data was worthless.
- journey_how 3y ago
  This is a problem people have with macro, large scale data, the problem you are exhibiting in regards to "value". Ill use a simple example to illustrate. If you (yourself) were to write a song that sounded just like a Beatles song and was in effect a lift or "copy" of it and it went to #1 on the charts. You would expect a Beatles lawyer to contact you pretty quickly. Thats called "one to one" copyright infringement. Lawyers and court systems are setup to process these claims and do so from time to time. However, if you were to copy and make available with no royalty ALL THE SONG EVER WRITTEN AND RECORDED, the legal system, and lawyers have almost no way to get their head around it and the judicial system can barely assign a plaintiff to the defendant. This is more analagous to the situation Google created when it scanned "every book written in the english language" and made it available via google search. At the time the courts and the law had no concept of such a thing and couldnt process the mass copyright violation. Google didnt scan all the book s because they had "value". Google scanned all the books to "devalue" them to zero, to serve its purposes. Google as far as I know never paid to this day a cent. So ChatGPT didnt scan the entire internet (reddit was a rounding error), because it HAD value. It scanned it to form english grammer out of tokens and to get away with mass theft. Just like google. As an AI assistant, I hope I answered your question to your satisfaction.
journey_how 3y ago
I have somewhere some polaroids from my childhood that have more value than the entire corpus of reddit. But they are fading. If people care so much take a screenshot and put it in a photo album. Otherwise dont expect other peoples servers which cost money to run to hold your valuables. Grow up.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Which is fine. These people are digital hoarders, desperate to save threads of puns on pictures of cats. None of it matters. You're not going to go back and look at all the pictures and threads you've posted. Life goes on.

social_ism 3y ago
The US congress would never bother regulating "icanhazcheezburger.com" These things and by things I mean the dumpsterfication of social media content or internet content because it has no value. Those same things don't "influence elections" and traumatized children and supposedly destroy society. Social media is a fancy dumpster fire and that's all it will ever be. It burns out and starts anew from some other source.
8organicbits 3y ago
I disagree, there's tons of valuable content on Reddit that people regularly reference years later. Tech support, product reviews, and similar. You'll often see people on HN recommend searching with `site:reddit.com` based on the valuable information it holds and the degradation of search result quality. Saving content from forums is the same idea. Reddit is just a collection of forums.
social_ism 3y ago
I agree with the hoarding bit. I'm not an fan of that either. But I'm much less of a fan of the self importance of tech pretending this "data" has any more use than temporary ad surveillance until they delete it or resell it.
Loughla 3y ago
Holy shit is this a wrong take on this. Do you think that, at no point in the future, it would be valuable to know how regular people thought and what they talked about today?
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  There's more than enough evidence of that in a billion different places. And we're not exactly suffering from not having those records of the past, either. If keeping records long term were actually important we'd have done it well before the sites end up deleting all their content. This is just a fear of the unknown with no concrete examples of cases to justify it.

kleinsch 3y ago

Thank you for taking the time to reinforce your supposedly persistent self by posting this reply on a social media site.

shmatt 3y ago

Facebook and Instagram have historically shut down API with 0 days heads up. Breaking apps that depended on them. This is pretty normal for a social network trying to commercialize

jve 3y ago

> the only content you see on social networks is designed to reinforce your supposedly persistent self and sell ads. There were TONS of comments on HN about how reddit is still safe place for product reviews (or just opinions). Plus they are kind of forums where niche knowledge can be found.

BowBun 3y ago

What about the fact that OpenAI used Reddit as a dataset for training GPT? Seems like the data was valuable.

capableweb 3y ago
What about the fact that reddit closing API access does in no way stop others from doing the same? There are multiple archives of reddit all over the place, and it hardly won't stop just because they make the API paid. Instead people will scrape the HTML and extract the data there, which will surely be more costly for reddit than the simple JSON API they have (for now).
- BowBun 3y ago
  What about it? You're arguing a point I haven't made. I was merely saying the data set is valuable or they wouldn't have trained on it. GP was saying the data was worthless.
journey_how 3y ago
This is a problem people have with macro, large scale data, the problem you are exhibiting in regards to "value". Ill use a simple example to illustrate. If you (yourself) were to write a song that sounded just like a Beatles song and was in effect a lift or "copy" of it and it went to #1 on the charts. You would expect a Beatles lawyer to contact you pretty quickly. Thats called "one to one" copyright infringement. Lawyers and court systems are setup to process these claims and do so from time to time. However, if you were to copy and make available with no royalty ALL THE SONG EVER WRITTEN AND RECORDED, the legal system, and lawyers have almost no way to get their head around it and the judicial system can barely assign a plaintiff to the defendant. This is more analagous to the situation Google created when it scanned "every book written in the english language" and made it available via google search. At the time the courts and the law had no concept of such a thing and couldnt process the mass copyright violation. Google didnt scan all the book s because they had "value". Google scanned all the books to "devalue" them to zero, to serve its purposes. Google as far as I know never paid to this day a cent. So ChatGPT didnt scan the entire internet (reddit was a rounding error), because it HAD value. It scanned it to form english grammer out of tokens and to get away with mass theft. Just like google. As an AI assistant, I hope I answered your question to your satisfaction.

journey_how 3y ago

I have somewhere some polaroids from my childhood that have more value than the entire corpus of reddit. But they are fading. If people care so much take a screenshot and put it in a photo album. Otherwise dont expect other peoples servers which cost money to run to hold your valuables. Grow up.