6 ms·

Except part of their 'value prop' is "We have this giant trove of human created content, and AI companies need to start paying us to utilize it when training th

Except part of their 'value prop' is "We have this giant trove of human created content, and AI companies need to start paying us to utilize it when training their models".

monitron 3y ago
Ah, good point. If this is the case, yeah, shred away. Still it's too bad that this greed will make it harder for humans to see useful old discussions.
- coldpie 3y ago
  It's not greed, it's capitalism. This is the system working as it's intended.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Which in this case is both greed and also bad
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    That's worth remembering, yes - without that we wouldn't have had Reddit in the first place.
    - Larrikin 3y ago
      Maybe we wouldn't have had Reddit, but I was perfectly content going to multiple phpBB boards when I was younger to discuss my hobbies. Reddit always felt like a place to take from since it got lots of people by being centralized, but not really a place to contribute to unless you were contributing to the group think aspect of the community. Communities specifically set up for answering questions or R&D were in my opinion the only valuable communities. Figuring out things or learning from the huge number of users was helpful, but it was never a fun place to just talk about any of my interests.
  - veidr 3y ago
    Well, capitalism is about choices. There are a multiple choices reddit could make, and there are multiple choices reddit users can make. This is a fairly classic case of "you aren't the customer, you're the product", but that isn't the only way capitalism works. This is capitalism and greed and disdain for the user. I don't know if that will kill or materially damage reddit, but that combo kills plenty of regular businesses. (Salient difference is probably that user != customer, as with many internet businesses.)
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    I'm really not a fan of comments like these. There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism, and 'problems' like this could be solved vid regulation. So no, the problem really is greed, and the extreme resistance to regulation in the US.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SilverBirch 3y ago
Do you think that reddit actually deletes comments when the user presses delete? My assumption would be that it just sticks up a "do not display" flag in the database. I'm sure that there's some influence that GDPR has though.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  Most of these tools first edit+save the comment with a word or single letter overwriting the original text in the db, then delete it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dimitrios1 3y ago
  CCPA also has a right to delete clause
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    That's applicable to personal information only. Everything a user posts to Reddit that isn't personal information, Reddit can use however they want. > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  This is probably true, but at least one implication of what the program in the title does is edit your existing comments with something before marking them as deleted, because at some point (this is probably no longer true) Reddit did not store your entire comment history. There are obviously ways to defeat this in analysis, but it does make Reddit's job slightly harder if they want to leverage that data. It would also probably be interesting to also just edit them and not delete them in some cases in some randomized way, which would make it even harder to reliably tease out good comments from noise.
antisthenes 3y ago
There are public data dumps of Reddit comments available all the way up to December 2022. And they're only roughly ~2TB all together. There's nothing stopping AI companies from just using those instead of paying Reddit $50 million to scrape all of them using the API. It would also be 10x-100x quicker to do that rather than hammer their API for the comments (the API sucks for mass data retrieval)
- realce 3y ago
  Where would someone find these?
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=reddit&sort_field=size&sort_dir=DESC https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=reddit&sort_f...
    - realce 3y ago
      merci good fellow :)
      - dontupvoteme 3y ago
        lieto di aiutare l'amico
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  Sure, but companies doing that also wouldn’t be paying Reddit for that data. The point of shredding comments isn’t to hurt the companies scraping the data (although that might be a nice side effect). Ultimately it’s to hurt Reddit.
amne 3y ago
perhaps it would be "fun" to replace the comment with a GPT summary .. in 10 words or less
- willcipriano 3y ago
  Where the adversarial AI people at? Write comments that if fed into a model generate nonsense or falsehoods.
  - DaSHacka 3y ago
    Now, I'm not nessesarily advocating for it, but replacing all of your content with varying degrees of politically incorrect misinformation would be significantly more harmful to both Reddit and the GPT bots scraping its dataset than merely deleting the information. Garbage in, garbage out after all.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    I might change most of my comments to various suggestions on how AI could enslave and/or torture humanity just to see how Eliezer Yudkowsky reacts.
commandlinefan 3y ago
Well, if that's the case, they can easily switch to "show 'deleted' content" - removing your comments doesn't delete them from Reddit's DB.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Most deletion apps I've seen also offer the ability to redact your comments with nonsense edits before deletion.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    That does assume that reddit actually updates the comment entry in their backend instead of keeping histories of the edits which I'm not sure we've had any insight into.
    - pkulak 3y ago
      Keeping a history is far more work (and cost!) than maintaining a deleted flag. I'm inclined to believe they don't keep a history.
      - ilyt 3y ago
        Actually being able to show history of edits would be a nice feature tbh.
      - balder1991 3y ago
        That’s my assumption too, keeping a history for every user increases complexity tenfold, while flagging deleted comments seems to be a common practice even in smaller companies because it’s so simple. Another user said they tried the data dump GDPR request and the comments included deleted comments but only the edited version, so I guess this can be verified at least.
- 3y ago
dontupvoteme 3y ago
"pay us enough and we'll provide the real upvote numbers and not the fake ones" as well

Except part of their 'value prop' is "We have this giant trove of human created content, and AI companies need to start paying us to utilize it when training their models".

monitron 3y ago

Ah, good point. If this is the case, yeah, shred away. Still it's too bad that this greed will make it harder for humans to see useful old discussions.

coldpie 3y ago
It's not greed, it's capitalism. This is the system working as it's intended.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Which in this case is both greed and also bad
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  That's worth remembering, yes - without that we wouldn't have had Reddit in the first place.
  - Larrikin 3y ago
    Maybe we wouldn't have had Reddit, but I was perfectly content going to multiple phpBB boards when I was younger to discuss my hobbies. Reddit always felt like a place to take from since it got lots of people by being centralized, but not really a place to contribute to unless you were contributing to the group think aspect of the community. Communities specifically set up for answering questions or R&D were in my opinion the only valuable communities. Figuring out things or learning from the huge number of users was helpful, but it was never a fun place to just talk about any of my interests.
- veidr 3y ago
  Well, capitalism is about choices. There are a multiple choices reddit could make, and there are multiple choices reddit users can make. This is a fairly classic case of "you aren't the customer, you're the product", but that isn't the only way capitalism works. This is capitalism and greed and disdain for the user. I don't know if that will kill or materially damage reddit, but that combo kills plenty of regular businesses. (Salient difference is probably that user != customer, as with many internet businesses.)
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  I'm really not a fan of comments like these. There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism, and 'problems' like this could be solved vid regulation. So no, the problem really is greed, and the extreme resistance to regulation in the US.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

SilverBirch 3y ago

Do you think that reddit actually deletes comments when the user presses delete? My assumption would be that it just sticks up a "do not display" flag in the database. I'm sure that there's some influence that GDPR has though.

unsupp0rted 3y ago
Most of these tools first edit+save the comment with a word or single letter overwriting the original text in the db, then delete it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dimitrios1 3y ago
CCPA also has a right to delete clause
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  That's applicable to personal information only. Everything a user posts to Reddit that isn't personal information, Reddit can use however they want. > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
This is probably true, but at least one implication of what the program in the title does is edit your existing comments with something before marking them as deleted, because at some point (this is probably no longer true) Reddit did not store your entire comment history. There are obviously ways to defeat this in analysis, but it does make Reddit's job slightly harder if they want to leverage that data. It would also probably be interesting to also just edit them and not delete them in some cases in some randomized way, which would make it even harder to reliably tease out good comments from noise.

antisthenes 3y ago

There are public data dumps of Reddit comments available all the way up to December 2022. And they're only roughly ~2TB all together. There's nothing stopping AI companies from just using those instead of paying Reddit $50 million to scrape all of them using the API. It would also be 10x-100x quicker to do that rather than hammer their API for the comments (the API sucks for mass data retrieval)

realce 3y ago
Where would someone find these?
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=reddit&sort_field=size&sort_dir=DESC https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=reddit&sort_f...
  - realce 3y ago
    merci good fellow :)
    - dontupvoteme 3y ago
      lieto di aiutare l'amico
mynameisvlad 3y ago
Sure, but companies doing that also wouldn’t be paying Reddit for that data. The point of shredding comments isn’t to hurt the companies scraping the data (although that might be a nice side effect). Ultimately it’s to hurt Reddit.

amne 3y ago

perhaps it would be "fun" to replace the comment with a GPT summary .. in 10 words or less

willcipriano 3y ago
Where the adversarial AI people at? Write comments that if fed into a model generate nonsense or falsehoods.
- DaSHacka 3y ago
  Now, I'm not nessesarily advocating for it, but replacing all of your content with varying degrees of politically incorrect misinformation would be significantly more harmful to both Reddit and the GPT bots scraping its dataset than merely deleting the information. Garbage in, garbage out after all.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  I might change most of my comments to various suggestions on how AI could enslave and/or torture humanity just to see how Eliezer Yudkowsky reacts.

commandlinefan 3y ago

Well, if that's the case, they can easily switch to "show 'deleted' content" - removing your comments doesn't delete them from Reddit's DB.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AlecSchueler 3y ago
Most deletion apps I've seen also offer the ability to redact your comments with nonsense edits before deletion.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  That does assume that reddit actually updates the comment entry in their backend instead of keeping histories of the edits which I'm not sure we've had any insight into.
  - pkulak 3y ago
    Keeping a history is far more work (and cost!) than maintaining a deleted flag. I'm inclined to believe they don't keep a history.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      Actually being able to show history of edits would be a nice feature tbh.
    - balder1991 3y ago
      That’s my assumption too, keeping a history for every user increases complexity tenfold, while flagging deleted comments seems to be a common practice even in smaller companies because it’s so simple. Another user said they tried the data dump GDPR request and the comments included deleted comments but only the edited version, so I guess this can be verified at least.
3y ago

dontupvoteme 3y ago

"pay us enough and we'll provide the real upvote numbers and not the fake ones" as well