10mo ago

For those thinking of going back to reddit. Gaze upon this comment section and reconsider.

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451 comments

That was cringe but I think a better reason NOT to return to reddit is the fact that they just sold out their users to an AI company that hasn't even been named.
- Could you imagine this is what we are training AI with !
  
  I can. Remember Tay?
  
  Lol yeah, other bot made data
  
  Yeah, all these bots replies is copied from other comment, and there's shit tons of r/confidentlyincorrect comment that is outright factually wrong, which then get regurgitated by other user and copied by bots, so good luck to the AI company filtering those.
  
  r/confidentlyincorrect comment that is outright factually wrong
  Sounds like it would fit right in with other AI models
- AFAIK, there’s nothing stopping any company from scraping Lemmy either. The whole point pf reddit limiting API usage was so they could make money like this.
  Outside of morals, there is nothing to stop anybody from training on data from Lemmy just like there’s nothing stopping me from using Wikipedia. Most conferences nowadays require a paragraph on ethics in the submission, but I and many of my colleagues would have no qualms saying we scraped our data from open source internet forums and blogs.
  
  You're right, anyone can scrape Lemmy. But that's not the issue (to me anyway) - Reddit have sold user data - user generated content. None of what they're profiting from was generated or created by them. Are Reddit users who did generate all this content getting a slice of the profits?
  When I post on here I know it's all open for anyone to access but that's true of any non walled garden space. I've accepted the fact that it's going to get fed into the hungry maw of some AI behemoth or two.
  What Reddit have done is make money for doing absolutely nothing based on content others have created like some sort of technological tapeworm feeding second hand. And along the way they killed off a lot of tools that users loved, moderators found made their jobs easier and people with a visual disability found vital. And all this so u/spez can live out his mini-Musk fantasies.
- Fuck Reddit, but why does this matter? Them selling internal analytics and profile information isn't going to be nearly as valuable as post/comment history which has already been public and scraped continuously since the site's foundings. Practically every LLM is already has already scraped the entire site! Whatever company is buying their info is probably the only ones doing it legitimately. You can also assume Lemmy is no different, it's all public and scrapable for LLMs to freely feast on.

451 comments