Reddit Will License Its Data to Train LLMs, So We Made a Firefox Extension That Lets You Replace Your Comments With Any (Non-Copyrighted) Text - The Luddite
An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.
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Reddit already has your comments. So does everyone else who might want to train an LLM, for that matter, there are archive dumps that anyone can torrent and those aren't updated "live" every time you vandalize your old comments. The only people that are inconvenienced by replacing your comments with gibberish are humans that may find that thread later on looking for information.
I disagree.
The more people are disappointed about reddit, the better.
Maybe, but we are losing a vast wealth of collected and archive information. Anything from resources for anyone who wanted to learn any hobby, places to go in cities for every niche interest you can think of, suggestions for what to do for various college situations tailored to every college in the US. The list could go on for a hundred more topics.
For a while it's been the only place you could get Google results that you could be reasonably sure you were getting multiple unsponsored human opinions and discussions in a thread. It's honestly tragic to lose that.
It is in the hands of a publicly traded corporation. As soon as that planned it was already inevitably lost.
Sounds like you haven't seen this happen before.. This is a typical pattern in IT. Sites will come and go. It's a good thing that people take action when they are not happy. Reddit exploited users and moderators to work for free, then sold their data.
The fact that it's happened before doesn't make it a good thing, and doesn't make it something that shouldn't be opposed.
Fortunately Reddit is well-archived so LLMs can still be trained off of it, regardless of what Reddit or its users try to do to the data now, but it's still a negative thing that doesn't have to happen.
But you can no longer be sure you’re getting unsponsored human opinions there. It’s already been ruined by bots and management decisions. Seems totally fair for the original content generators to salt the earth on their way out.
"It's ruined and that's a bad thing, so let's ruin it more. Including the older stuff that wasn't as badly ruined."
This is a very childish approach to life, IMO. If you don't like Reddit any more then just move on and leave it be for those who do still like it.
That may be, but it's their content and it's their choice if they wanna let reddit continue to profit from it or not.
They licensed Reddit to do what they want with it by agreeing to Reddit's ToS.
Tbh, that is on the profit driven corporation behind Reddit, not the users protesting against it
are humans that find that thread later [...]
that's the point too tho. Having content on their platform only provides value to Reddit shareholders. Removing that content deminishes the platform's value as a whole
Ik it's not much, but it might be a spec of sand in the cogs of capital. Also if a person was on that platform for quite a while, the effect is quite a bit larger
I agree with respect to the low likelihood of changing one's old posts being effective in preventing their being used as training data. I'd assume, however, that those who are motivated to "vandalize" (itself a loaded term to refer to altering one's own words) their old posts have more than one motive; in addition to inconveniencing humans, doing so devalues reddit as a place to find information and, in theory, punishes reddit for their actions, maybe even deters others from behaving similarly.
This a situation where I think that maybe a shared distaste/disdain for "slacktivism" leads to folks discouraging potentially effective collective action in one of the limited contexts where online protest has a chance of having any effect.
Most of my Reddit posting was advocating for policies that make sense (such as closing the wealth gap) and countering right wing propaganda.
That has value no matter who has it.
I don't have a distaste for "slacktivism." I have a distaste for pointless performative "protest" that only serves to ruin useful resources that could benefit others.
The only people that are inconvenienced by replacing your comments with gibberish are humans that may find that thread later on looking for information.
That's what I said awhile back, still ended up down voted to hell lmao
I've already started running into this, (probably) good information and the answer I was looking for was now "Pizza Paper Piper Follow Bumble" or some shit, but I'm sure reddit has versioning and has the original still so it was pointless.
Right but on the backend they capture deltas, then emit the newest version. Aside from explicit gdpr requests (lol) they never actually delete the originals (more lol).
Would it not have been smarter to subtly alter them, in order to not trigger database rollbacks? Plenty of ways to ruin intelligibility with minor changes.
When I requested my data a solid 30% of my comments had been successfully torched. Also, I highly doubt Reddit is going to do a full rollback based on my removal of my comment/post history. It also assumes that they are competent about their backups, which my professional career has taught me is never a given no matter how big the company or how big of aproblem it would be.
Then I demanded my data every month until they started ignoring me - just to be annoying, of course
Wow, you're the kind of person that makes every worker in IT hate the GDPR. It's good for consumers. Until the consumer is you. Think of the fact that a person has to actually fulfill that request, and you know that management never paid for tooling for that, they have to fuck around manually in the database every time.
To me there's a huge difference between being angry at a company and its leadership, and taking out the anger on the workers that are probably just as angry at their own management. It's like someone yelling at a level 1 phone support, as if that magically makes them able to help you, which is usually something they would be fired for even if they had the system access to fix the problem. They're paid to handle standard questions with a standard answer catalogue and nothing more.
You're not making life for the management difficult by repeatedly asking for a GDPR readout. Just for the workers who are already being paid fuck all to do shitty work in too long hours.
I didn't post any useful information, all I did was shit post during college sports game threads. Just lemme be spiteful against Reddit lol
Where can I find those archive dumps? The usual (unmentionable) torrent sites or is there a specific place for archive dumps?
The place I know about off the top of my head is academictorrents.com where you can find lots of large data sets useful for academic research. The torrent files themselves are small, so I'm sure they can be found in other places too.
Yes, correct. But also, let those people be inconvenienced. Reddit should not be convenient. The only thing it’s good for now is porn.
Which contributes to the death of the site, and the AI gets trained to treat untold reams of shitposts as truth.
I see that as a win-win.
I actually agree with this. The other day I searched for an issue on my PC. It looked like it was a rare issue and I'd only found one post on reddit about it. The solution comment was one of those "replaced with gibberish" ones :/ OP was even thanking the commenter for the solution that is now gibberish. That really got on my nerves.
Not only that but it actually brings up the value of their dataset. It makes theirs unique compared to the dataset you can build by scrapping for free. Every deleted comment literally adds worth to what they are selling.