this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
199 points (97.6% liked)

Bye Reddit

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1 users here now

A memorial for the front page of the internet. If you have left reddit or is considering leaving then this community is for you.

There’s also a blog documenting the rise and fall of reddit as well as news and thoughts on the whole issue.

It serves as an archive for posts and topics in case reddit decides to delete anti-reddit posts within its platform.

https://byereddit.com <—- here it is in case you’re interested

founded 1 year ago
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An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ok but Reddit absolutely saves the old comments though

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (4 children)

You are polluting the data set. Do it a few times with different text sources and the scrubbers won't know what part of your comment history is good. Replace, don't delete.

[–] ArbitraryValue 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I'm pretty sure they'll know that the first version of each comment is almost certainly the good one. People sometimes edit a comment to add new information or fix a typo, but they almost never replace nonsense with a good comment, rather than the other way around.

Edit: fixed typos, also replaced excerpt from Moby Dick with this post.

Edit 2: the comments you post here are totally available for machine learning, so I don't see much of a point in deleting my Reddit comments as long as I'm participating in Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Maybe. Almost every comment I make I edit. The key is that by doing this you are inserting the possibility. It is actually easier, and safer, to just filter out edited comments than it is to try to sort out what's good and what isn't. The bottom line is that the best course of action is to avoid Reddit at all cost. If you do go there and feel compelled to comment, then coming back the next day to replace your comments a few times is better than "deleting".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

They don't need to filter out edited comments. They keep the first version. It's good enough.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You could easily compare old vs new and see how much has changed. If more is added, edit is good. If 80% matches, it was probably minor fixes.

If nothing matches, then remove it from the data set and use the original comment. Which I'm sure they still have.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

They know people are messing with the data so they aren't going to trust anything changed a few days after first posted.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Not in a meaningful way. It’s easy to detect and revert a change like this. Instead of bulk changing all your comments, you should slowly change them over time.

Even then, users don’t usually edit most of their comments. Sure Reddit might be naive and just take the current comments, but it’s pretty trivial to reverse this kind of thing.

Probably good to do it to make this process harder and more error prone for Reddit but I would not be under the impression that this has an impact beyond being annoying.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Or it’ll help train the AI to recognize when that happens and more easily parse history for the relevant stuff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

It's already happened last year during the reddit exodus. The AI models either validate the data or not. This has a chance of working, which is better than doing nothing at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Over a long period sure. If they see a spike where say, 25% of a user's comments are changed in a day, then they'll just use day -1

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Reddit has a copy of every comment and edit, they probably have copies of things users type but don't actually end up posting.

It is brutally trivial to notice mass edits like this.

The only thing this is doing is making it harder for people scraping it without paying, making what reddit is selling actually valuable.

Every edited or deleted comment is more money in their pocket.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Let this be a lesson on generating content for a business and not getting paid for it.

With that said, I’m sure the frog posts are exactly the kind of quality content needed to train an AI.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Big business is likely scraping our Lemmy comments anyway.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Good point. At least it’s available freely to everyone instead of being used to make a profit on the content itself.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

See I don’t have any issue with data being free. I have issue with corporations hoarding it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Oh shit it's still Wednesday!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

My comments on that site are so dumb, ai will not produce any good text after using those as training data.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They'll gladly use that data, it makes the ai more human

[–] rustydrd 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Came here to say this.

This comment was powered by ChatGPT 4.5

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

This.

powered by redditGPT

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

are there copyrighted texts that have such distinctive patterns that they would be particularly easy to spot in an LLM's output? say, would replacing every comment with a page from moby dick or wuthering heights be more or less infringing than using harry potter? hypothetically.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago

Well, I'm pretty sure Moby Dick is in the public domain by now. If I were you I'd go for something from Disney which is mathematically certain to get somebody sued although I can't predict who.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (3 children)

i personally think the value of the comments are worth leaving for people to find later even if Reddit does use them in an underhanded way.
i recognize this may not be popular.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

You are entitled to your opinion.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yup. Reddit gives zero fucks about any form or protest or the degredation of the quality of content. They already have the metric the traffic originally created.

The only people negatively impacted are the people trying to find information that are pushed there by search engines when trying to find stuff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

As someone else brilliantly pointed out, leaving the comments hurts Reddit more than delete/edit.

Deleting/editing comments only hides the posts from the public. Reddit has the original posts, is ignoring all edits made to posts, and selling that original data.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Privately owned social media platforms are a dead end.

Libraries should host the peoples internet. Municipal mastodon has a ring to it I think.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

I left my comments there, thinking some day I might go back. But it's been months and I haven't missed it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I think giving their AI my depression is punishment enough.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I got banned from /r/AFL because I used Redact to scrub my comments. My how the turntables have turned and they turned out to be the real thin skinned pansy cunts. Not /r/sports during the kerfuffle.

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

Ai be like “stfu regard”

[–] drasglaf 1 points 6 months ago

And my axe!