cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/8775123
Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”
The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data.
Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an “Enshittification” community :-)
I just went over to Reddit to see what people were saying about the recent news. It’s sad that people are so down on this news yet they refuse to leave. Buncha addicts
It still amazes me that there are people on Reddit who are upset about this but still keep using Reddit lol!
Even if they’re “addicts” it’s not like there’s no where else to go! That’s like an alcoholic finding out that their favorite brand of whiskey is laced with lead and arsenic but still continuing to drink it instead of just changing brands!
I guess there are still some people there who naively think that it’s all somehow going to go back to what it used to be, but at this point it mostly seems like pure laziness
Even if they’re “addicts” it’s not like there’s no where else to go!
For people that want a true reddit replacement, there ISN’T somewhere else to go.
It certainly isn’t lemmy (imo) Twitter is a cesspool…
You are correct that Lemmy is not a “true Reddit replacement”. In my opinion it’s better than Reddit! The only downside I’ve really noticed is that there aren’t as many varied communities built up yet
Reddit rose from the ashes of digg. Maybe lemmy will take its place, maybe another will. The biggest issue is that it’s already a trove of knowledge, and users are shredding their account history as they leave to keep reddit from profiting from it. I understand why they do it, but it’s kind of like burning the library of Alexandria.
I get it - there are in fact no real alternatives. Lemmy is great but there are a lot of niche communities I learned a ton from on Reddit and Lemmy just doesn’t have the people for that. Yes, yes, maybe one day, everyone just needs to contribute more, etc. But for right now, that’s a large barrier to exiting Reddit for a lot of people.
Everyone wants to consume the content without doing the work to actually populate the content.
Exactly, that’s the issue. Leave reddit, start whatever community you want on Lemmy. Quit expecting others to do everything for you. Believe it or not, reddit didn’t have your favorite little niche until someone made it and started posting content. I’m tired of these lazy bullshit excuses for staying on reddit or any other traditional social media site for that matter.
I guess once the Revanced apps will stop working, or old.reddit will be shutdown, they will give Lemmy a try
What does that have to do with revanced? That’s YouTube clients? And is there any news on revanced being shut down somehow?
I’m sure it’s like pissing into the ocean but I went back and edited my most popular posts and replaced them with AI generated nonsense that is supposed to be difficult to classify for LLM AI’s. I doubt it will have an effect but it would certainly be funny if you had enough people do it.
I guess because they are grammatically correct but contain paradoxes, ambiguity, and are utter nonsense.
Here are some samples:
“Silent thunder vibrates noiselessly through the colorful darkness, illuminating unseen sights with invisible light in a transparent fog.”
“The invisible painting, clear as day, vividly colors the transparent wall, telling untold stories in a language never spoken.”
“The motionless wind, still yet turbulent, swiftly calms the turbulent stillness of a restless peace in a serene tempest.”
It’s an odd situation.
Reddit is a valuable resource of information. Any web search will often offer at least one result directing you to Reddit. The problem though is that sometimes that information is wrong or biased.
I just deleted all 16 years of my Reddit content this past week; and then my account. I learned a lot, discussed a lot, and shared a lot in those years. It’s a little sad to scrub that from history (also very liberating and satisfying).
On one hand, the Reddit website is hosting a magnitude of data I could never comprehend. That costs money. And as a tool that so many millions of people use and rely on, shouldn’t we financially contribute to the thing we use and rely on?
On the other hand, straight up selling our information, with so much of it being very personal and intimate, should be a crime.
And, on the bionic hand, shouldn’t we get a say as the content creators as to how our information is used to train an artificial intelligence? Not whether we permit it to use our content but, as a community, we should be afforded the input to decide how the future of AI uses our information. Ten, twenty, fifty years down the road, AI will have learned from our memes and biases and the stories we made up just for karma.
Reddit is like the Bible. Sure, there’s some valuable lessons in there but most of it is bullshit and unverifiable. Still, a mass intelligence will take it as fact and pick and choose how it wants to use what it learns to guide it for centuries.
Have you confirmed that it was all successfully deleted?
Check back in a day or two from a different internet connection. There’s been lots of stories of people deleting their content, and it’s showing back up later.
To late now. Without an account there’s no way to avert comment necromancy by reddit. It’s why I kept my login; so I could clean up stragglers.
The death of Reddit is near.
I wonder what will be of it in a few years. A tumblr situation or completely closed down.
It faces death at about the same rate as Facebook. Just like facebook, it has a huge database of information and a still-active userbase that just doesn’t care that Spez is trash or that Reddit is wringing their content and eyeballs for money. It will still be around 20 years from now, just like aol email addresses.
I do not think this is a good comparison.
Facebook has 3 Billion active users while Reddit has about 850 million per month. Now what do each site consider as an active user will be interesting.
Facebook also has other platforms, Instagram and threads. They also do not have significant adult content issues that Reddit has so they do very well on advertising. The very nature of the social media platforms are very different so much so that companies see it as a necessity to advertise and post on them while never considering Reddit.
I think the more accurate comparison is Twitter/X. As they have the same adult content issues that harm their advertising. We have seen how much the value of Twitter has fallen even though it was inflated to begin with. Also they have Mastodon as the ad free competition.
I truly believe in the end Reddit will fail but will be bought out by another company to expand their portfolio. Similarly to tumblr being bought by Matt Mullenweg who owns Wordpress. It will become someone’s money hole fun project to see if they can revive it.
TLDR: bad comparison, reddit is gonna die bro
Facebook is sooo much worse than Reddit in this regard. It’s a hollow shell of its former self, and not even because users fled. Facebook wanted to be TikTok or something, despite being its own niche successful platform, and they completely destroyed the soul of the website. You cannot see friend’s content anymore, unless you go directly to their page. The entire feed is full of worthless and terrible group posts that you never expressed any interest in. You can’t do anything to stop it. If you block 100 groups, a million more are there to take their place. So now people have started fleeing from the site, because it’s nothing like the site they were interested in to begin with.
Going to get so much worse just stop using it
