Reddit Inc. is weighing feedback from early meetings with potential investors in its initial public offering that it should consider a valuation of at least $5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, even as it is estimated below that figure in the volatile market for shares of private companies.

Imo Reddit has been the winner of the 3rd party apps and fuck spez protests. The users came crawling back. A few of us went to lemmy and formed quality communities, but for the most part, a large majority are on there.

@[email protected]
creator
link
fedilink
91Y

yeah similar case between X and mastodon like many migrate to Mastodon after Elon takeover. But, at the end they are going back

nicetriangle
link
fedilink
11Y

deleted by creator

Nah I’ve had a reddit account since the dawn of time and I’ve now switched completely over to lemmy. Can’t remember the last time I logged onto reddit

Now we can watch this place grow into the thick veiny caterpillar reddit always should have been

HubertManne
link
fedilink
301Y

meh.im happier as a member of the federation and honestly if we got all the reddit users it would lower the quality fast.

z3rOR0ne
link
fedilink
101Y

Probably an unpopular opinion here, but honestly I’d rather just everyone migrate to lemmy and mastodon and leave reddit and twitter broke and empty husks. A low quality federated platform is still better than a mediocre centralized one.

For “us” e.g. the users of the federated platforms i’d prefer the smaller, nicer and more qualitative community we have currently.

For the users of reddit there is the ones that also want this experience (again) and i am confident they’ll find their way eventually.

For the users of reddit that just want the quick meme/outrage video and farm karma on the ever same joke-chains, i think they are in the better spot for themselves than it would become if they’d clash here with the different culture.

For society as a whole i think enshittification is necessary to drive people off of platforms eventually. I wholeheartedly agree, that the enshittified web needs to go down, but it can only come from people realizing it for themselves.

deweydecibel
link
fedilink
English
221Y

I mean, that was never seriously in doubt. The days of massive site migrations happening overnight are long over.

What matters is the momentum.

Every dumb move sends a wave of people over to the Lemmyverse, and some of those people stay, building on the community here

maegul (he/they)
link
fedilink
English
481Y

Similarly with twitter and mastodon. Generally, that’s fine … smaller niche online spaces are a good thing (as many who’ve remained have discovered I suspect).

But in the end, for those who see this fediverse project as a mission to “take back the web” … so far only pretty minor movement has been made on that front. To the point that IMO I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter etc just “win” and the whole “alternative” social media thing stays “alternative” and relatively small. If there’s a chance of this, I’d say to fediverse advocates that they should maybe rethink what the fediverse is and what it’s good and not good for, because there’s a real chance here that the fediverse kinda dropped the ball, especially mastodon which has been going strong for a while now.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
141Y

I’ve never used Mastodon, but from what I’ve heard it’s an entirely different ballgame where you basically need to go where the people are. e.g. artists seeking commission work need more rather than less people, and if you want to follow a particular someone, you go to where they are not the other way around.

And if their servers have anywhere close to the level of technical glitches that we do here on Lemmy… well it is quite off-putting, especially to non technically minded people.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
5
edit-2
1Y

I’ve been on Mastodon for over a year and I never experienced anything that could be classified as a technical glitch. From a tech / UI perspective it feels very polished to me.

I guess the only exception would be that old posts are sometimes missing on profiles from different servers.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
21Y

Thank you, that’s helpful to know:-). Kbin had MANY issues and that was the closest I’d seen.

It seems to confirm that what is holding Mastodon back isn’t technical at all but just the design - i.e. like if people are on X then that’s where most other people want to be, similar to Windows where it is not technologically superior, just the default for some reason.

maegul (he/they)
link
fedilink
English
15
edit-2
1Y

I’m not sure they have technical glitches in the same way lemmy does. Interestingly, the difficulties people have, I think, are because federated social media is actually a bad non-idea technology to use for a twitter clone.

So much either doesn’t work how you’d expect or involves new problems that all together they start to defeat the point for many. For example, replies to a post. The author of the post sees all of the replies. But replies aren’t actually federated unless certain conditions are met based on whether someone on your instance follows the person writing the reply. As a result the author of a post that receives many replies has to manage/tolerate a bunch of replies that have no awareness of the fact that they’re just repeating what has already been said, sometimes many times over. For people replying to a post from a small/niche instance, they basically don’t see any of the other replies, which just makes for bad content for them, but also means they constantly risking being really annoying people which in turn effectively punishes small instances. This is generally referred to as “context collapse”, and yea, it’s something kinda extraordinary when the core feature of a social media platform actively destroys the context of conversations.

Lemmy doesn’t have this problem because its based on groups where the whole premise is that the whole conversation gets federated, and for that reason I think a reddit clone or a forum or a youtube-clone (or anything based on groups, sub-reddits or channels) is a better fit on the fediverse.

The other friction mastodon has is that, as a twitter-clone or microblogging platform, its core mechanic is following people and allowing people to form their own network of connections and friendships. But once you’ve got federation and instances in the mix, where defederation happens, then you have this often completely separate dynamic (ie the relations between instances) capable of completely slicing your personal social network in many destructive ways. Often this happens without people hearing about it (as there aren’t mechanics for notifying people of defederations AFAIU), so that they have to find out after some time to realise that they hadn’t heard anything from a whole bunch of friends and were wondering what had happened. Moreover, what such people can then do to re-connect with those friends is rather non-trivial. It’s probably the major draw back of fedi-drama, that the majority of people affected by it don’t benefit from it and would prefer to just be on the big instance (mastodon.social) that no one really defederates from or just go back to twitter.

EDIT (more ranting):

The way someone I like (as a person on social media) put it, after giving mastodon a good shot, was that mastodon misunderstands what people want from social media, that mastodon puts independence over socialising when people prioritise it the other way around … the whole point is to connect and converse, not to run your own instance and make sure you’ve defederated from everyone who has it coming.

Now there’s the whole issue of making sure someone vulnerable to abuse is able to ensure their own safety and happiness from would-be assholes and abusers and even those eager to voice unwelcome, abrasive and triggering points of view which are generally tolerable because they’re the mainstream. Federation across instances can help with this … but can also make it worse because anyone can talk to you from any instance over which you have no control or information until it’s too late. In many ways, decentralisation isn’t great for these problems and creates new problems that a centralised form of social media simply doesn’t have (not least of which being that the whole thing is about copying you and your posts out to everything on the network). It’s for this reason that BIPOC left mastodon and went back to twitter, because to them, mastodon was the racist/facist place, not twitter. In light of that phenomenon, it’s worth considering the perspective that decentralised social media might be a bit of a weird idea and rightly seen as a bit of a fanatical and even a bit of a right-wing or libertarian movement.

In the case of group-based platforms like lemmy and forums however, I think it makes much more sense. Many independent forums are out there, and have been and hopefully will be for a long time. Why not contribute Open Source software for such things (such as lemmy) and enable them to connect to each other however they wish.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
71Y

Yikes. It does not sound pretty. For them at least, but indeed, Lemmy is a whole other deal. It seems to mainly just need some polish? Especially easing in new people, if increasing the numbers is really the goal.

Old-Reddit’s days are numbered… so we’d best prepare for the next incoming migration.

maegul (he/they)
link
fedilink
English
51Y

The weird thing is that people on mastodon mostly go along happy with their feed. Those that have found the problems too much bounced or just learnt to tolerate it. One thing that may fade away is the idea of running your own personal instance. I get the feeling that some don’t find it to be entirely worth it. There are “relays” though, which are commonly used, and basically feed in content from major instances as though you’re following a bunch of people there. I don’t really know how that goes though.

With lemmy (and kbin too), yea, it certainly feels like it’s not far from being kinda “done”, at least as a version “1.0”. Scaling up to many more users is likely to surface more issues though. But we’ve got many apps and alternative front ends, a somewhat stabilising API and months now of mostly working as intended.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
21Y

Yeah Lemmy got much better with v0.19, while Kbin has barely improved visibly at all it seems so I just gave up on it for now.

I still suffer the issue, on both mobile and desktop browser, that literally every time I come back, to pretty much anywhere I have to login again - I cleared cookies a few times but that didn’t seem to help. Most instances seem to have that, though I may have an odd selection of them (Kbin, Discus.Online, and StarTrek.website), and there are the occasional days where I have to attempt to make every comment at least twice for it to stick (but at least now if it doesn’t go through, you notice, unlike previously where it disappeared into the void invisibly, though I only had Kbin experience back then).

I haven’t bothered to research the apps yet - security, stability, ads vs. no, etc. - so all that I’m saying is for the vanilla browsing experience.

Also people report that the creation of new accounts from the mobile browser is barely if at all functional. I haven’t tried that myself, but it does seem like the experience varies enormously depending on which method of interface someone is using - and that’s going to be off-putting to a migration event, like if something doesn’t work it would be better to put up a sign saying “this (often?) doesn’t work on a mobile, just go to a desktop computer for this task”. Caveat: assuming the desire is to bring in more people who are less technically minded, for the sake of e.g. content creation.

And this doesn’t even begin to cover the modding concerns:-).

maegul (he/they)
link
fedilink
English
21Y

Re kbin, you might be interested in mbin … it’s a fork and has active development happening. They have at least one instance up that I’ve seen. Generally seems to be a positive move.

And yea plenty of rough edges. Your experiences definitely sounds worse than mine though (and I’m on web apps too).

just bookmarked this post to remember it when some nerd tries to tell me again that federation solves all our problems in the wordl 😅

maegul (he/they)
link
fedilink
English
01Y

Yea, I do think there’s a bit of cult-hype around federation and decentralisation and has been for a while here in the Fedi. Which is really just tech hype … the idea that some technology magically solves problems.

In reality, better social media requires more than just a technology.

Which is why I knew the only way it would work for me would be to

  • DNS Block it
  • Leechblock it
  • Block it from Search Results

And it works!

To a degree. The large subreddits, like AskReddit, get far fewer upvotes on the top posts of the week than they used to get. I think there’s a good chunk of folks who left for a replacement, then left their replacement without going back to Reddit.

There’s very little quality on Lemmy. It lacks diversity. It’s quite authoritarian left. Tankies under every rock. Even in non-politics communities. I still use a forked version of Boost to lurk reddit. But as someone else said, if never recommend Lemmy to anyone I actually know.

It lacks diversity.

I think what you really mean is that you don’t feel like you fit in here.

If that’s what I meant then I would have simply said that. If that’s what you choose to believe, so be it. Most observant people can see this is a rather large echo chamber. It’s really obvious.

It’s also not really a place for normal people.

I’d never recommend Lemmy to anyone that isn’t used to dealing with tankies and delusional zealots

Yeah, way better to stay on Facebook and Nextdoor and deal with actual literal fascists.

On the subs I visited on reddit I’ve encountered virtually no fascists. I don’t need to discuss politics all day and even then the takes were way less extreme than on here.

It might be difficult to imagine for some of the zealots on Lemmy but I don’t want to be stuffed to the brim with Chinese and Russian propaganda. I don’t need to hear how bad the west is and how it has to burn, die, whatever. I don’t care how superior the communist ideology is and why liberals are the root of evil.

It literally reads like a bunch of absolute idiots and edge lords thriving in their bubbles, be it hexbear, chapo stuff, political memes, etc.

Agreed. During the pandemic, I adopted a policy of unsubbing to any subreddit that made me angry. Usually this came in the form of people bringing up trump/capitalism/whatever out of completely nowhere. luckily the Beehaw people seem to be pretty good about actually having conversations and not just devolving into mocking trump every second. But whenever I venture into some of the other instances, I see some of Lemmy’s true colors. Chronically online people completely out of touch with reality kinda run shit around here.

People having to get used to people is common. If they can get used to their uncle talking about how the earth is flat I’m sure they they can get used to people on Lemmy.

I don’t recommend lemmy because I don’t have conversations about social media sites with people.

People are forced to deal with their crazy uncles. If they didn’t have to, they wouldn’t.

You can get used to everything, most people would probably quit though.

I spend maybe a tenth of the time here that I spent on reddit

90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.

I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.

Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.

I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).

The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).

I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.

Did they? Other than /nfl most of the communities I followed went to shit very quickly and haven’t recovered. They are mostly bots talking to bots or the same questions and post over and over with minimal new content

FenrirIII
link
fedilink
131Y

For me, it was politics that sank Reddit. I was banned from a half dozen news forums for criticism of the IDF in Gaza at the beginning of what most people now acknowledge to be an ethnic cleansing. I reported every account calling for murder and genocide of Palestinians, which is against the Reddit TOS. They permanently banned me for “report abuse” for doing their jobs for them. They have obviously shown that there’s no freedom of speech, even when you follow the rules, if it goes against the feelings of the administration and the unelected moderators. Fiefdoms ruled by angry internet trolls shouldn’t get an IPO.

Shadowbanned from r/news and God knows what other subredits, because I refused to add an email. Banned from r/politics because I said that not wearing a mask during Peak COVID was a death wish. (Apparently that’s promoting violence or whatever?). Banned from r/Pyongyang because I dared question next months chocolate rations.

Site is a complete shithole.

Sure, it’s been the “winner” if you were expecting reddit to topple from top spot as best aggregator - but it was never really reasonable to expect that.

Even now, the perspective that Lemmy should strive to be some kind of new reddit is really daft.

What we actually want, is for Lemmy to grow in a sustainable and manageable way with real actual content enjoyed by real contributing users.

The quality of Lemmy has improved dramatically in the last 6 months. Way more users, servers, content, and third party apps. The quality of reddit has decreased dramatically in the last 6 months. User counts may not have suffered, but the content and the experience most certainly has.

Lemmy’s very nature killed it for me.

It’s way too much work to try and cultivate the setup I built with ease on reddit.

I’m still here, but the site iddn’t make it easy.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
271Y

No it does not indeed.:-|

It’s worth noting that Reddit changed too, permanently, both in terms of ease of use (not only 3rd-party apps, but also the mobile and desktop browser routes too) and in how many content creators simply left - who knows what they are even doing now (reading books, touching grass, some came here ofc). Even many niche subs over there are empty, dead, or one may consider them dying from lack of interesting content (though those people still there I expect would be resistant to admit that).

And it will be interesting to see how that changes further, the moment they get their IPO and thus can finally kill off old-Reddit, which still allows you to block ads iirc? That will drive additional content creators away. Perhaps they will come here - despite how we are not ready for that.

Anyway, the old Reddit is just flat gone, for many people, and there is no going “back”, ever, even if you wanted to, it’s not there to return to, especially after the IPO changes it still further.

FaceDeer
link
fedilink
141Y

I still visit Reddit and that’s definitely been my experience - my front page diversity has gone way down, many of the subreddits I am subscribed to have basically gone silent. There’s still a few specialized ones left, and the big news ones I still read, but only in old reddit. When old Reddit is gone then so am I.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
2
edit-2
1Y

Why wait? Jump now! Hehe, okay so only you know your schedule, it’s mostly just a funny phrase (but also: don’t sleep on it forever - you don’t want to be surprised one day when it disappears overnight with no notice).

For me, it’s not just emptiness - it’s the site being devoid of content anymore. Like look at r/firefox after the mods left (I forgot which communities got ousted vs. who left voluntarily, but either way that community packed up and followed them iirc). It is all just the most basic of questions “how do I…?”, often with later edits “I should not have bothered asking, these people will just yell at you”. Just about every post has 1 or 0 upvotes (though more uncommon spikes above 10 do exist, and even rare ones with hundreds), but the titles of the popular posts are all things that are extremely common knowledge - “Mozilla says Apple’s new browser rules are “as painful as possible” for Firefox”, “YouTube is loading slower for users with ad blockers yet again”, “Will Firefox survive in the browser market?”, “Chrome wants to track me? Bye. I use Firefox …”, “Google settles $5 billion privacy lawsuit over tracking people using ‘incognito mode’ (Re: Switch to Firefox ASAP).” These are things that I constantly hear about on Lemmy.

And even more than that, I dread speaking there after Rexit - the trolls omg the trolls… it’s just not fun. Then again, I tended to make posts advertising useful alternatives to Reddit, so you could argue that I brought that upon myself? :-P (edit: although in a community that calls itself by the name r/RedditAlternatives, THAT was the POINT of the discussion that we were TRYING to have there!!)

Neato
link
fedilink
English
141Y

Really? It was more work to find and occasionally add communities than it was to spend months-years to accumulate subs for your frontpage and block subs for all? I browse all on lemmy and find new communities that way. Or by links and referrals for newer ones.

No we didn’t. I happily left reddit the day Apollo stopped. They also lost my premium subscription.

I also stopped Twitter when musk took over. I use Bluesky or Mastodon and find both platforms to be superior.

Sure, some folks may have, but many of us have not. Does that matter to Reddit? probably not. Do I care? not really.

Modern Reddit is unusable, and old reddit isn’t mobile friendly.

Zuberi 👀
link
fedilink
441Y

Lol at the 50% haircut since the API shit.

Can’t wait to release this ransomware data this year 😍

The haircut isn’t done yet…

LOL if you listen to some angry people in other threads, they will claim that not a single thing has changed.

You wrote a ransomware?

Zuberi 👀
link
fedilink
41Y

Me? Never. Idk how to even turn on my Mac.

Sell it to musk, finish the job

Can’t they blow Musk up by accident or send him on a rocket to Mars that orbits forever there (oops)? Something like the submarine last year but better.

Surely we now have the technology

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
551Y

Can’t wait for him to rebrand it as Y

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
221Y

Or 3

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
181Y

Let’s not rule out Æ

Nah, sounds “like a password”

Password hint: ‘p…’

hunter2

correcthorsebatterystaple

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
49
edit-2
1Y

I 100% can see it easily selling for that much.

You want to know why it’s worth that much?

Petabytes of raw training Data for LLMs. Arguably atm reddit us one of the better gold mines of LLM training data on the internet, bazillion of posts already formatted as post-response chains, which is the exact type if format an LLM wants to train on.

Can you imagine how valuable those servers loaded with posts are to a company like OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft?

5 billion is quite reasonable to harvest every reddit post that has ever been made ever and cut it off from your competitors.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
371Y

Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody’s just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying “boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don’t have to force an intern to scrape it for us”.

I asked Bard whether they could make a bastardization of rogersimon10 post and it made this:

Ah, the 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost. A pocket rocket some called it, a ticking time bomb I preferred. Owned one myself, sunshine yellow with a dent shaped like a screaming Muppet (courtesy of a rogue shopping cart). Let me tell you, that car was less a vehicle and more a high-octane game of Russian roulette with pistons.

Every morning was a gamble. Would she purr to life like a hungover kitten, or unleash a symphony of coughs, bangs, and the ominous "Check Engine" light disco? One day, the radio spontaneously switched to polka, which, let's be honest, is only two steps away from a thermonuclear detonation in a Fiesta's internal combustion fiesta.

Speaking of fiestas, the fuel gauge was as reliable as a politician's promise. One minute it was brimming, the next it was flashing "Bone Dry, Mate," even if I'd just filled it. Learned to carry a jerrycan like a Prohibition-era bootlegger, never knowing when the engine's thirst would strike.

But oh, the things that little lemon could do! On a good day, that turbocharged engine was like a caffeinated hummingbird on steroids. Weaving through traffic, leaving Audis in the dust (until their turbos spooled up, of course). Handling? Razor sharp, unless you hit a pebble, then it was suddenly a drunken ballerina on roller skates.

Comfort? Ha! The seats were about as plush as a park bench, and the suspension was tuned for "Feel Every Pebble in the County." But hey, it kept you awake, which was essential considering the constant fear of spontaneous combustion.

In the end, I sold the Fiesta to a circus clown for a fistful of juggling pins and a lifetime supply of those tiny, uncomfortable hats. He seemed thrilled, probably because the polka radio was a bonus feature for him.

So, would I recommend a 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost? Only if you enjoy existential dread, questionable fuel efficiency, and the thrill of living life on the edge (of a breakdown). Otherwise, stick to something safer, like a heavily sedated hamster. You'll thank me later.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a tow truck and a very suspicious mechanic who keeps asking about "jumper cables." Wish me luck.

P.S. Don't forget the jumper cables. Seriously. You'll thank me later.
TheRealKuni
link
fedilink
English
31Y

That’s remarkable.

Scraped data isn’t legal to resell, scraping isn’t even legal in the first place.

Just because you can scrape the data doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.

Companies like MS, Google, OpenAI, FB they make money by selling the usage of their LLM services to other companies who then they use that service to make their own products.

If it came to light that MS/Google/OAI/FB were using illegal training data for their LLMs, it would get all those other companies hit in the crossfire.

So these companies have to do a shit tonne of diligence to assure their investors and clients that their LLMs are purely trained on legally obtained data and are safe to use.

And you know what is a super easy way to assure them of that?

If they literally own the original data themselves

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
11Y

Scraping is legal

Have you been following any of the court battles involving LLMs lately?

The New York Times suing OpenAI. Getty Images suing Stability AI. Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin suing OpenAI.

All of those cases involve data that has been scraped. (In the latter two cases, the memoir/novels were scraped from excerpts and archives found online).

It’s too late to say with complete certainty that it’s all legal (the appeal processes haven’t all been finished yet), but at this point it looks like using scraped and copyrighted data in training LLMs is legal. Even if it’s going to turn out not to be legal, it’s very clear that nobody’s shying away from doing it, because we have the courts showing as a statement of fact that it’s been happening for years.

Everything you’ve written is just fantasy. We have a lot of reality which contradicts it. Every LLM company has been primarily relying upon scraping data (which we know to completely legal) and has been incorporated copyrighted and scraped data in its data sets (which is still legally a grey area, but is happening anyway).

NYT hasn’t actually won that case yet, so it’s pointless to bring up. OpenAI has publicly stated that NYT heavily has misrepresented their findings.

OpenAI’s value would plummet and crash if they gained a reputation for using illegal material to train their AI on, investors would drop them so fast.

This is just a simple fact. LLM providers reputation is heavily staked on the legality of their data.

So far the courts have ruled in these companies favor.

But it’s extremely likely illegaly scraped Dara from reddit would not pass the sniff test and debestate an offending companies reputation.

If you don’t understand why, you have to do some brushing up on why these LLM services are worth so much and who is using them and for what. Once you understand that, it becomes extremely apparent why legally owning the entire history of every reddit post ever would be extremely valuable, and why a 5bil price tag is actually not that crazy.

The worst part is that ai chatbots will start responding like redditers. I can’t wait for chatgpt to regale me with a story about his dad beating him with jumper cables, or jolly ranchers, or hell in a cell.

Nonstop “this”

This

And then everyone clapped

And took an arrow to the knee

And then asked “AITA?”

Stern
link
fedilink
111Y

Thanks for the gold

This data was out in the open for a decade and still is. People could train their llm without problems.

Not legally / free.

And yes, that very very much matters if you intend to actually sell the service to companies that they themselves dont want to get hit in the crossfire of potential lawsuits for building their products on top of stolen info.

So if you can own the data itself (via buying reddit), you now have an ENORMOUS quantity of prime training data that you’re investors and potential customers know is legally clean, because you literally own it.

Exactly. Why is this being upvoted?

They just started charging for API usage so isn’t it already not open?

And then everyone started deleting accounts, comments and even rewriting and poisoning their comments. The data was way better before the API change.

Do you actually think this has any impact? That’s silly.

Reddit’s servers have the original copy of every single post made, undoubtedly, and everytime you edit your post, they store that copy too.

So not only has everyone “poisoned” their data ineffectively, they literally have created training data of “before” vs “after” poisoning to compare the two for training the LLM against poisoned data.

Whoever buys the right to that is going to have a pretty huge goldmine, and perhaps they will rent it out, or perhaps they’ll use it themselves.

AJ Sadauskas
link
fedilink
51Y

@pixxelkick @ardi60 Well, if anyone wants to buy it for that purpose, then I just hope they remember to screen out the more NSFW parts of Reddit.

Otherwise, their bots are going to start giving some rather unfortunate responses to customer questions…

Most LLMs have tonnes of NSFW data in their training.

Typically, if this wants to be blocked, a secondary RAG or LORA is run overtop to act as a filtering mechanism to catch, block, and regenerate explicit responses.

Furthermore, output allowed lexicon is a whole thing.

Unfiltered LLMs without these layers added on are actually quite explicit and very much capable of generating extremely NSFW output by default.

I am looking forward to the hilarity of it for a while though.

“Cooking bot, i have found this cucumber i need to use before it gets bad. What can i do with it?”

“Shove it up your rectum”

Could lead to a lot of interesting lawsuits and let a lot of MBA bros look rather stupid.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
-3
edit-2
1Y

I still wouldn’t use it, but Elon should buy it so he can more convincingly posture a saviour of independent social media. Just drop the tracking, sell square ads on the sidebar based on content only, open up api for all sorts of uses and make rif is ridiculous fun for reddit the official client. Give it to five geeks to maintain and call it a public service. What’s a bit more down the drain? It’s all gonna go Midas anyways. At least that would be a win for the internets

How about $5?

deleted by creator

Silver award. Take it or leave it

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
11Y

You’re going to need more than that to cover the legal liability of the lawsuits brought against the company. You could easily end up in the negative, with a mess like that!

$5 + tree fiddy?

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
61Y

Remember the defamation lawsuit where spez lied about what the third-party app dev said, so the dev released the recording of the call proving it?

Also, the other time that happened as well? If you bought the company for a few million, $5 might be all you end up left with! (I hope!:-) 😂

In short: fuck spez.

Fuck spez

Ah… so they’re shorting it.

Herbal Gamer
link
fedilink
31Y

As in short circuit?

Short selling, Wallstreet thing for making money when the stock. It kinda works like borrowing a stock and immediately selling it, then we it’s time to return the stock you borrowed you buy a replacement and if the price has gone down you keep the profit.

shorting means to bet against a stock. instead of buying a stock and waiting for it to grow over a long period and selling it for more money (long position), you borrow the stock from somebody, sell it, then buy it back (for a lower price) after a short amount of time to give back to whom you borrowed it from. (short position). If the stock price rapidly drops in that time, you gain money.

If this sounds like a perversion of what investing was supposed to be, yeah welcome to wall street

They havent been profitable in a decade. What’s their plan for monetization?

Jamyang
link
fedilink
English
11Y

Valuable training data for AI. Spez does not give a damn about it. He gladly takes money and sell it off to someone like OPEN AI whose models can be trained on its data.

“I trained on millions of users’ data and now I ape them. AITA?”

Everyone here are thinking $5 billion means Reddit won. Wasn’t their evaluation at $15 at one point?

If you mean that an entitled douchecanoe who has no trouble allowing genocides to occur on his service getting stupid rich, then they did win. If you are looking at how much they could have gotten, then, yeah, they suck.

Sorry, what genocide happened on Reddit?

The Great App Genocide of 2023.

If the went from fifteen bucks to five billion, yes they totally won 😉

Well I guess I fully set myself up for that one lol

Reddit is such a nice example of capitalism turning a genuinely nice thing into a pile of garbage.

Did they fucking recover deleted messages?

I can find every post after automatically editing and deleting them afterwards

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
651Y

for that bot-infested shitposting dump?

Ghostalmedia
link
fedilink
English
231Y

Pardon me, but I believe you mean that bot AND AD invested shitposting dump.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
5
edit-2
1Y

Fuck Spez right in the p***y!

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
61Y

Hey, it’s not just bots! It also serves as a home for trolls and whiny children too.:-)

I hope you know what I mean when I say that Reddit is dead, but Long Live Reddit! :-P

Good luck!

I’ve already left, but seeing them marching towards an IPO makes me even happier with my decision. I just fear that the mountains of helpful troubleshooting and advice on Reddit will be locked away forever soon, while the rest of the web falls to SEO and AI-generated nonsense text…

possibly a cat
link
fedilink
6
edit-2
1Y

deleted by creator

Reddit Was the only site Google could effectively search. Rip googling questions and adding reddit.

I’m trying out Kagi a little bit, and it has a federation search mode of some kind. I tried it for a search and it gave me results from Lemmy.

I don’t know yet how Kagi compares to Google in terms of results quality, I barely used it so far. It’s pretty expensive though.

Oh yeah that’s true, I should try it as I use it as my main search engine nowadays.

Man, and it works great. It is waaaaay more common to find good answers to a question from a bunch of randoms on the Internet than trying to get an actual answer from a random website. Sometimes you find bs but you can usually quite quickly filter it out, and it gives a good basis from which to then continue to search on the topic.

I hate that Reddit is so good for answering questions. The alternatives are usually AI written unhelpful trash.

It was speedier and usually more effective than forums which crept at a snails pace.

Create a post

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

  • 1 user online
  • 40 users / day
  • 139 users / week
  • 304 users / month
  • 2.32K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.01K Posts
  • 43.4K Comments
  • Modlog