I just found out reddit sold everything we wrote to AI companies… and honestly I don’t know how to feel

I just found out reddit sold everything we wrote to AI companies… and honestly I don’t know how to feel

So I was reading about Reddit’s API controversy from 2023 and fell down a rabbit hole.

Turns out every post, every comment, every opinion you’ve shared here - reddit licensed it to openai and google. No opt-out. No warning. Just. - done.

And that’s just reddit. Meanwhile Google, Meta, and basically every major platform are quietly building a profile on you — your interests, your political leanings, your daily routine, your insecurities. All from things you said or clicked on “anonymously.”

The wild part? We already knew this was happening. It’s not new. Yet here we all are, still posting.

So I’m genuinely curious — why do you still use reddit (or big tech in general) knowing this?

Is it because:

  • The alternatives (Lemmy- kbin- etc…) just aren’t there yet?
  • You’ve accepted it as the price of the internet
  • You actually don’t think it’s that big a deal?
  • Or you simply never thought about it until now?

Not judging anyone — I’m still here too. Just want to hear honest answers.

  • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    Just do your best to stay anonymous on those sites, then it doesn’t matter. Use TOR browser, it changes locations at each instance. Use a VPN. Treat reddit and similar sites like the enemy. Keep it absolutely vague as possible. Every comment is a lie, are you a 40 year old male or a 17 year old girl? Married one week, trans the next. Your data is near useless if it doesn’t make sense.

  • Saprophyte@lemmy.world
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    2 个月前

    I deleted all of my posts days before the mass “adult settings of everything so it can’t be searched” and subsequent removal of most mods. I went back a month or so later to log in and found many of my posts restored. From that point I said I’d never go back to reddit once my history was removed.

    It took two more visits to re-delete my posts. One to lorem ipsum all the text and another to delete again, and two final visits to verify they had not been restored. After that I purged my account. If someone sends me a reddit link now, I don’t click on it. If Google sends me a reddit link in search results, I don’t click on it. Reddit doesn’t exist to me and I keep wondering why people keep posting reddit news on here like someone keeping up with their ex after a breakup.

    It’s over. Spez doesn’t want you back. It’s time to move on.

      • Saprophyte@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 个月前

        I do wish there were more niche groups I could find to fill the gaps with Lemmy. I have a group of former twatterers I follow on mastodon now but it’s not the same. Hopefully things will improve over time as reddit continues to enshittify and there’s a need for these niche communities elsewhere.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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      2 个月前

      My MO at Reddit was to use throwaway accounts for a couple of months. So they’ve got me big time. Fuck spez.

  • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    2 个月前

    As someone who writes lengthy posts with dashes (see my post history) the text in OP’s screenshot is probably not out of an LLM.

    There are zero em dashes, three compressed double-dashes, and four single dashes all used in the same casual way to break the flow of text, along with some ellipses and numerous grammatical inconsistencies/informalities which indicate that’s just how they write.

    But they’re all different. Just so you know,

    This is an em dash (note its length): —
    This is an en dash (slightly shorter, but still longer than a regular dash, and has specific uses): –
    This is a regular dash, the one on your keyboard: -

    And different from them all, the compressed double dash. That’s what’s in OP’s screenshot, and they’re what you get on Lemmy and Reddit when you type two dashes together with no spaces between, and it passes for the em dash in human writing.

    This is a compressed double-dash: –

    Here on Lemmy, it looks exactly the same as an en dash, and that’s the tell: no one really uses en dashes outside specific circumstances like a parenthetical range of numbers, and why would they? En dashes are a pain in the ass. I don’t even know the keyboard shortcut for them.

    But regardless of whatever else it may look like, a compressed double dash (–) is always shorter than a real em dash (—).

    You can always look at the source of a comment (the little paper icon under it) to know which has been used. The only real em dashes in my online writing ever come from material copied from a source that uses them, because I don’t, at least not online.

    Also, LLMs will generally employ em dashes in the old style (think books published on paper during the 19th and 20th centuries) where there is no space between the em dash and the letter it follows, like this— but I find that irritating, because visually it breaks a sentence like someone vocally stopping themselves mid-phrase. So I never do it myself, and most human writers do not anymore (though there are some) and generally it hasn’t been the style for at least twenty, thirty years now though you’ll see it in older publications like The New Yorker where their style guide hasn’t changed since the 1930s.

    Rather, a human writer will generally employ an em dash — or a compressed double dash – with spaces before and after, or at least after. Like I just did. Look at the source, see it for yourself.

    As someone who has written with em dashes for well over forty years I want them back, goddammit.

      • foodandart@lemmy.zip
        0·
        2 个月前

        Weird - I use them all the time - and no one’s accused me of being anything other than an old fart, (“…Okay 'boomer…” - which I now wear as a badge of online longevity honor…) or at best, a nuisance best kept from polite society.

        • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          I see what you did there, lol.

          I’ve been accused multiple times of “being AI” on Lemmy alone, and it always amazes me. Usually, as far as I can tell, it’s just for being long winded and having complex sentence structure. Every time, I look back at the post they are accusing of having come out of an LLM, with all its grammatical imperfections and missed punctuation, lacking all of the polish and shine and smooth-to-the-point-of-fawning language LLMs produce, and think what are these people reading???

          But strangely they never accuse me of being an old fart or call me a boomer, which would actually be true.

          • foodandart@lemmy.zip
            0·
            2 个月前

            …and think what are these people reading???

            You said it in the post… “long-winded, complex sentence structure…” By and large the bulk of users here are two, maybe three decades younger than we are, and as such, they came of age and were educated in the post-Reagan era. You can really throw some of them for a loop and use colons and semi-colons in a few nice independent clauses.

            Not to digress too much, have you seen the videos on youtube by Elle Cordova? Her “Grammarian” videos are a riot.

            I do so love clever use of language…

            • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
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              2 个月前

              No, I hadn’t seen those before now, thanks for the recommendation. The one you linked was great; I’ll have to look at the rest of them. I haven’t seen a physically bound copy of the Chicago Manual of Style since the 80s, but even so the Errorist caused me to physically cringe a couple times, lol.

              Maybe I should get another copy. I write as I think and then try to clean it up afterward, which means that in reality I only have enough grammar to be able to look back and see what is still wrong after I’ve already posted something. I could use the polish!

    • chunes@lemmy.world
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      2 个月前

      hard disagree on whitespace. every book i’ve ever read doesn’t use any next to emdashes.

  • happydoors@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 个月前

    I’ll pop on Reddit if I’m feeling up for brainrot and to see how the masses are being told how to respond to federal news. It is really draining the circle in quality.

  • Red0ctober@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 个月前

    I think you will find that most people posting here are not posting on Reddit these days. A see a few saying they still do, but mostly on niche subs that don’t have the critical mass needed here.

    The Fediverse has a ton to offer, I personally abandoned Reddit and haven’t looked back when the API lockdown happened. Even though a lot of the niche communities that I was a part of aren’t here, I prefer posting to a platform that doesn’t disrespect its users.

    Edit: whoosh. I did not realize this was a post on reddit OP screenshoted.

    • Obi@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      2 个月前

      After cutting it out completely for a while I started lurking Reddit again because honestly while I love Lemmy for general discussion/politics/memes it just doesn’t have anything related to my more niche interests. I do however refrain from ever posting/commenting there because fuck giving them any more data from me or helping drive their engagement metrics.

      • BilSabab@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 个月前

        i quit cold turkey because reddit nuked my account and it’s been four months since i last peeked into that wretched place and no love lost i guess. reddit been progressively more bad for me ever since 2022 russian invasion and lots of mentally unstable harrassing me because “fuck ukraine you nazi” wasn’t what i was looking for on the platform. just so many aggressive tankies.

        the last thing i did on reddit was digging through yet another wave of bots reporting every post on my subreddit as violence or threats and then the next day - bam you’re banned for 7 days, no 30 days, no permabanned no appeal fuck you.

          • BilSabab@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 个月前

            i’m yet to encounter them en masse and they’re not lurking anywhere around me so that’s already something. on reddit - smorgasbord bizarre was basically under siege at times

    • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 个月前

      Same for me. The only thing that’s awkward is when I try to explain something I saw “on the Reddit alternative I use.” I still can’t get my friends to understand Lemmy.

      • BilSabab@lemmy.world
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        2 个月前

        i just tell everyone “if Lemmy from Motorhead was a forum” and it makes way better impression that “reddit is what happens if metafilter was the shits”

      • darkdemize@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        2 个月前

        Shit, most of my friends don’t even get Reddit. Lemmy would probably make their heads explode.

        It should go without saying that I don’t work in tech.

      • osanna@lemmy.vgEnglish
        0·
        2 个月前

        I tried their app. It was soooooo bad. Such a waste of time. I can only imagine how much data they were harvesting from your phone. I uninstalled it almost immediately. Then deleted all my Reddit accounts. This was around the time of the api ban.

        Anyone remember alien blue? Such a shame they killed it and turned it into the reddit app they have now.

    • abbadon420@sh.itjust.worksOP
      0·
      2 个月前

      I’m pretty much in the same boat. But I do lurk on Reddit sometimes when I’m looking to doomscroll, but I often find that the ads and bots prevent me from enjoying the doomscroll mindlessness.

      I thought it’d be funny to share this post, because it looks like some people are becoming fed up with reddit for all the reasons that have been glaringly obvious for years now. Eventhough this is likely a bot post. Which might make it even funnier.

  • SirSamuel@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 个月前

    I wrote a poem about this a while ago.

    AI Datascraping Is Not the Problem

    We are commodities
    We exist to be bought and sold
    By the ruling class
    I have been bought and sold
    Many many times
    But only my thoughts
    And identity
    And words
    And face
    So that’s okay
    I’ll just scroll other stolen thoughts
    On a phone built by an eight year old
    Who was bought
    And sold
    Half a world away

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 个月前

    If they don’t buy it wholesale, the ai companies will just steal it if it is web accessable in a way with their crawlers that disregard all rules and conventions.

  • Cekan14@lemmy.org
    0·
    2 个月前

    The reason I still use Reddit is that, as a polyglot, there is barely any content in most languages I speak in the Fediverse. It’s already difficult enough to find content in Galician or Catalan/Valencian on mainstream social media such as Reddit or Instagram. I did delete my Reddit account, stopped using the site for weeks but… I found no alternative? The closest was Mastodon, but I never really liked Twitter’s format which is basically what Mastodon is, so it is not for me. And, of course, there is absolutely NOTHING here on Lemmy in those languages. So, between feeding them with free data or not being able to use my languages at all (because I live in a place where none of them are spoken) I had to choose the lesser evil.

          • i_love_FFT@jlai.lu
            0·
            2 个月前

            When a language dies, a piece of hunan culture dies with it. Letting a language die is allowing erosion of human culture. Forcing or encouraging a language to die (so everyone can use the best language that I understand) is colonialism.

            • Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              0·
              2 个月前

              Apart from the “evil” thing, which is why I’m making this separate comment: why is it a bad thing if a language is not spoken anymore? As far as I understand, speaking languages is about understanding one another, and in that case, wouldn’t it be much better if we only had one language? That way, everyone could understand each other. I don’t care about the “colonialism” thing, for all I care that one language could be Esperanto. If no one speaks a language anymore, then it’s not useful for communication anymore.

            • Cekan14@lemmy.org
              0·
              2 个月前

              Yep. Besides, in the case of Galician and Catalan (especially the former) they are endangered languages; there is nowhere where onmy Galician is the official languages, and bad policies are pushing it to the brink of extinction. Most Galician you hear today is heavily influenced by Spanish, so having spaces where the language is protected, in this context, online spaces, is critical to its salvation.

      • Bamboodpanda@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 个月前

        Not OP, but depending on how many languages they’ve learned, I’d guess it’s about practice. You need constant exposure or the language fades, and losing a language you’ve invested years into genuinely is a kind of loss. So yeah, ‘lesser evil’ tracks.

        • Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          0·
          2 个月前

          I don’t understand how losing an investment into something is “evil”… Unfortunate maybe, yes, but evil?

          • Bamboodpanda@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 个月前

            I apologize. I assumed English as your primary language and understood the phrase is an idiom. The idiom “lesser of two evils” implies that neither option is good, but one is clearly better than the other. It doesn’t have to be “evil” literally.

    • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      anyone can scrap Reddit or Lemmy just fine to train on LLM.

      Well, until you hit flood limits and reddit keeps giving you ‘prove you’re not a robot’ screens or just timegates you from loading new pages at all.

      Plus, it would be a lot more convenient to have API access to automatically provide your AI with only the text of posts and not have to scrape/strip entire pages.

      You could scrape reddit without paying for it, but it would probably be a much slower and more annoying process.

        • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          But the only ones doing it are bigger companies anyway, they’ve money to do it.

          Yeah… Compared to the expense of buying literally all the computer hardware in the world, paying reddit for API access is nothing.

    • Lag@piefed.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      We switch to local meeting spots and pass around flashdrives of weekly memes. Refer to your local memester to turn in your flashdrive for a new weekly updated meme drive.

      I need to open a meme truck.

        • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
          0·
          2 个月前

          In many cases, it’s easier to have an online culture with an anti-AI policy than a local one. A bunch of people already insist on using AI when interacting with others irl, and many more are passively supportive of them doing so. (i.e. “they don’t care”, but in a very different way from how “they don’t care” about someone eating vegan).

          So an online group that has persistent identities where it’s hard to get a new account with a good status whose culture opposes AI is going to be much easier to keep AI-free than your local neighborhood third space.

          • REDACTED@infosec.pub
            0·
            2 个月前

            Right, like how heavily Lemmy hates AI but then I see AI generated memes or shitposts constantly?

            • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
              0·
              2 个月前

              Lemmy doesn’t have an anti-AI policy. It has people that hate AI, and some communities have rules that forbid AI in some contexts, but any instance federated with db0 is at the very least tolerant of AI.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      This is 100% why Reddit made the API changes the originally brought many of us over. AI companies scraped the web, made LLMs, and Reddit missed out. They wanted to make sure the next ones paid them.