• @Dark_Dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Reddit banned me through IP address or something. Whatever new account i create will be banned within 24hrs even if i don’t upvote a single post or comment. I tried with 10 new account all banned and all new email address. So gave up and randomly changed all my good comments. Shifted permanently to lemmy. Missing some of the most niche community. But not so much to return to reddit.

    Edit: I didn’t even commit any rule violation. Took a too long to change from modded reddit app. I only logged in once. That doesn’t amount to blocking me from every using reddit.

    • @dumblederp@lemmy.world
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      21 year ago

      If you use a vpn and a disposable email you can get about a week out of an account if you need to comment, it’ll get quietly shadowbanned though.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    21 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    OpenAI has signed a deal for access to real-time content from Reddit’s data API, which means it can surface discussions from the site within ChatGPT and other new products.

    It’s an agreement similar to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year that was reportedly worth $60 million.

    The deal will also “enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to Redditors and mods” and use OpenAI’s large language models to build applications.

    Recently, following news of a partnership between OpenAI and the programming messaging board Stack Overflow, people were suspended after trying to delete their posts.

    No financial terms were revealed in the blog post announcing the arrangement, and neither company mentioned training data, either.

    That last detail is different from the deal with Google, where Reddit explicitly stated it would give Google “more efficient ways to train models.” There is, however, a disclosure mentioning that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also a shareholder in Reddit but that “This partnership was led by OpenAI’s COO and approved by its independent Board of Directors.”


    The original article contains 334 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 48%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • @micka190@lemmy.world
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      81 year ago

      Realistically, when you’re operating at Reddit’s scale, you’re probably keeping a history of each comment for analytics purposes.

      • @bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I used redact.dev to mass edit all my comments, worked pretty well. Problem is that if you mass delete, they’ll restore them pretty quick, but so far they haven’t reverted my edits.

      • @Rolando@lemmy.world
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        21 year ago

        Back when I deleted all my comments, I was told I could claim to be in Europe and make a request citing the European law that Reddit has to follow. I think Reddit had a page where you could make the request, but of course it was hard to find.

        • @db2@lemmy.world
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          151 year ago

          They’re not multiple though, edit it and then delete it and it’s gone. They disabled all the tools to do it though so it’s manually or nothing now.

          • @Coasting0942@reddthat.com
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            141 year ago

            Damn. You outsmarted them well paid data jockeys. And assuming your edits change the actual comment and don’t simply hide the original.

            I could be an idiot too though. Reddit might have been running this whole shit show on the original version of the database system and be upselling to buyers.

          • @SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world
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            121 year ago

            They just reload a previous cached comment, doesn’t matter how many times you edit or delete, it’s all logged and backed up.

        • metaStatic
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          171 year ago

          yep they fuckin got us

          but it’s not like our posts are safe here either. This is the world we live in now.

          • @the_doktor@lemmy.zip
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            11 year ago

            We have to either make AI illegal or make it accountable by giving references to where it gets its data so it can properly cite its sources.

          • andrew
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            71 year ago

            But here, the API is open and I can run my own copy and train my own LLM same as anyone else. It’s not one asshole who decides to whom and for how much he’ll sell the content we all gave him for free, so he can justify his $193 million paycheck.

        • @Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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          51 year ago

          Will be interesting to see if they stoop so low as to allow this. Probably wouldn’t be a super wise move as most deleted posts are likely material that would not be great to train on anyway. My first thought when I read this was, “well, not on MY posts” I’m clean off of reddit.

          • mox
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            111 year ago

            There have already been reports of people being banned and finding their posts restored in response to their attempts to delete them.

          • FaceDeer
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            71 year ago

            There are torrents of complete Reddit comment archives available for any random person who wants them, I’m sure Reddit themselves has a comprehensive edit history of everything.

  • @db2@lemmy.world
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    81 year ago

    Not my posts. Go ahead, look at what remains. The rest was edited and then deleted.

    Fuck you, Steve. Right in the ass.

    • yeehaw
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      101 year ago

      If only snapshots and backups were a thing…

      • @Todgerdickinson@lemmy.world
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        31 year ago

        Yea that’s the problem isn’t it. I had a great idea involving bullshit-efying my comments by editing them slowly with a LLM via long running script and repeatedly over months.

        I realised that they probably don’t delete the original text on edit anyway which, as you say is probably buried in a backup someplace.

        • Ace! _SL/S
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          21 year ago

          I don’t think it is in backups only. My guess is they store your full edit history for each comment/post/whatever. Newest one will be shown on the frontend, rest is for data vampires

          • yeehaw
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            21 year ago

            This is it exactly. Edits to use are “changed”. To the back end it’s just an iteration while the rest still exist.

      • @CeeBee@lemmy.world
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        61 year ago

        It’s theoretically possible, but the issue that anyone trying to do that would run into is consistency.

        How do you restore the snapshots of a database to recover deleted comments but also preserve other comments newer than the snapshot date?

        The answer is that it’s nearly impossible. Not impossible, but not worth the massive monumental effort when you can just focus on existing comments which greatly outweigh any deleted ones.

        • yeehaw
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          11 year ago

          It’s a piece of cake. Some code along the lines of:

          If ($user.modifyCommentRecentlyCount > 50){

          Print “user is nuking comments” $comment = $previousComment }

          Or some shit. It can be done quite easily, trust me.

          • @CeeBee@lemmy.world
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            11 year ago

            It can be done quite easily, trust me.

            The words of every junior dev right before I have to spend a weekend undoing their crap.

            I’ve been there too many times.

            There are always edge cases you need to account for, and you can’t account for them until you run tests and then verify the results.

            And you’d be parsing billions upon billions of records. Not a trivial thing to do when running multiple tests to verify. And ultimately for what is a trivial payoff.

            You don’t screw around with infinitely invaluable prod data of your business without exhausting every single possibility of data modification.

            It’s a piece of cake.

            It hurts how often I’ve heard this and how often it’s followed by a massive screw up.

            • yeehaw
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              11 year ago

              The words of every junior dev right before I have to spend a weekend undoing their crap.

              There are so many ways this can be done that I think you are not thinking of. Say a user goes to “shreddit” (or some other similar app) their comments. They likely have thousands. On every comment edit, it’s quite easy to check the last time the users edited one of their comments. All they need is some check like checking if the last 10 consecutive comments were edited in hours or milliseconds/seconds. After that, reddit could easily just tell the user it’s editing their comments but it’s not. Like a shadowban kind of method. Another way would be at the data structure level. We don’t know what their databases and hardware are like, but I can speculate. What if each user edited comment is not an update query on a database, but an add/insert. Then all you need to do is update the live comments where the date is before the malicious date where the username=$username. Not to mention when you start talking Nimble storage and stuff like that, the storage is extremely quick to respond. Hell I would wager it didn’t even hit storage yet, probably still on some all flash cache or in memory. Another way could be at the filesystem level. Ever heard of zfs? What if each user had their own dataset or something, it’s extremely easy and quick to roll back a snapshot, or to clone the previous snapshot. There are so many ways.

              At the end of the day a user is triggering this action, so we don’t necessarily need to parse “billions” of records. Just the records for a single user.

              • @CeeBee@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                There are so many ways this can be done that I think you are not thinking of.

                No, I can think of countless ways to do this. I do this kind of thing every single day.

                What I’m saying is that you need to account for every possibility. You need to isolate all the deleted comments that fit the criteria of the “Reddit Exodus”.

                How do you do that? Do you narrow it down to a timeframe?

                The easiest way to do this is identify all deleted accounts, find the backup with the most recent version of their profile with non-deleted comments, and insert that user back into the main database (not the prod db).

                Now you need to parse billions upon billions upon billions of records. And yes, it’s billions because you need the system to search through all the records to know which record fits the parameters. And you need to do that across multiple backups for each deleted profile/comment.

                It’s a lot of work. And what’s the payoff? A few good comments and a ton of “yes this ^” comments.

                I sincerely doubt it’s worth the effort.

                Edit: formatting

                • yeehaw
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                  11 year ago

                  How do you do that? Do you narrow it down to a timeframe?

                  When a user edits a comment, they submit a response. When they submit a response, they trigger an action. An action can do validation steps and call methods, just like I said above, for example. When the edit action is triggered, check the timestamp against the previously edited comment’s timestamp. If the previous - or previous 5 are less than a given timeframe, flag it. “Shadowban” the user. Make it look like they’ve updated their comments to them, but in reality they’re the same.

                  We’ve had detection methods for this sort of thing for a long time. Thing about how spam filtering works. If you’re using some tool to scramble your data, they likely have patterns. To think reddit doesn’t have some means to protect itself against this is naive. It’s their whole business. All these user submitted comments are worth money.

                  Now you need to parse billions upon billions upon billions of records. And yes, it’s billions because you need the system to search through all the records to know which record fits the parameters. And you need to do that across multiple backups for each deleted profile/comment.

                  This makes me thing you don’t understand my meaning. I think you’re talking about one day reddit decides to search for an restore obfuscated and deleted comments. Yes, that would be a large undertaking. This is not what I’m suggesting at all. Stop it while it’s happening, not later. Patterns and trends can easily identify when a user is doing something like shreddit or the like, then the code can act on it.

                  It’s a lot of work. And what’s the payoff? A few good comments and a ton of “yes this ^” comments.

                  this

        • @skulblaka@startrek.website
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          11 year ago

          Just collate them based on edit/deletion date… Each post will have a last-edited attribute that can be used for sorting. Even more so once the AI is bootstrapped enough to start recognizing the standard protest edit messages. At that point you hardly even need human oversight anymore, because the bot will be able to recognize “that’s a fuck spez edit, ignore that; this post looks good; that’s a Shreddit/PowerDelete edit, ignore that” and so on. Can even have it fetch the previous edit automatically when it comes across something like that, to a point where a comment removed by a PowerDelete tool is nothing more than a cover letter that states “there was once a real human-generated comment in this location”.

  • @myliltoehurts@lemm.ee
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    1521 year ago

    So they filled reddit with bot generated content, and now they’re selling back the same stuff likely to the company who generated most of it.

    At what point can we call an AI inbred?

    • @restingboredface@sh.itjust.works
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      181 year ago

      I wonder if Open AI or any of the other firms have thought to put in any kind of stipulations about monitoring and moderating reddit content to reduce ai generated posts and reduce risk of model collapse.

      Anybody who’s looked at reddit in the past 2 years especially has seen the impact of ai pretty clearly. If I was running open ai I wouldn’t want that crap contaminating my models.

        • Ghostalmedia
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          151 year ago

          A model trained on jokes about bacon, narwhals, and rage comics.

          • FaceDeer
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            21 year ago

            By “old archives” I mean everything from 2022 and earlier.

            • @BakerBagel@midwest.social
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              131 year ago

              But there were still bots making shit up back then. r/SubredditSimulator was pretty popular for awhile, and repost and astroturfing bots were a problem form decades on Reddit.

              • FaceDeer
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                11 year ago

                Existing AIs such as ChatGPT were trained in part on that data so obviously they’ve got ways to make it work. They filtered out some stuff, for example - the “glitch tokens” such as solidgoldmagikarp were evidence of that.

        • @mint_tamas@lemmy.world
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          31 year ago

          That paper is yet to be peer reviewed or released. I think you are jumping into conclusion with that statement. How much can you dilute the data until it breaks again?

          • @barsoap@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            That paper is yet to be peer reviewed or released.

            Never doing either (release as in submit to journal) isn’t uncommon in maths, physics, and CS. Not to say that it won’t be released but it’s not a proper standard to measure papers by.

            I think you are jumping into conclusion with that statement. How much can you dilute the data until it breaks again?

            Quoth:

            If each linear model is instead fit to the generate targets of all the preceding linear models i.e. data accumulate, then the test squared error has a finite upper bound, independent of the number of iterations. This suggests that data accumulation might be a robust solution for mitigating model collapse.

            Emphasis on “finite upper bound, independent of the number of iterations” by doing nothing more than keeping the non-synthetic data around each time you ingest new synthetic data. This is an empirical study so of course it’s not proof you’ll have to wait for theorists to have their turn for that one, but it’s darn convincing and should henceforth be the null hypothesis.

            Btw did you know that noone ever proved (or at least hadn’t last I checked) that reversing, determinising, reversing, and determinising again a DFA minimises it? Not proven yet widely accepted as true, crazy, isn’t it? But, wait, no, people actually proved it on a napkin. It’s not interesting enough to do a paper about.

            • @mint_tamas@lemmy.world
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              21 year ago

              Peer review, for all its flaws is a good minimum before a paper is worth taking seriously.

              In your original comment you said tha model collapse can be easily avoided with this technique, which is notably different from it being mitigated. I’m not saying that these findings are not useful, just that you are overselling them a bit with this wording.

              • @barsoap@lemm.ee
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                11 year ago

                It was someone different who said that. There’s a chance the authors might’ve gotten some claim wrong because their maths and/or methodology is shoddy but it’s a large and diverse set of authors so that’s unlikely. Fraud in CS empirics is generally unheard of, I mean what are you going to do when challenged, claim that the dog ate the program you ran to generate the data? There’s shenanigans about the equivalent of p-hacking especially from papers from commercial actors trying to sell stuff but that’s not the case here, either.

                CS academics generally submit papers to journals more because of publish or perish than the additional value formal peer review offers. It’s on the internet, after all. By all means, if you spot something in the paper that’s wrong then be right on the internet.

  • @villainy@lemmy.world
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    41 year ago

    “Strikes” made me think they were cancelling the deal. Like strike-through, crossed it out, etc. Too bad.

  • Possibly linux
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    1 year ago

    They now are paying Reddit? I thought they could just scrape for free.

    Also, you can not delete anything on the internet. Once something is public there will always be a copy somewhere.

    • @Fetus@lemmy.world
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      261 year ago

      Scraping through a website at the scale they are talking about isn’t really viable. You need access to the API so that you can have very targeted requests.

      This is why reddit changed their API pricing and screwed over everyone using third party apps. They can make more money selling access to LLM trainers than they could from having millions of people using apps that rely on the API.

      • Dr. Moose
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        1 year ago

        Scraping at scale is actually cheaper than buying API access. It’s a massive rising market, try googling “web scraping service” and there are hundreds of services that provide API to scrape any public web page and bypass the blocks for you and render all of the javascript.

        • @BatrickPateman@lemmy.world
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          11 year ago

          Scraping ia nice for static conten, no doubt. But I wonder at what point it is easier to request changes to a developing thread via API than to request the whole page with all nested content over and over to find the new answes in there.

          • Dr. Moose
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            11 year ago

            Following a developing thread is a very tiny use case I’d imagine and even then you can just scrape the backend API that is used on the public page for the same results as private API.

    • @micka190@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There’s actually legal precedent against scrapping a website through unofficial channels, even if the information is public. But basically, if you scrape a website and hinder their ability to operate, it falls under “virtual trespassing”.

      I’m assuming it would be even worse now that everyone is using the cloud and that scrapping their site would cause a noticeable increase in resource cost (and thus, directly cost them more money because of cloud usage fees).

      It’s why APIs are such a big deal. They provide you with an official, controlled, entry point to a platform’s data.

      • Dr. Moose
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        1 year ago

        It’s the opposite! There’s legal precedence that scraping public data is 100% legal in the US.

        There are few countries where scraping is illegal though like Japan and China. European countries often also have things called “database protection” laws that forbid replicating public databases through scraping or any other means but that has to be a big chunk of overal database. Also there are personally identifiable info (PII) protection laws that protect storing of people data without their consent (like GDPR).

        Source: I work with anti bot tech and we have to explain this to almost every customer who wants to “sue the web scrapers” that lol if Linkedin couldn’t do it, you’re not sueing anyone.

        • @General_Effort@lemmy.world
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          21 year ago

          Refreshing to see a post on this topic that has its facts straight.

          EU copyright allows a machine-readable opt-out from AI training (unless it’s for scientific purposes). I guess that’s behind these deals. It means they will have to pay off Reddit and the other platforms for access to the EU market. Or more accurately, EU customers will have to pay Reddit and the other platforms for access to AIs.