- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you’re giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that’s the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what’s the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don’t allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for “security reasons”, meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it’s our data. That’s exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to “communicate with other people”: your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
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Remember they can’t afford mods or to pay anyone. They can rip off your content for themselves though!
Don’t Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit
(Emphasas mine.)
So shitposts are fine?
I’ve been training my whole life for this.
Yeah. I only post sarcasms without the /s until I get banned from all the subs.
It’s pointless anymore to try infoposting on reddit.
Take for example the soldering subreddit. The info on that sub is that you must slather everything in flux in order to solder properly. A guy posted yesterday citing 40 years of experience, saying that’s not how he’s done it. The comments are a mess.
Another post today, someone asks about air filtering the solder smoke. The consensus in the comments is it’s not a big deal. You can literally measure the particulate matter yourself to see how bad it is. Basically an average residential room size, say 100-200 sq/ft. You’ll basically hotbox yourself with smoke.
Another one that’s seen less often but the false idea persists. It’s that capacitors never short and burn out. I don’t know how or why that false idea floats around, but I’ve seen it over the years. I’ve replaced tons of caps that spontaneously combusted. Both electrolytic and SMD caps. Sometimes they just fail and short. No other fault.
Reddit is full of bad info. It’s site that relies on word of mouth and popularity contest. You do not build a knoweldge base of technical information this way. You’re getting an entropic game of telephone. That’s all reddit ever was and ever will be. It’s flawed paradigm by default.
A paradigm that lemmy is built off. So don’t you all be getting the idea that good knowledge is going to be getting sourced from here either.
Meanwhile I’m playing Oxygen Not Included, and like half the time I look something up about the game, half the results are on reddit. There’s a lot of accumulated stuff on there that’s still helpful.
Of course, any false or outdated info will quickly be obvious when you start up the game again. Lower stakes than soldering safety.
It’s kind of insane that integrated wikis with citations/documentation aren’t the centerpiece of (Reddit) communities.
Instead, we got… Discord?
Early iterations of the community did try to incorporate these features.
But simply tapping the sign that reads “Go read the wiki on this solved issue” doesn’t generate the kind of traffic and community participation that repeating the same copypasta every month or two does. Also, god forbid one of your mods does something like…
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post something unPC in a Politics community
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argue with content from a native advertiser
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piss off an admin… somehow
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sign in from a device in a way that triggers an automated unchallengeable ban
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fail to constantly scour your community of shitposts
Plenty of the old subs have been hollowed out, transferred, or otherwise denuded of their professional contributors for some stupid reason or another. And now the site is so aggressively policed that you can’t really join (much less re-join once you’ve been booted) to add anything useful.
This has been the OG Wikipedia’s fate as well, with mods getting older and links going stale and new contributors all getting hyper-policed for fear of bots, marketing accounts, and shitposters.
Small forums full of active users are more reliable for useful information than big forums full of lurkers and attention whores. That’s not unique to Reddit. Just very obvious, given the long and deplorable history of the platform.
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Don’t worry, they’re next, they’re just run by some what quiet assholes instead if fuckyou spez
It’s that capacitors never short and burn out.
As a long time maintenance technician, this made me unreasonably angry. This is something I would punch somebody for asserting.
O.o
I’ve been in it since the late 90’s, I feel, at most, like peeing in their shoes when they’re not looking.
They won’t learn anyway, least you can do is make them uncomfortable for while.
It is also one of the first things you learn when experimenting with capacitors. You burn a few while building faulty circuits.
Right after having burned a few resistors.
The second thing we learned in electronics class was that putting a 12v cap in a mains line makes a really loud bang.
Our benches were left unplugged every day and when we came in, we were to plug them in.
This devolved into finding ways to hide caps in the outlets in each other’s benches and a desire to show up very early to class.
The only subs that kept me around for years was r/electricians and r/askelectricians, which admittedly does usually have pretty accurate answers and info, and sometimes I just like to riff about work. Wrong answers get downvoted and removed at an almost scary speed.
But finally after like years of the same exact questions from homeowners that are just like “how do I wire a smart switch? What’s a switch loop / what do you mean my white wire is not a neutral? I took apart this mess of wires and didn’t take before pics how do I put it back together?? Do I need grounds???” I could go on lol. But I just realized how much a huge waste of time it all was. I wouldn’t call any of the troubleshooting or commenting “fun” it was just a way to pass time. I guess it’s better people get real answers than trust AI because a lot of time they try that first and post some of the answers these chat bots gave them and wheeeewwww boy are they some schizo hallucinated bullshit haha
I’ve been off all social media other than Lemmy for a while now. Since it’s not as active here it’s been better for me personally. It’s easy to refresh reddit and get a new thread every few minutes. On here I notice I’m seeing the same articles a couple times in a row and that’s my cue to hop off and read manga or play chess online instead or something.
Also yeah caps can go bad lol. We had these giant 18" tall ones on the solar industrial sites I worked at. This was 10 years ago so I forget the value I just know we had dozens of them each on 6 AWG wire. Part of our maintenance was to check for leaky ones. Because they’d leak then they’d eventually fail and then without the proper filtering for the system, usually the cabinet would catch on fire.
I was on a few narrow interest subs. I mean really narrow interest. There were folk they’d turn to for reliable historical analysis, folk they’d turn to for reliable cultural analysis, I was one of their data crunchers (I could basically find the line entries that looked wrong and the folk who had time to do more in depth forensic bullshit could dig into them) I mean on one of those narrow interest subs some people thought they were taking down a cult, I just helped shine a light on things. And learned about cults of course, can’t start a good cult without knowing how the toxic ones work
It’s a good thing that this could never happen to Lemmy and some vindictive mod would just take their instance offline, right… Right?
Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially.
Real “I grew up doing content farming in the early 2000s” energy.
great post. im glad it has so many upvotes.
additionally:
i think it ties back to many issues:- privacy
- stance and dividend of LLMs
- online culture. digital communities
- citizen rights
- and lots more!
I hate that “you were blocked by network security” page so much. Fucking smug fedora wearing neck beard with his arms crossed. What the fuck fo you think is going to be the difference of someone using a VPN vs being logged in with a VPN on network security? You’re just lying to me reddit.
They’re likely on the hook to prove to their investors that usage statistics are real people and not bots. All the changes they’ve made do that as well as “keep people safe” or whatever.
A lot of people “confided” in reddit in the past by making an anonymous account to ask a question about something they didn’t feel comfortable asking in real life due to social consequences, legal consequences, or perhaps mortal consequences depending on what was asked and what country the asker was in. Those people should consider that reddit could’ve sold them out.
With the new no VPN/must login rules people should consider that selling them out is reddit’s business model. Posting on the privacy subreddit is hypocracy at this point. Would a question about the privacy of reddit itself stay up on r/privacy?
Lemmy is ready for those people I believe. They just can’t be told about it via reddit.
It’s likely so they can block scraping and DDoSing from people behind a VPN by just banning their account.
That would be a bitch ass move reddit would do, yeah. “Oh don’t worry, you can use a VPN, just log in!”
logs in
banned
It’s way too late
If we all agreed to this when google was handing out invite only keys to gmail, then maybe we could’ve made a difference
The irony is that this argument will probably get more attention on Reddit than on any open forum: Centralised platforms are great for discovery and awful for preservation. Use them as the billboard, not the library. Keep the valuable stuff where you control the rules, the backups and the future.
agreed there, the rule should be, if your goal is to make sure your information is out there… don’t limit it to one place. Post it to Lemmy, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, keep it on your PC, and a flash drive, and have off site backups.
Exactly. Platform loyalty is a bad archiving strategy. If one platform disappears, changes the rules, or buries old content, your work and links still survive instead of vanishing with someone else’s business decisions.
After a decade of reddit and over a half million karma I quit for multiple reasons. Primarily the cash grab for the API and forcing the reddit app, but also the explicit acknowledgement that the mods and community were absolutely being exploited for unpaid labor and anyone who didn’t bend a knee could get fucked.
I’ve been slowly replacing, by hand so it doesn’t trigger their detection alerts, all of my 15 years of comments on Reddit, a lot of it valuable answers to tech questions or programming problems, with a randomly prompted unrelated paragraph of ChatGPT whatever.
When one of the first exodi(?) came, a lot people replaced their comments with random words through scripts, back then it was not as detected and prevented (which Reddit promptly scrambled to prevent), and thanks to people doing that I’ve eventually blocked Reddit from my Kagi altogether, simply because 90% of what I found was either questions with scrambled answers, comments that are just ads from bots, or just unrelated bullshit. So, it does have an actual impact.
Have fun selling that to AI companies.
i think the reason reddit deleted both my accounts, was so that i couldnt modify or delete my contributions.
after the accounts are deleted, they probably still have copies saved somewhere. but it revokes my access to remove or tamper with my content.LIke you I deleted all my comments and verified they were deleted. When I looked a couple of months later, Reddit had actually restored each and every one.
I’m slowly deleting them again. Maybe this time they’ll stay gone.
Deleting (or editing) comments does not change what the hosting website has, it just updates what they display. so there will be lines in a database saying:
- the original comment was “blah”
- on the 6th of August 2024 it was changed to “blah2”
- and the 20 of January the comment was deleted
There isnt a way for you to remove that unless there is some legal mechanism for you to force them to remove all data about you.
Even with GDPR requests there’s zero guarantee they actually comply with deletion requests. They may decide to show something that may lead to think they have complied. That’s it…
Have you tried a GDPR request?
That’s why I went with editing them to something random, unrelated to the thread, but still a feasible paragraph, in hope that this won’t trigger this mechanism.
This is one of those cases where AI generated comment pasted over the original comments to poision the data comes in handy. So AI is training off AI.
Unfortunately, I think there is a pretty easy way for them to detect comments that were deleted/edited with the intent of making them useless to Reddit: check the age of the comment/post when it was modified.
Whether they would bother to do this is a different question.I’d be interested in your results a few weeks/months from now.
You should back those up first and consider contributing them elsewhere. Maybe even just a WriteFreely blog with all your old comments and context.
I wish there was a third-party reddit archive, because before it enshittified it was a great resource for a lot of niche topics.
What I’m particularly concerned about lately is the growing share of online forums that don’t even publish their content on the web.
The most famous example of this type of forum is probably Discord.
As those of you on Lemmy know, many people chose Discord as an alternative after Reddit’s deterioration.
Hasn’t this problem already escalated to the point where access to content isn’t guaranteed not only to some bots but even to individuals without accounts?
Shouldn’t those who love the web be extremely wary of online communities that don’t even try to be based on the web?
That’s what I think.
If search engines truly only show the “existence” of forums, then the open web is truly over.
There really is a place for closed forums of enthusiasts where not everybody can get access and where you can talk without being indexed by Google, fed into LLMs and analyzed by Palantir. There is a place for an open discussion on a public square, a place for a chat among mates in a pub and a scientific conference where people can speak freely about their research without fucking Elon Musk leading an army of trolls into the audience
I don’t think that we should be wary of them. It is only natural that when the whole web is overrun by bots, these gated communities will pop up. It’s an easy way to keep a lot of bad traffic out, while a space for users to interact and be authentic.
And yes, I think the open web is truly over.
Good man.
(I agree wholeheartedly)
Big error is conflating services like Reddit and Discord with an open web to begin with.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
what about the subreddit posionai, they are doing the lords work out there
I don’t contribute anything worthwhile anywhere.
I see you, too, are a man of culture
