Reddit has filed for its IPO. They’ve been preparing for this for a while, squeezing profit out of the platform in any way that they can, like hiking the prices on third-party app developers. More recently, they’ve signed a deal with Google to license their content to train Google’s LLMs.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, we’ve made a Firefox extension that will replace all your comments (older than a certain number of days) with any text that you provide. You can use any text that you want, but please, do not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material. Reddit’s data is uniquely valuable, since it’s not subject to those kinds of copyright restrictions, so it would be tragic if users were to decide to intermingle such a robust corpus of high-quality training data with copyrighted text.
Here’s that extension link again. To all our friends at Reddit, we wish you all the success that you deserve!
Tech companies usually take backups y’know? There’s almost certainly older snapshots from before the AI craze, or at the first sign of trouble …
The main buyer is Google. Google actually ALREADY has all the data on Reddit, they scraped and cached it all long ago. Remember how Google used to offer mirrors of pretty much any site? Well, guess what, they probably will have all that valuable gold stashed. So it’s not like reddit is actually transferring terabytes to Google, it’s just a licensing deal, and the execs are having a fun chuckle about users trying to “delete their data”
I think there is still value in doing it.
Reddit is still the best place for info, and adding site:reddit.com is likely to get you the best results for many different things, even with the risk of astroturfing. While this is true, reddit will stay top ranked.
If Reddit stops being a useful source because all the older content was removed, then it’s short term annoying for everyone but longer term a new solution will arise and Reddit won’t have this special status anymore.
Reddit isn’t going anywhere, and they WILL prevent this kind of existential business threat, if it actually becomes one. It’s pretty easy for them to institute a policy like “no edits after a month” — or serving older content
If Reddit actually implements this, then I think that’s a sign reddit sees it as a real threat. All the more reason to do it.
A year ago I replaced all my posts with utter nonsense that reads like real language. And guess what? Been checking lately and they didn’t change it back. Others reported that their deleted posts were restored from backup, my bullshit is still up because digital idiots can’t tell it apart from philosophy.
Better to post new comments doing that. That way they don’t have any “healthy” originals to sell.
Poison the well.
If you think they haven’t already cached your data then you’re absolutely brain dead. Deleting it is just comical.
Why does anyone think this does anything? Reddit doesn’t internally overwrite their memory of what you wrote before.
I would really like to do that, but there were multiple instances on r/atheism that I was able to help talk people coming out of a life of religion from making really terrible choices (like self-harm type stuff) and falling into a pit of despair and I feel like leaving it for other people to come across might help too.
Fuck Reddit, but if something I wrote would prevent even one person from hurting themselves, it’s worth me keeping it there. Maybe I’m being foolish, but that’s what I’ve decided.
Here is a link to the script for “The Bee Movie” Link for no reason at all. This is not intended as an example of content that you should replace your reddit comments with.
got to go check and see if any of mine have been reinstated
fuck them. everything is back and I have checked a few times so they did it within the last year.
this is some bullshit. I just ran power delete and it showed it deleting and my account shows it deleted but then on a seperate browser I can see a comment from a subreddit I was part of
Cat and Mouse problem. The current AI’s were trained on data they HAD. Making bigger and bigger models seems to be the trend. Old data, no matter how large and curated, just won’t be enough. Now they need to make new content for AI, that doesn’t create a feedback loop
deleted by creator
Love itttt
I started doing this with a Greasemonkey script I mostly plagiarized and replaced my posts with text from Moby Dick and Lady Chattetly’s Lover.
EDIT: The problem is that old.Reddit.com doesn’t access most of your comments. If you look at your comments on www.Reddit, you’ll see a ton of untouched content.
To bad I’m banned
