Deleting or using an overwrite script, and the reasoning was because in addition to pushing out 3rd party apps, douchecanoe Huffman was opening up reddit’s post history to LLM training, so that was us giving him the finger on the way out. While I agree it sucks for people looking at it from an internet archival perspective, at the time it seemed more imperative to jab the crap out of him and reddit as a business.
What’s so bad about that? Even on Lemmy I’m posting things in public, intended to be read by the public, and if somebody wants to train AI on what I’ve given to the public then good for them. I refuse to use a walled garden. Being proprietorial about online posts is probably not the most effective response to online surveillance. I agree that Huffman is a douchecanoe though.
Fediverse stuff is essentially not commercialized by nature.
We should hold commercial actors to entirely different standards than non-commercial ones. There’s no hypocrisy in doing so.
It wasn’t that Reddit was going to do so. It is that they were going to do so in a fundamentally proprietary way – they were treating the content as THEIR property to monetize and sell.
To be fair, it’s their prerogative. I left Reddit in protest of how they were using that prerogative, but I left my account open and comments undeleted for the people who might need it later.
At the time, trying to suggest that you can do these two things in that manner was not a popular opinion and as such received massive downvotes.
Mind you this is my lemmy-verse alt account, so no meaningful clues as to what I can contribute is found here.
It’s your account and your comments. You can do with them as you wish.
That’s the point. If you don’t wish to leave them behind to be profitable to Reddit, that’s also your choice. I don’t feel strongly about your choice to do it one way or another. Personally, I nuked my 15yo account and all comments completely because I don’t want to leave anything valuable behind to make profits for a company that I feel doesn’t deserve them.
The point is, those comments were mine, not theirs. I don’t want them selling them for profit, especially to an LLM mill.
I really hate the attitude that everything is exactly the same and that nothing is ever worse than anything else.
There is nothing naive here.
Reddit changed policy and philosophy significantly and that’s what led to the backlash and lots of users leaving. You know that and clearly agree with it. And using my comments for display purposes as part of the community under the terms and understanding I had 15 years ago is very different than using my comments to train AI and their new attitude that started this year.
We should hold commercial actors to entirely different standards than non-commercial ones. There’s no hypocrisy in doing so.
This should also be noted: you’re free to keep your content available on these for profit corporate websites, I’m by no means telling anyone what to do, but just know that they will ABSOLITELY not extend the same courtesy to you. Reddit bans people and communities alike all the time for no apparent reason (or stupid ones like speaking out against their terrible business practices, many or even most of whom are quite technical users who created a lot of helpful resources on the platform), deleting their content without a second thought, not to mention we live in a world where corpororations will outright kill and make it impossible to access content that we’ve directly purchased because the platform is no longer profitable to them and expect us to be okay with it.
You could argue that the attitudes toward the fediverse vs corporate web is a double standard, and I guess it is. But the double standard between the corporate web and its users is even worse.
I view it like open source where commercial and non-commercial are on an even playing-field, what matters is their contribution. The freedom afforded by a healthy open-source ecosystem should mitigate negative commercial interests, it doesn’t always work out like that but that’s the kind of thing I would hope for.
There are actually extremely valuable contributions to open source from commercial entities.
I think many people just did it because Reddit still benefits from the Google traffic. I wanted results from Reddit to be less useful and I want people to be frustrated when they go to find an answer on Reddit and see it no longer exists.
Deleting or using an overwrite script, and the reasoning was because in addition to pushing out 3rd party apps, douchecanoe Huffman was opening up reddit’s post history to LLM training, so that was us giving him the finger on the way out. While I agree it sucks for people looking at it from an internet archival perspective, at the time it seemed more imperative to jab the crap out of him and reddit as a business.
What’s so bad about that? Even on Lemmy I’m posting things in public, intended to be read by the public, and if somebody wants to train AI on what I’ve given to the public then good for them. I refuse to use a walled garden. Being proprietorial about online posts is probably not the most effective response to online surveillance. I agree that Huffman is a douchecanoe though.
Fediverse stuff is essentially not commercialized by nature.
We should hold commercial actors to entirely different standards than non-commercial ones. There’s no hypocrisy in doing so.
It wasn’t that Reddit was going to do so. It is that they were going to do so in a fundamentally proprietary way – they were treating the content as THEIR property to monetize and sell.
To be fair, it’s their prerogative. I left Reddit in protest of how they were using that prerogative, but I left my account open and comments undeleted for the people who might need it later.
At the time, trying to suggest that you can do these two things in that manner was not a popular opinion and as such received massive downvotes.
Mind you this is my lemmy-verse alt account, so no meaningful clues as to what I can contribute is found here.
It’s your account and your comments. You can do with them as you wish.
That’s the point. If you don’t wish to leave them behind to be profitable to Reddit, that’s also your choice. I don’t feel strongly about your choice to do it one way or another. Personally, I nuked my 15yo account and all comments completely because I don’t want to leave anything valuable behind to make profits for a company that I feel doesn’t deserve them.
The point is, those comments were mine, not theirs. I don’t want them selling them for profit, especially to an LLM mill.
I mean it’s quite naive if you thought that they weren’t trying to profit off of you before the whole paid API debacle.
Not saying you didn’t, but we clearly valued things differently.
The long term loss of me leaving the platform is much bigger than the short term loss of me deleting my comments.
I really hate the attitude that everything is exactly the same and that nothing is ever worse than anything else.
There is nothing naive here.
Reddit changed policy and philosophy significantly and that’s what led to the backlash and lots of users leaving. You know that and clearly agree with it. And using my comments for display purposes as part of the community under the terms and understanding I had 15 years ago is very different than using my comments to train AI and their new attitude that started this year.
This should also be noted: you’re free to keep your content available on these for profit corporate websites, I’m by no means telling anyone what to do, but just know that they will ABSOLITELY not extend the same courtesy to you. Reddit bans people and communities alike all the time for no apparent reason (or stupid ones like speaking out against their terrible business practices, many or even most of whom are quite technical users who created a lot of helpful resources on the platform), deleting their content without a second thought, not to mention we live in a world where corpororations will outright kill and make it impossible to access content that we’ve directly purchased because the platform is no longer profitable to them and expect us to be okay with it.
You could argue that the attitudes toward the fediverse vs corporate web is a double standard, and I guess it is. But the double standard between the corporate web and its users is even worse.
I view it like open source where commercial and non-commercial are on an even playing-field, what matters is their contribution. The freedom afforded by a healthy open-source ecosystem should mitigate negative commercial interests, it doesn’t always work out like that but that’s the kind of thing I would hope for.
There are actually extremely valuable contributions to open source from commercial entities.
I think many people just did it because Reddit still benefits from the Google traffic. I wanted results from Reddit to be less useful and I want people to be frustrated when they go to find an answer on Reddit and see it no longer exists.