this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Reddit Migration
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To some degree it's hard to be sympathetic, because the people complaining about this are seriously lacking in sympathy themselves. They just wanted to see the content that those users produced for them, they didn't care about the difficulties or preferences of the users themselves. So when those Spez-opposed users took their ball and went home the Spez-friendly people got angry at them for taking their comments away with them rather than at Spez for having driven them to that in the first place.
People love to blame the victim for defending themselves over the problematic person who is abusing them, because if they acknowledge that someone is being abusive that kind of morally obligates them to step in.
And they very much don't want to do that.
And obviously the exploitation of users for their knowledge and content so that the owners of Reddit Inc. can gain wealth for sitting on their thumbs is different from the kind of abuse one's mind might go to when the word is raised, but it's the same dynamic.
Someone is claiming mistreatment, those around them are annoyed by the claims, not by the mistreatment, because the person standing up for themselves is putting onlookers in the dangerous position of examining their relationship to that mistreatment.
And they don't wanna.
Vicious, but true. I'm still struggling with whether or not I'm going to astroturf my comment history and delete my account. I see a lot of folks saying their comments were restored and then they had no way to log back in to delete them again. For now, I'm just going to leave my Reddit account dormant. I suppose it isn't super effective to leave my content there for Spez to benefit from, but I kinda feel like it does more harm to people just looking for answers than it ever will to Spez if I were to remove it. All around, this is just a ridiculously stupid situation we all find ourselves in over the whims of small minds chasing after big money. Again.
May I say that whatever you decide to do, you've already "won" this? First, giving a shit about people, and second, spending time grappling with those truthfully complex issues has enriched you, and all of us.
One suggestion is to edit them with wording like fuck spez, so that if he deletes your content it won't be you that yanked it away from people.
But they could just revert that easily enough, rather than delete outright (although are they smart enough to do that...?). Another could be to insert an explanation at the top or bottom of all your (best/all) stuff that you do not condone Reddit's actions but decided not to punish end-users for the actions of that powermod abuser.
And eventually you could migrate it elsewhere but yeah, that's a bit hard to do atm when users would have trouble finding it. OR, you could combine these approaches: for each answer, make a post to kbin/lemmy about the issue, then edit the original to include solely a link to that new location. That would kill 2 birds with 1 stone by helping people realize where to go for high-quality content, while providing the direct answer (there's no need to create an account or deal with fediverse issues, anyone at all can just read it). (The down-side is that spez could easily revert that back too, but if so then you could keep trying, like spell out the link to futz with its automated detection.)
But whatever you end up doing, I see that you are doing it because you care, and that's already a win in my book. :-)
Personally, I'm leaving my comments intact because I doubt that Spez is really going to benefit much from them in the long run anyway.The technology behind AIs currently seems to be moving away from simply throwing vast amounts of data into the training to a more precisely fine-tuned high-quality training dataset, so there's probably not going to be as much demand for Reddit's trove as Spez thinks.
And besides, the old PushShift archives are still floating around. We don't know how the legal or technical situation will shake out but maybe people will be able to use that for free training.
I think rather than AI the idea is to reduce ad revenue by moving content off of reddit so folks will stop checking reddit and thus reddit has fewer ads seen.
The question is, does Reddit ownership believe the money is in LLM training data or not. We've seen tech leadership jump on all kinds of bandwagons in the last few years, none of which have panned out. I don't think LLMs will, either, but every time one of these things gains some limelight, someone with an established tech company seems to believe they're about to make a lot of money.
And in this case, they actually might. Just not off of the tech, but off of an IPO where they centre the tech as the opportunity for new investors.
But I have no idea if they're smart enough to see the scam and run the play, or if they're true believers or not.
Here's what I recommend to have the best of both worlds, while still taking advantage of mass editing tools.
Create a magazine or two on kbin specifically just to hold your content.
Copy it over and paste it into your mags.
Mass edit your content on reddit with the usual message, but also include a link to your kbin profile. Folks who want to see the useful content can still find it that way.
Same. I don't begrudge the people who want to salt and burn their Reddit history, but I'm leaving my old posts up for anybody who might be helped by them ~~(plus most of them are just shitposts anyways)~~
You could move them here and link from reddit - folks still get the help but reddit still loses ad revenue overall (as word-of-mouth and search engines slowly start to repoint others in need to the fediverse instead of reddit)