/r/StableDiffusion – Mod here – My side of the story
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
The entire subreddit is in a process of community migration now: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/
I am unsurprised at Discord's behavior, handing over a server like that. They have essentially been hostile when not silent to us at WSB with our 600K user server.
Reddit has an opportunity to do better here. Hand back control of r/StableDiffusion back to OP.
Steve Huffman alluded to the disaster that is sub transitions in the recent Mod Summit. If someone at Reddit is reading this, this is your opportunity to do better.
They handed over the subreddit under a promise that was immediately broken by the other party. So yes, I suppose you could say they handed it over willingly, but they did so about as willingly as handing money over to an advance-fee scam.
However, this is largely irrelevant because what Reddit truly cares about (insofar as community management) is stability, and I think it's fair to say the community is very unstable right now, and is unlikely regain that stability.
The context is more around how communities should be able to naturally transition as opposed to only doing so during event-driven periods of great distress (E.g. r/AntiWork -> r/WorkReform).
There doesn't seem to be much post-summit discussion about it that I can find. I suspect because it's largely been overshadowed by other, more... spicy, topics.
Thanks for sharing!
I understand that "server" is an abstract term and just means "something which provides a service", but most other uses of the word relate to something owned by the person operating it. E.g., if I run a Matrix server instance, it's mine to administer, manage, destroy, etc. If I start a Discord "server" it's a glorified chat room or set of chat rooms owned and maintained by the company.
Language is powerful and helps shape our world, and by redefining "server" to mean a segmented part of someone else's website, it's another nail in the coffin for the concept of real ownership.
(Interestingly it seems like the choice to call them servers must have come late in development, because in the API they're called guilds)
EDIT: A comment elsewhere in this thread is implying that they were officially called guilds initially but then changed because users kept calling them servers. I don't know if that's true. I don't recall ever seeing them called guilds even in the early days of Discord, but I also wouldn't have been reading their official user-facing docs and support page for pleasure.
apparently, there is a separate drama about hacking at SD and accusations of ownership of code.
Which violates a number of Reddit's conflict of interest rules for moderators.
Those don't exist. There is something called the "Reddiquette" which is by the community and completely informal.
Subreddits owned by companies is the new normal and if you look at games, most reddit users these days even prefer it to community-run ones. Not uncommon to have two subreddits at a launch of a game and the unofficial one will always "lose".
Besides that, Reddit itself reaches out to brands & product owners and influencers to make official subs for them, managed by those entities then.
Subreddits are the new Facebook Groups and Reddit is completely "mainstream". I wonder what's next in a couple of years. Maybe we can go back to forums :)
Games often link to the "official" reddit community from inside the game, so no surprise that traffic will be driven there
But even besides that, if you look at any time this situation happened in the last ~3 years, you'll always see more users being vocal about the preferring the official sub than the community one in comparison.
Reddit's demographics changed, and it just exploded over the last couple of years with "casual users", "went mainstream" or what ever one wants to call it.
Most users these days don't even know that "official subreddits" were something that was super unpopular and uncommon on Reddit.
It used to be official, although still informal. It was eventually relegated to an obscure page in their help desk, though.
The additional drama includes that said open-source author has looked at the leaked code and concluded that it stole some of his open source work in the way it tunes text parameters.
Unless these AI companies want google and facebook to be literally the only companies in the world that can train large scale machine learning (by using their TOS to get licenses from their users) they should tread carefully.
In this particular case the leaked code apparently exposed that the proprietary codebase was also using the OSS developer's work without attribution.
There's an interesting anecdote around how stand-up comedians protect jokes against theft, given how weak copyright is on jokes: it's keying cars, poisoning drinks (generally non-fatally, but it's hard to have a good night on stage when your lower GI tract wants to be elsewhere), and never-work-in-this-town-again agreements. We put these protections into the law because the alternative isn't no protection; it's people-take-it-into-their-own-hands protection.
The users of these models and the developers are fundamentally different.
If it costs $10 million to find information/weightings/etc., our current legal system would consider that intellectual property which might not be copyrightable but would be considered IP theft if stolen.
If they were negligent in handling it, e.g. left it on a publicly accessible share and some member of the public stumbled into it, then trade secret protection would likely be lost.
If some employee violated their NDA and snuck it out-- well that would be a different matter. etc.
Another perspective that may become important is the fact that not all cultures share the same interpretation of copyright. In Japan there was a case in which a court ruled that selling a memory card with preloaded save data for a video game was a breach of the original work's integrity.[1]
This I think will get greater attention in the near future because a large portion of the interest in SD stems from generating new art derived from the styles of art on Pixiv, a Japanese website. The data for many popular forks of SD like Waifu Diffusion and the proprietary NovelAI model were sourced from Western sites like Danbooru, which has been known for violating copyright and artist takedown requests by reposting art without the creator's permission for many years. With the sheer popularity of SD and the fact that so much of the innovation came off of the backs of thousands of artists who weren't so much as asked for consent, it remains to be seen if attitudes towards those sites and this process of mass-scale data collection will remain the same in the near future.
I also have to wonder what the implications would have been if NovelAI ended up launching what is now the leaked model as a paid service, given the unresolved question of consent that surrounds the original data.
HN and the people who support SD can have their own opinions about copyright not applying in this specific case. They can delve into the technicalities of why they think the models are not copyrightable. But even beyond legal means, the artists can still ask the programmers to take everything down, and potentially be refused. The insistence that "it's different in this case" can break the hearts of people that see the world differently.
I think this will be a debate that transcends arguing over the technicalities of copyright, involving fundamentally differing cultural values of how the acts of creation and reproduction should be treated with respect. It will not end with "how will this fit into the existing (Western-centric) framework of copyright," but "what is the right thing to do."
[1] https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%...
Anyone who sets their ethics based on the law is probably acting like a big jerk.
:)
huh? It was launched as a paid (subscription only) service before even getting leaked.
Looking back it seems many in the Japanese community on Twitter aren't happy with discovering their art is being used as training data. In the last week since the NovelAI announcement the number of banned artists on Danbooru has doubled, approximately the same amount as all the banned artists that were registered in the site's entire history.
Beyond the training issue there is the fact that the art was reposted on another site at all, which is what many take note of. It seems Danbooru's initial statement to Japanese users made it seem like it was NovelAI's fault that things blew over, without bringing up the reposting part that was the root issue, and it didn't seem to be an effective apology as a result.
Possibly that's why artists taking down from Danbooru , it's their right.
There is likely a legal threat by NAI involved in the decision calculus here.
My understanding might be out of date, but as I recall it seemed that the code he thought was stolen from his open-source work actually originated from a third project that's MIT licensed.
1. Accusations that AUTOMATIC1111 (the web frontend developer) copied code from the NovelAI leak relating to the loading of hypernetworks
2. The leak revealing that Anlatan (the company behind NovelAI) had copied code from AUTOMATIC1111's repo (who, as above, Anlatan are accusing of copying from them) relating to the weighting of words. AUTOMATIC1111's repo does not have a permissive license to allow this
The third party MIT-licensed code is relevant to #1. Some code AUTOMATIC1111 was accused of copying from the leak (https://i.imgur.com/r1AkvBG.png) actually already appears in multiple older permissively-licensed public repos (https://github.com/lucidrains/perceiver-pytorch/blob/main/pe..., https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/main/ldm/mo...), one of which was credited in the readme by AUTOMATIC1111.
For #2, the Anlatan CEO blamed it on an intern (https://i.imgur.com/BFjKG1V.png). The leak shows that the offending code was committed by the CEO (https://i.imgur.com/aLiA2tr.png), which doesn't necessarily rule it out originating from an intern (e.g: "send me the code over teams to review and I'll add it") but doesn't look great.
From other examples I'd say AUTOMATIC1111 did get a bit sloppy in terms of not following clean-room design regarding the leak, but I'm inclined to give some leeway to a solo developer making a hugely popular public tool for free.
This is extremely fascinating to me. In what Andrej Karpathy calls "software 2.0"[1], leaking your model is equivalent to leaking the main IP of your company. Unlike source code where it loses value quickly out of context (e.g. twitch leaked their code yet that didn't spawn a bunch of twitch clones), models can be fine-tuned and transfer-learning-ed for many other purposes
Since these models take millions of dollars to train, I see these sort of hacks becoming a thing! I wonder when companies will start adding "trap streets"[2] to prove that others are using their stolen models?
I don't know if it tripped an internal filter on HN or something. Here is the link to the post in case you're curious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146603
In case it matters I used the GitHub issue title as the name of the post - "Stable-diffusion-webui is using stolen code".
Here is the actual link I posted.
https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/issu...
We can let that particular link go through if it's the best one on the topic but perhaps there is something else out there?
Kind of with automatic on this one, good imperative code can only take so many forms.
Plus there is the argument that no IP deserves protection, and that no IP owner should have any rights, ever, given that information is infinitely copyable and yearns to be free.
These arguments aren’t taken that seriously by people that understand investment, technology development, and risk mitigation though.
That we allow (even encourage) such blatant violations of natural laws and physics is one of the more contemptible attributes of us as a people, IMHO
Just because an industry exists doesn't mean it's valid. Like living things, business entities have a survival instinct that will fight anything that that threatens it. And the dismantling of their business plan is a pretty big threat. Like cancer, these things start small and metastasize until they endanger the life of the host.
This goes beyond that, taking the stance that by merely conforming your api to work with a user-provided proprietary checkpoint, you're in the wrong? This same philosophy forbids sharing open source game emulators, and we all know how that turned out (can be the best way to play a game).
now they're in "monetize later" and some rando's internet repo is more usable and has a better pipeline than their "dreamstudio", and to boot now these rare gtx aren't rare anymore thanks to the bitcoin crash, so enthusiast can readily use the model at home.
If it ain't your computer (and if no money even changed hands), it ain't your property.
So it goes quite a bit further than “a chat channel”.
Reddit, for all its faults, goes to great lengths to give its moderators latitude and discretion to operate their communities, and only steps in as an absolute last resort.
I wonder if Stability fucked up by using a minor in this case. They seem to still view Stability in high regard, mostly it seems because they are hoping for future gain from the relationship, but I doubt they'll feel that way forever. Probably they won't feel that way for much longer given Stability's heavy handed approach. It might be a lot easier to reverse some of this once it's made obvious they took advantage of a minor.
Social media died the day that Shaquille O'Neal was no longer @THE_REAL_SHAQ.
I suppose one could go the, "SD had a minor doing the work, which they then capitalized on" route, but I find it a little uncompelling.
If SD had asked the minor to moderate the subreddit, then took it away from him afterward, that would be an issue. Doubly so if they were aware of his age. From the description that was given, none of that applied.
As it is, I see it as fixing up a parking spot for the CEO; cleaning the ground, repainting the lines, putting up a nice shiny plaque, all unasked. Then getting upset when the CEO parks in the spot and leaves garbage strewn about. It's not nice, or even fair, but it is not particularly surprising either. Hard work is rarely appreciated, even when it is actively being paid for. "Took you long enough" is a phrase I have heard thrown about on projects before. When work is unfunded? You will be lucky to get so much as a mention, let alone a head nod or thumbs up.
I just hope that he can learn from this experience and remind himself how much he is making the next time he takes up a project of this kind. There is nothing wrong with working for free, but it is crucially important to remember that the merit of working for free does not somehow entitle us to anything. It's not something that brings me any joy to say, but it is true.
Open source AI art has likely been the biggest catalyst of getting teenagers interested in computer science/machine learning in years.
A lot of them have grown up now and that shift doesn't seem to have happened on the legal side. Maybe there are some shifts in norms (e.g. many authors and publishers used to loudly maintain that fan fiction was not a fair use, but most seem to have decided that it would be a bad idea to sue over it, and it's become more normalized overall), but not much in legislation!
So I'm not sure this outcome is in any way guaranteed.
(Larry Lessig also said that his foray into copyright activism had convinced him that campaign finance was an obstacle to having legislation reflect public opinion. Not every issue is a "campaign issue", but some issues that legislators don't directly campaign on are very important to donors. Lessig concluded that copyright was one of those.)
2a. Got a job and had kids/got hobbies. Stopped caring and just subscribed to Netflix like everyone else.
--or--
2b. Created copyrightable works. Joined the protectionists.
We're talking from 1958-1964, in particular (predominately) the "elite" class of people born in that period who became successful career politicians, who are arguably (though not much of one when considering the evolution of IP law...) beholden to lobbyists which is just a convoluted way to say corporate interests or arm twisting from their peers...
So no, young people aren't in control, and the ones that are will ostensibly be borne to power from their favorable starting position which means they're probably going to follow the trajectory and preserve the status quo.
He never had a "server". Just like no one has a Facebook "server". Discord is a corporation not a person. Communities run by corporate services are different than servers run by human persons. You give up everything when you don't actually host your own server(s) for communicating with your community.
Meaning, it seems eminently reasonable if I was 16, started a Disney Discord, got a verified badge for it, then Disney pointed out the delicacies of Discord handing the Official Disney Discord to a minor, it seems to be a reasonable compromise to make the official Disney Discord officially Disney's, and allow the 16 year old to still have the secret chats, etc.
Even if transfer of rights looks reasonable, it's better to live in a world where such transfer is made through law and not through company managers will.
That's not correct, originally they were called "Guilds", which is also what the API and code still use today.
It might not square with the traditional hardware definition of the the word, but it's being used correctly here.
A VPS service like AWS goes out of their way to specify that it is a "virtual server". the product they provide is analagous to real server hardware and largely interchangable with other server hosts.
Of course they can. It was never "yours" any more than "your" Facebook or Tiktok account.
Okay, so maybe disclose what they have done for you? Because the only thing that would make sense is financial support. And if that is the case why spend time writing something that will not change the course of things.
If it was public, then random users might demand more of dang, thinking that his salary justifies it.
Not too related to the discussion, but I'm really hoping Twitch moderators start asking for a paycheck once their streamer's realtime chat reaches a certain size, as they have to stay quick and attentive for hours straight. But sadly, they often start when the streamer is smaller and work for them on their own dime and remain that way.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
"Picturing the moderators responsible for steering conversation on Hacker News, I imagined a team of men who proudly self-identify as neoliberals and are active in the effective-altruism movement. (I assumed they’d be white men; it never occurred to me that women, or people of color, could be behind the site.) Meeting them, I feared, would be like participating in a live-action comment thread about the merits of Amazon Web Services or whether women should be referred to as “females.” “Debate us!” I imagined them saying, in unison, from their Aeron chairs."
Giving kids responsibilities drives maturity.
It's also a volunteer gig. If it makes you uncomfortable, stop doing it.
Case in point, I dug into it the drama here a bit more, and it seems like the kid basically just handed control of the entire Stable Diffusion Reddit and Discord communities to the Stability AI corporation, no questions asked. That creates all sorts of conflicts of interest, and it seems to have been done against the wishes of the community itself.
Other considerations:
- Obviously from a purely technical perspective, making a new subreddit is easier than coding and deploying a new Facebook
- It's less friction for a user to subscribe to a new subreddit than to sign up for a new website
+ The name of a subreddit can contribute to its popularity quite a bit. The community can make a new subreddit, but not a new /r/StableDiffusion
I used to think Reddit users skewed too heavily in certain ways, and didn't make sense. One day, using some tool (removeddit, reveddit, etc), I noticed how many posts and comments were removed by moderators - things that went against the skew.
It's one of the reasons places like r/politics became such an echo chamber dumpster fire.
Facebook is extremely ban happy and you can do absolutely nothing about it. On reddit, at the very least you can create your own sub or join subs where people won't ban you for whatever you have to say.
The correct opinions aren't illegal. Reddit is not a bastion of free speech [0].
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/14/reddit-ce...
2 reasons:
1. Reddit does not usually participate in censorship itself. It's extremely rare for reddit accounts to be banned on the whole or for users to be banned from creating communities for like minded people.
2. Reddit allows you to create your custom feed. You could sort by new, you could create your own community, you could post opinions only on your account and reddit would not care.
This is very different from how Facebook acts. The facebook algorithm is very biased, has checks for several trigger words and gradually profiles your political side and starts getting stricter as time passes.
In my last 1-3 years on Facebook, I was been banned for at least 6 times and no I'm not a political person. I was banned for either posting an image that facebook algorithm didn't approve of, opinion on tech that somebody else attacked me for or in general, not being the person facebook ideologically asked me to be.
Not exactly true. the_donald, all the numerous *InAction, some morbid, etc subs were all banned. Most of them because they didn't like what people were saying, regardless of what lies Reddit comes up with for the reason.
Yes both are biased but as long as you're not a guy infuriating more than half the Reddit employees, you're not usually banned which is opposite to Facebook as it would ban you no matter if you're a new account or an old account or are even posting an opinion on your wall with no friends.
The day after election day 2016 in the US, it was actually possible to post non-leftist comments/articles in /r/politics. Basically, the mods and bot owners hadn't been given their new marching orders, and didn't know what to do.
The discourse in many subreddits is invisibly dictated by the moderators.
It's not obvious when you browse posts because everything is organically coming from random people. However, moderators can entirely shape the conversation by only allowing posts that say what they want.
In other words: The moderators are speaking through users, by selectively filtering out everyone else. Many subreddits are also famous for banning any commenters who say anything that doesn't support what the moderators want to see. The remaining unbanned users are effectively curated to echo what the moderators want you to see.
Discord obviously has the same dynamics, but Discord makes it more obvious when you're switching between "servers". Reddit mashes it all into one feed that feels like something organic.
In this case, I suspect the core issue is that the person used the Stable Diffusion trademark, which resulted in Stable Diffusion playing the legal card. The correct response would have been to force a rename of this Discord (if legally obligated), though.
On reddit, you can totally avoid bans and still say something. On Facebook, your words and your whole account have no value if the algorithm decides you spoke a 'no no word'.
Facebook feed is entirely controlled by the algorithm and that algorithm is controlled by the people at Facebook, the reddit feed can be controlled by you. That difference alone makes Reddit a little bit better than Facebook.
Getting banned on Facebook is extremely easy, I got banned for quoting someone's comment and replying with 'ok' and unfortunately I'm not kidding. So far on reddit, haven't gotten any bans or warnings and I have always kept my discussions civil.
Facebook wants conformity, it doesn't slap you on the wrist if you do something that Zuckerberg doesn't approve, it totally takes your voice away for a long time.
I deleted my 10 year old Facebook account because the censorship was getting really crazy. Somebody could give you death threats and your comments would be the one getting deleted by Facebook, that's how bad it got near the end of 2020.
That's only true if you stay small. If the subreddit gains traction, it will be taken from you if you don't moderate in a way that suits the whims of the power mod / admin cabal. They may take it from you under a flimsy pretext even if you're doing a good job, simply because they want to add your subreddit to their dominion.
Facebook on the other hand finishes before something can even start because the algorithm checks every single word that you post, unlike Reddit.
Moderators on Reddit can be biased in different areas, they might let a comment pass or have a nervous breakdown over something they don't like. It's not clear and never will be but you still have the freedom.
Facebook algorithm does not miss. It does not overlook things or understand context. All it knows is someone said something they're not supposed to and that is the difference.
I'll take Reddit over Facebook anytime of the day because at least on Reddit, I can say controversial things (if any) on my own feed without the fear of the algorithm deleting it and banning me for a month where I have no voice, only a threat to be confirming to Facebook ideals that I have no idea what they are.
So yeah, both are censuring but Reddit allows more freedom.
I do condemn censorship in all forms (unless specific laws are being followed) but after fighting against all the platforms for a voice, I see Reddit as the best option for civil discourse. Hackernews is also very close to reddit and we know the model works very well.
Wherever I am, I'm always looking for good discussions (like this thread for example) and I'm glad that I can do it more freely on Reddit and HN than I ever could on Twitter or Facebook, hence my comments.
Granted you can just create a new account to route around it but still…
God damn I still cannot get over how many people continue to buy into this Covid nonsense.
Blinding yourself to the things that harm us doesn't make them go away, it only leaves you more vulnerable.
At least if my post is deleted I can tell. But when companies artificially limit the reach of content they do not like, you might never know.
Facebook openly admits to doing this. They are playing god by curating which information is worthy / unworthy of being seen, as well as presenting a warped view of reality to their users.
You may not even have been aware that the above is a thing; most people aren't. But in my experience it accounts for a large fraction, if not the majority, of moderation actions against real human users on Reddit.
Shadowbanning is very similar but IMO less insidious since it's a lot easier for human users to notice. I'm not sure if per-subreddit shadowbans are a thing, but I lean toward no because it has not happened to me (that I'm aware of).
Reddit as a whole does have shadowbans but at least as far as it is public knowledge that functionality is restricted to the admins. Perhaps moderators of large "default" subreddits get special tools though or perhaps they can call up the admins to do it for them.
Is shadow comment deletion not available to AutoModerator? My own experience suggests otherwise, though not conclusively.
If you haven't signed up for alerts on reveddit, odds are good you have no idea how many of your comments and posts have been silently removed: https://www.reveddit.com/y/<your_username>
One would be a "mod action audit." Each subreddit, or perhaps each moderator, would have a score indicating what % of comments are removed. Some random chunk of the removed content could be reviewed by auditors to determine what % were just spam and what came from legitimate users.
This way when I see a community where >50% of content is removed, I know that what I'm seeing is not organic.
Since then, I have taken tens of thousands of street photos, and the fact that I cannot post them on the most-used street photography subreddit is confusing and shitty.
I also got kicked out of a Discord server I moderated because someone asked to be nagged about doing their homework, and I nagged them, and then someone in the server created fanart of my anime profile picture hitting their anime profile picture on the head with a magic wand, and I pinned it. I thought it was hilarious and I treasure it to this day. But that apparently was the last straw. ("There must have been some underlying issue," I hear you cry. There was. There were some differences of opinion on how to moderate the channel and the discord server. The community skewed about 60% female, and I was pretty quick to time stuff out like "women should be in the kitchen, not watching a stream" when the inevitable edgelord showed up to troll. This was apparently a controversial opinion, and all the other mods that would back me up on those decisions had long since left. I was pretty late to the giving up party, but I'm glad I eventually left. Even if not on my own terms ;)
The TL;DR here is yeah, it's really easy to be a bad community manager, and people are pretty good at easy things. Stir in a spoonful of power tripping, and the results are predictable.
In the case of r/bitcoin, the largely invisible reddit censorship allowed for the effective capture of the coin's community and development. It was used to silence and remove those who believed BTC's primary use case should be cash. It was incredibly effective too.
For further reading:
https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...
https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite...
I'm now over 30 years old, but I started being a mod/admin on online spaces when I was about 13. Back then it was IRC, several BBS's, flash chat and flash games.
If I do a total count, I personally supervise over 250k people in Facebook groups alone. Add to that the fact that anyone can comment on Facebook pages and you get an even higher number (millions).
I do it out of love for my communities but I know people who do it just for the power. You'd be surprised at how many pages there about major franchises that share the same admin/mods with the sole goal of controlling what is said there. I know people who create a page the minute a new trailer for a product or franchise comes out without even being interested themselves.
Couldn’t one say the same about hacker news? Great quality content, from possibly anonymous profiles.
However both suck in very real but different ways.
I kind of felt bad for him, but the thing is, without people like this we don't have Reddit. It just doesn't exist. Community forums and discords don't exist. Honestly, I find them annoying at times but at the same time I understand the need for them.
Every community develops its own biases, HN included, but Reddit is in late-stage groupthink. It wouldn't be a bad thing if what got traction wasn't doom and gloom. So many posts boil down to "the world is a mess"/"I am a mess"/"other political side is so stupid how can other people think different?"/"hate this person for expressing X opinion or doing Y (at least for like 3 days)".
It's not just an online thing only, I've seen many people who have internalized some of these beliefs since they see them expressed so much online. Being ruled by what the internet thinks is acceptable is a horrible way to live your life, but if you're an awkward teen you might very well end up like that.
Maybe I'm just nostalgic but the early internet had this care free spirit where every interaction, good or bad, seemed somewhat fun at least since it was crazy you were able to at all, and there were no stakes. People would flame you for your political opinions but you'd just shout at each other until a moderator told you to shut up, not have an entire community go against you since you don't agree with them. It was fun!. This "ganging-up" OTOH induces the brain to start modifying its beliefs to fit the group. A very normal process, but harmful. And younger people, the audience of Reddit, are exactly the most vulnerable to this online peer pressure.
I got banned from one of the main subreddits for asking an innocent question on something I knew nothing about, something kicked off, I heard about it first on the reddit, couldn't find much info about it as most content around it had already been removed online, questioned if it was really that bad as I could only find one bit of information and was instantly banned for supporting sexual abuse.
I stupidly, avoided the ban by going to a different account as i felt I hadn't done anything wrong, after trying to speak to the mods about it but then Reddit managed to discover this and then my whole account was banned that i'd used for years on reddit.
Insane. Now I just make new accounts every few months and access via VPN's, but I don't get involved in most discussions, only use it for when i want to ask someone a question.
imo, we need to eliminate upvotes/downvotes and just have a single flag/report type system for vitriolic content.
Also not giving new users access to downvotes hopefully means that those downvoting are somewhat good citizens.
> hopefully means that those downvoting are somewhat good citizens.
Definitely not. It only takes a few flags on HN to completely remove something from the front-page. It only takes a few downvotes to grey it nothingness.
People forget that Reddit used to look a lot like HN does today in like 2006-10 before the Digg exodus. Today Reddit is almost entirely kids.
Frankly, I can't be bothered to downvote. I've seen plenty of questionable things, and I just keep scrolling. I'd rather save my energy for upvotes. I'd rather focus on the positive. Let someone else play HN Police if that fulfills some kinky need they have.
I do agree with you greatly though that Reddit mods have way too much power. The /r/movies subreddit is pretty garbage because of it. I wish they had just a daily thread for people to discuss movies. They refuse any sort of thing like this and persist their perverse love affair with movie posters.
Ive never had that problem, but this is a tech and entrepreneurship forum and not a general form.
>That’s what downvotes are for
If you get enough karma here you can down vote, 500 iirc. They do this so you can't create fake accounts to downvote people multiple times.
Also, when something gets downvoted solely for content, if you come back later, it often gets upvoted right back (and then some), with some comments below to the effect that downmodding is not a proper way to express disagreement. I've upvoted greyed-out comments that I strongly disagreed with myself more than once, solely on the basis that they make a valid argument that ought to be a part of the conversation - even if only to debunk it properly.
Evidently, teenagers are not the problem
True, there was a recent post on r/India talking about an IMF twitter post talking about India's projected GDP growth and the user was banned from the subreddit because it showed India in good light. This is just one instance, there are lots of big subreddits out there having the tag of being an Official subreddit which are nothing more than propaganda machines.
I respect the initial decision, but this is all a bit much.
(pure speculation btw)
If you're working with people, especially on a rapidly moving startup, sometimes things aren't going to be communicated well. If the people are, on net, good to you with some problems shouldn't you be working with those people to improve problems rather than writing reddit exposès?
Reddit recently updated its top mod removal process (recently as in 5 days ago) and dramatically weakened requirements for removing top mods.
More information on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/xwim7v/updates_to_...
The EU one isn't large, but the regular one is approaching 1M.
Rarely have I seen so much fud spread, while also systematically using the least charitable interpretation of anything stability.ai or emad said/announced. (the whole covid skeptics shit storm comes to mind).
I could understand where this would be coming from if it was aimed against the use of these AI models, but this seems to be from the proponents.
Of course, I can see the dissatisfaction, but not the escalation, does any one really think stability.ai should associate itself with software piracy?! Cause that's what this started about, enabling the use of a a stolen model and weights. The way I set it the only safe action for stability.ai was to distance themselves from this as much as possible.
Of course the reddit “takeover“ happened a week before these events, the active mod, the one that started the linked topic, kept his moderation rights. One issue was that SD wanted to disclose private information to the modaal that required an NDA, not all ex mods wanted to sign. Either way the situation is more complex, not handled ideally, but again, using words life tricked is the least charitable interpretation. And for better or worse with stability.ai controlling the subreddit, in order to put distance between them and the tools that enable the use of pirated models (and in that repo there is an explicit discussion topic on how to use the pirated model to get the same results as novelai (the source of that model)) of course the link to the github repo that enabled the use of these was removed from the stickied topic listing blessed UIs and other things.
Repo issue explaining the situation: https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis/issues/3104
The post became popular.
I could not believe my eyes, when some hours later, the post was edited.
I have never seen that before. Mods cannot edit users posts, right? Do some companies have superpowers on their sub, or did they reach out to Reddit to change the post?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
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