Reddit signs $60M content licensing deal with AI company
reuters.com
reuters.com
Uh, what? Wikipedia dates the first bullet to the 13th century:
> Fire lance barrels made of metal appeared by 1276.[30] Earlier in 1259 a pellet wad that filled the barrel was recorded to have been used as a fire lance projectile, making it the first recorded bullet in history
Indeed the first integrated cartridges were developed around 1808 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartridge_(firearms)
The AI company just trains their models on that and aren't creating derivative work in the legal sense.
"We didn't license it to them for the express purpose of training your model on this data, we only gave them database access for the express purpose of training their model on this data."
Craigslist Confessional: A Collection of Secrets from Anonymous Strangers https://www.amazon.com/Craigslist-Confessional-Collection-Se...
PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives https://www.amazon.com/PostSecret-Extraordinary-Confessions-...
Stoned, Naked, and Looking in My Neighbor's Window: The Best Confessions from GroupHug.us - https://www.amazon.com/Stoned-Naked-Looking-Neighbors-Window... (actually a great book)
People can and will profit from things you do in life for free, I feel like we accepted that a very long time ago?
From the oldest version of their ToS[1]. This is unchanged in the newest versions even for the EEA[2]. It seems pretty clearly that whatever AI training is doing is covered by "use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display" in "media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world" (emphasis mine).
[1] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-october-15...
[2] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-february-1...
Remains to see if this actually can happen.
Capitalism in a nutshell
I recommend that if you want to delete something, then delete your account only. Your username won't be visible, but the content still will be.
A longer while back I wrote a little JS bookmarklet to do it. It could just do a page at a time, which was annoying, but not too bad. However, when they would change the site, it would stop working and need to be fixed.
Remember to edit the comment before you delete it. From what I read, deleting a comment just sets a flag on the comment as delete, so it’s still in the DB for them to sell. Making it garbage text will kill the value of the comment in the DB as well, and probably really screw with the AI trying to train from it.
So I'd guess that reddit somehow restored some number of posts, and it seems to occasionally continue to do so.
In terms of hurting the site, it absolutely does. Reddit is a ghost town, and I find deleted posts constantly that google thinks are relevant. It's a shame it had to be this way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39404051 (15 hours ago, 29 points)
It's to the point where I search for them every few weeks and take time to edit and delete them manually, after which they seem to stay gone.
My best guess is that they can detect mass deletion and have some sort of automation that restores posts at (seemingly ) random. Either that or their platform is broken enough that editing or deleting posts isn't reliably committed to disk.
There is no conspiracy to restore deleted comments lol. You can only retrieve 1000 items with Reddit's API so when you use Shreddit to delete your posts only 1000 are deleted. Everything else before that remains untouched. Use PullPush to really delete everything.
My reddit profile was empty, I'm aware of the api limitations, I read the readme.md, shreddit ran on a loop for 24 hours, each time pulling 1000 posts, editing, and deleting them. My profile is still empty, and currently my google results are empty, but in another few weeks some will pop up again, but still won't show in my reddit profile.
Clear enough for you?
Later move to shreddit and created a cronjob to delete the entries, and kept shreddit running a week or so. As you suggested, you will hit Reddit's rate limit soon after start mass deleting or your account shadow-banned.
Just checked two of my deleted account, can't see any post or comment. I wish I didn't delete it, just overwrite them with random sentences from local AI
Reddit is pulling out all the stops for their upcoming IPO and it still amounts to nearly nothing.
Bringing back r/place to juice user count, killing the API, destroying their mobile site, and that's just the start.
That's why they are only planning a "very small float", there's simply no interest.
It seems even at just $5 billion, the valuation is too rich.
I can only assume the price is because the license is non-exclusive and they think they can get other big fish to bite.
They can offer higher quality and more timely data than scrapers can, so there is a value proposition there.
I know this is possible to do by other communities like paid forums (SomethingAwful), or grow into an adjacent e-commerce supported community (e.g. bodybuilding forums), but is it possible to do it on Reddit's scale? We'll see.
I have no horse in the race either way, most of my posts on there are from the Reddit vs Digg era, so I'm not really invested.
There's a reason plenty of people append "reddit" to their google searches.
Reddit is still one of the few sites left that provide user content openly. FB+Instagram+Twitter are entirely inaccessible if you don't have an account, and a lot of forums do things like only show images to logged in users.
I've found the Reddit experience much worse with recent changes. When you land on Reddit from a Google search comment threads are only 1 level deep with a max of only a few replies shown, so you have to load a new page for each response you want to read. It's one of the worst UX I've seen considering that landing from search is probably the most financially lucrative use patterns Reddit has.
Just imagine how great reddit would be if not for the other users, the moderators, the admins, and the CEO.
Reddit exists because millions of people like it. Reddit also exists because hundreds of developers created it while other people are paying for its infrastructure.
And the arena gets paid by selling food to people who come to my games, sell advertising on the boards, beer to fans.
What do I get and why is none of this money trickling down to me?
Clearly I get the enjoyment of being Canadian and playing hockey.
Reditors are no different. None of them were tricked, they participate on the site by writing comments or submitting articles because the get enjoyment out of it.
I don't expect to see a dime from the arena when I play hockey and they make money from it and no redditor expects to see a dime when they participate on the site and the site makes money form it.
If you think its weird that a for profit company is making money and no one is complaining, its because everyone went into the deal knowing exactly what's what. No one was tricked or deceived.
They were tricked from day one, when the founders pretended to be different people to make the site look busier than it really was.
They are tricked every day by bots, troll farms, spammers, astroturfers, bought-out moderators, corrupt admins, etc.
Go look at the founders page, where Aaron Swartz used to be.
Look into who maxwellhill probably was (first Redditor to a million karma and mod of some huge and deranged subs like worldnews).
Look into how certain keywords get shadowbanned.
Look into the mod and admin cabals with their private agendas.
Look into the way many national subs were taken over in quiet coups.
There are nice things about Reddit, even today, but the idea that users know what they're getting into is deeply naive.
I was very specifically talking about users not being tricked into thinking they were going to be paid for posting content on reddit.
Your comment, as far as I can tell, has nothing at all to do with that.
Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
How many Reddit users knew they were agreeing in the future for Reddit to sell the content they wrote to make money for Reddit, not them?
> no redditor expects to see a dime when they participate on the site and the site makes money form it.
Plenty of Redditors would disagree with you, and I'm not sure why you're acting like this is obvious. If I hadn't already deleted all my content and left because of the last debacle, I would be doing so for this.
> Plenty of Redditors would disagree with you, and I'm not sure why you're acting like this is obvious. If I hadn't already deleted all my content and left because of the last debacle, I would be doing so for this.
Really?
Ok, let's say reddit only sold adds for revenue.
What percentage of redditors do you think would feel justified to a percentage of reddit's ad revenue? Because the only reason the ads have value is because of the redditors themselves?
Ads are for consumption by Reddit users, and is an expected, if not liked, mechanism. That you can pay to opt out of.
People wrote content that they expected to be content on Reddit. Not to be later able to pick up a book (after buying it) and read their own words, that Reddit sold and made additional money off of (because they're still doing the ads, of course).
I guess we simply disagree. Given that there is no right or wrong and only opinions, then I guess we're at the end of the line.
Despite my low opinion of Redditors, I believe that on some level they are aware of the principle that if the product is free, then you are the product.
If you presented the regular users with the choice between "pay a subscription fee and opt out or let us use your data in these ways", the vast majority will end up choosing the latter and we all know it.
The deal never included that they would appropriating the community content and selling it as their own, but that could try to make money from user-generated content, and in turn they would keep it as open as possible: an easy to use API, third-party clients, RSS feeds for every subreddit and even posts and comments, etc.
They changed the deal. People are right to be upset with the new terms.
I'm not sure why folks are trying to say that going to Reddit and doing activity where the price of admission is ads is the same as doing activity where the price of admission is they own your writing and sell it. You may be fine with it but they seem clearly distinct to me -- enough to be worth talking about instead of dismissing.
and its even worse because its basically the best formatted social media with the worst demographics now, aka most potential and worst execution, so its a dataset of decreasing size compared to other social media now
when it comes to training its hypothetically a particularly great dataset because you can choose to include or exclude text topics as input based on subreddit or thread, its so well organized