That’s probably why they are banning people left and right to control the content they want to put out.
Reddit be a mess, yall
The fact that any AI company thought to train their LLM on the answers of Reddit users speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of their own product (IMO)
LLMs aren’t programmed to give you the correct answer. They’re programmed to give you the most pervasive/popular answer on the assumption that most of the time that will also happen to be the right one.
So when you’re getting your knowledge base from random jackasses on Reddit, where a good faith question like “What’s the best way to get get gum out of my childs hair” get’s two two good faith answers, and then a few dozen smart-ass answers that gets lots of replies and upvotes because they’re funny. Guess which one your LLM is going to use.
People (and apparently even the creators themselves) think that an LLM is actually cognizent enough to be able to weed this out logically. But it can’t. It’s not an intelligence…it’s a knowlege agreggator. And as with any aggregator, the same rule applies
garbage in, garbage out
“How do I parallel park a car?”
AI Overview: “git gud”
Technically correct
The main thing that AI has shown, is how much bullshit we subconsciously filter through every day without much effort. (Although clearly some people struggle a lot more with distinguishing between bullshit and fact, considering how much politicized nonsense has taken hold.)
Exactly that.
If I were to google how to get gum out of my child’s hair and then be directed to that same reddit post. I’d read through it and be pretty sure which were jokes and which were serious; we make such distinctions, as you say, every day without much effort.
LLMs simply don’t have that ability. And the number of average people who just don’t get that is mind-boggling to me.
I also find it weirdly dystopian that, if you sum that up, it kind of makes it sound like in order for an LLM to make the next step towards A.I. It needs a sense of humour. It needs the ability to weed through when the information it’s digging from is serious, or just random jack-asses on the internet.
Which is turning it into a very very Star Trek problem.
Usually the third/fifth comment down is correct while the top 4 are jokes
Thats why I have stopped calling it ai. Its a dumbass buzzword just like cloud, that tech bros like to use but cant explain (or blockchain).
Its llms, and image generators/OCR (which has been around for decades), Using complex markov chains and a fuck ton of graphics cards. NOT AI. NOT AI.
It is AI, along with a bunch of optimization algorithms, statistical decision trees (probably used in adaptive AI in games), etc. AI is a field in computer science that includes a ton of things many wouldn’t consider AI.
Basically, if the solution doesn’t come from direct commands but instead comes from some form of learning process, it’s probably AI.
It’s not “general AI”, but it is in the field of AI.
I would argue we need to go back to Machine Learning.
The field is machine learning, generative machine learning etc.
This rebrand to AI is doing nothing but confusing people and building investor hype
Back? Machine Learning has always been a subfield of artificial intelligence since it all started in the 1950s or so. The end goal is to create general AI, and each field in AI is considered a piece of that puzzle, including LLMs.
I use the term “inference machine”
I’ve had to start calling it AI because most people don’t know what LLMs are, and noone cares to go through the explanation, including myself.
I’m afraid that, as these things go, AI has gained a new meaning by popular use, rather than the original meaning of the acronym.
No point fighting it anymore.Maybe we just need to adjust and start saying GAI (generative ai). It has a nice ring to it too.
It’s always been like that, even since the 1950s…
If people are so dumb they dont even know what an llm is, they have no business using any “ai” products. Too bad we cant ban dumb people from using tech that will make them dumber.
I don’t care about their stock value but the situation fells so weird. So chatgpt refers to reddit less, and that makes reddit stock value fall. This really shows how much of the share value is pure hype and how much of “the economy” is pure manupulation of numbers instead of actual value.
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That’s actually quite easy to explain. Reddits entire monetary value (or at least a very large portion) depends on how relevant it is as platform to mine user interactions - to use as training material for AI.
Reddit getting references less is a sign that the models, or the owning companies, value reddit data less compared to before.
How decoupled stocks are from reality or value. It’s bizarre.
Tesla is “larger” than all other car companies combined when they’re virtually always “delayed” on actually shipping product. We live in bizarro world. Your livelihood is a single cell in a giant spreadsheet full of completely made-up numbers.
The market can stay fascist longer then you can stay solvent.
Tesla sells itself as a technology innovation company, but it sells hype.
The thing that baffles me on that one is that it doesn’t stand up on its own terms. None of Tesla’s tech in 2025 is ahead of its competitors, and they’ve become so toxic as a brand that most top tier engineers don’t even want to work there.
meme stocks.
You just described most tech stocks.
As Cory Doctrow explains:
the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of “mature” companies.
Good. Fuck u/Spez.
Keep in mind if the Reddit stock price fell too much some hedge fund vulture would buy up a majority of the stock and then turn it into Nazi town.
Even better then. That’s how the mass migration from twitter happened.
Happy cake day
Isn’t it already basically Nazi town?
It is more disaffected people than nazis. At least the places I was at there. The site wide moderation is pretty fucked in favor of powerful interests, including Nazis however. They like to chase off real people that are driving engagement in favor of the legions of influence agents with their bot accounts.
Right, and if the moderation allows Nazi ideology to run rampant, you have a Nazi town. Especially when it’s all mostly bots spewing Nazi talking points anyway.
Refusing to fight hate speech is tantamount to supporting it.
As someone who around when shitredditsays was the bogeyman, always has been.
Just realized I was posting a reddit habit on a lemmy thread about reddit…
Nazi cucks at the moment.
Fuck reddit.
Reddit is a parasite that produces nothing of value. The users are the ones keeping the site alive.
News about short term falls are just click bait. Just look at Tesla
Tesla stock ups and downs seem like someone is literally gaming the system.
That’s because he is.
the fact that neither Musk nor none of his cronies ever get comeuppance for that tells you everything you need to know about the “fairness” of the “system”.
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Good. Nazi sympathizing shithole deserves nothing but the worst. Fuck spez and every complicit modgoloid and SSAdmin.
Modgoloid is great.
Wasted 15 years on that site to be banned for one fucking comment, burn baby burn.
I said that folks would blame the Kirk shooting on trans people. What do you know, I was banned and it actually fucking happened.
Same. My comment was “fuck trump and Obama” arguing about using drones to order civilians abroad. Do you remember what your violent advocation was?
Mine was telling someone it was unlikely that spain would declare war on israel, it being a nuclear nation…
Banned for ‘glorifying violence.’
Mine was a direct, attributed quote from the US president.
I suggested drawing in chalk on the street outside of the governor’s mansion, to protest the GIANT chalk Christ she had commissioned across the driveway to celebrate Easter one year.
It wasn’t even a serious call to action.
Mine was “the german train system organisation should be burned down and redone anew” and “sprich deutsch du hurensohn”
Was it your plan to hit em with the left right politics punch, or…?
No it was under a postof news that the CEO again got raised while the trains were delaid heavier than ever and that a lot of bureaucracy holds it back. Its not politics. Litterly just we need to redo how to organise our trains!
Well, everything is politics. But I was more wondering about the “sprich deutsch” Part - that’s usually more of a racist thing, and therefore right wing politics. But if you don’t see public transport as political you might be right-wing overall?
It’s a meme on German language subreddits when Americans shit up the place in English.
Yeah, I got that context now, which I also accounted for with the “usually” qualifier. I still think it builds an attitude that is toxic to outsiders and can potentially push someone into a right-wing position. I have witnessed first hand how someone fell down a fascist rabbit hole via online places touting language superiority.
…are we now just connecting things to put everyone in right corner? God i hate online people…
Guess being against corperates, for self reliance, public owner ship, pro a european state and untouchable democracy, and so on, is now “right wing”.
“Sprich deutsch” in litterly ich_iel is litterly the norm! Thats the joke! Everything is worded german. Guess such is now “right wing”.
“Everything is politics” omfg. Yeah nah. Thats enought Internet for this month, and it only started. Crazy!
bro just skipped the “usually” part and made a rant against things being judged politically.
I think the “everything has to be written in German” part of ich_iel is also establishing a rather nationalist online culture through linguistic homogeny and illegibility to outsiders. So, yeah, you may not want to recognize the impact your words may have, but it’s clear to many others.
no OP.
I got the F out and deleted my old posts every time they restored them until they stayed gone.
Deleting your posts was a waste of time. Chances are likely that it is archived on their end.
Reddit has been paying close attention to behavior patterns of banned users and users they wouldn’t want on their platform. It’s likely they’ve gotten your posting imprint and just give you the comfort of thinking you’ve deleted your posts.
deleting your account also wont stop them from finding your new accounts, they mostly archived that as well. they look at browser fingerprinting, device, device components, time zone discrepancy, browser size and VERSION, resolution,etc. if you use any paid service/trial service that can spoof any of these above and they arnt the correct versions, they can detect that.
and then theres the warming up period with new accounts(like not posting, reporting, or upvoting too fast after account creation)
As far as I know, they use things called Evercookies and it’s been a thing now too. If you have an Evercookie, then it won’t really matter what browser you use or even if you clean the cache and history. You have to deep scrub your system and practically all traces of your browser to even get rid of those.
And even so, basic networking is a no brainer when they can just flag your IP and it won’t even matter how many times you’ve done that process.
VPN and Incognito browsing is the way.
I discovered the other night that I couldn’t even browse Reddit anonymously with my VPN active.
They’ve been blocking Vons for years.
The absolute degradation of the site is appalling. And most of the comments read like they’re written by children, because I’m assuming most of them are.
The absolute stupidity of everything on the site is flabberghasting.
I don’t know then. I can browse Reddit just fine and I’m not using a VPN. It is interacting with the content and commenting I can’t do because auto-shadowban.
That there are so many ways to store data on a browser (including exploits) and that they expose so much information about your physical device is a big part of the problem. Even barring that, there are additional ways they can fingerprint a user. While any one thing might not be telling, when you take all of them in combination, it gets frighteningly accurate how easy it is for them to know exactly who you are.
They certainly can. Do you have evidence that suggests they are doing that?
They were archived as they restored them several times. But I kept the account and every time they restored them, I used software to go in and wipe them back out. They’re still not visible on the front end to this day. Maybe they’ll do something AI with them, but they don’t show up in Google search anymore.
You can download everything posted on Reddit prior to the great api ban in a torrent. So yeah it’s still out there.
For wishing an old man would have a heart attack and leave the world peacefully.
remember the luigi craze,
i think people were shocked that all thier accounts were banned simulataneously, despite some of them not participating in the same subs, around the same time. they just went after every account in your ip address,device or browser. even if time has passed that a subreddit ban has been lifted in your old accounts. the site filters/AI doesnt take that into account, and i suspect its intentional.
i noticed reddit is very wary of browser forks now too(google, firefox forks), theres a reason they dont like brave(because it hides your fingerprints by default)
feel your pain, homie.
Thanks haha, I was never really rah rah into reddit itself but it had a lot of cool niche subs for hobbies and such and that’s where I spent most of my time not even in the default or political subs.
i got nuked right after some dummy account asked if i want to add a new mod on my sub. a couple of days later - voila - i’m actually a malicious bot boo this bot motherfucker. that was suspicious and for what - i’m literally dropping read/watch later shit
I could never understand why people cared about their social media accounts.
Because whether you like it or not, social media is the easy-track to connect with people of all varying degrees and connect through common interests and even ideals. It’s a lot easier than in the 2000s and 1990s when all you’ve had was an e-mail and probably chat room hopping. You just had to know someone else’s e-mail like you would have to know someone’s number to call them, that’s how it worked.
With social media, you can just breeze through friend lists and comb over searches to find friends and everything far easier. It’s easier to connect with people that way than ever before. And losing out on that, can sting.
I sometimes wished it wasn’t that way, but the people have largely decided we needed something more than just writing e-mails to eachother.
if you start having a social network within a social media, a ban can hurt.
especially a sitewide ban preventing you from making a new account, of which they dont tell you the offense.
probably some have ties to smaller communities of specific category(not news or politics), like your into tech, or cars, or CARD GAMES, or console games. or specific discussions. i had identification of “things/plants” that i now cant access. or discussion of a condition(not to find a diagnosis, but your experiences)
Downvoted because this isn’t news. It’s clickbaity nonsense which has no bearing on anything real.
The entire site is gpt.
Reddit banned me today for making a joke that the patch title for Guild Wars 2 could match real life events.
What is the patch name? The Mad King and his Lunatic Court.
Permanently banned for what? Harassment.
Not how I expected GW2 to come up on Lemmy… But here we are hahaha
Well… no surprising since we ought to have the molengrad.
I wish I could say I’m shocked. That site has fallen off so hard it’s crazy. The censorship has gone mad. It’s the main reason I’m here.
Hopefully the mods on lemmy don’t go power hungry
Wouldn’t really matter in a federated network like this. Mods banned you from a community? Make a new one. Account banned? Move to another instance.
There’s zero reason to feel attached to online accounts like these, which is the only thing you can lose on Lemmy.
A few have. But when it happens people just start frequenting alternative communities. The good karma flows like water through the easiest path. So when an admin or a mod says they find the term bro offensive, people just unsub and find a better community.
Bro thats so nice
its pretty hard to get power mods here, since you isolate and sequester them by defederating, or block thier content. on reddit, you can get subreddit banned(mods), and sitewide banned(admins)
Insult to the king, off with your head!
/s
Must be the AI profiling system and how it flags anyone even remotely talking about POTUS.
im not surprised if the filters is looking for any “anti-trump” comments, they probably will ignore certain bots and not users.
Huh.
Does anyone else think that ChatGPT is still using the data, they’re just not referencing Reddit directly?
This is how you can tell Reddit’s $200+/share price is insane. Over 10% of its value dropped based on a different unprofitable company’s references to ingested content.
Yikes!!
The entire stock market has become a meme stock pyramid scheme. No price makes sense; it’s all glorified gambling making life on this planet worse for most living things.
⚜︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
Reddit’s value is its ability to use bots to manipulate and distribute information. It’s just like Twitter, meta and all the other social media platforms.
No, it’s value is that users have up voted and down voted good and bad data. This gives the AI training data that has been crowd sourced by humans. Bots manipulating votes would destroy the value of Reddit.
Bots have been controlling votes on Reddit for years. It costs about $50 to get to the front page of Reddit.
Which is also generally very detectable (if you actually care) and is generally used to push (monetized) social media and not the answer to “what is the difference between normal and merino wool?” and so forth.
The vast majority of the “user” interaction and memes is not the product (at play. it IS useful for societal manipulation but there are better platforms for that). It is all those useful questions and answers that people get pissy about folk deleting the answers to.
Because people, generally, weren’t searching for
team edward or jacob redditbut insteadthe fuck is a renesme redditorLED versus fluourescent bulbs redditand so forth. And the community labeling of the latter is generally REALLY good.Things DO get messy when the question becomes
best synthetic boxer briefs redditbut… it is incredibly rare for an astro turfing campaign to be strong enough to get a genuinely bad product “on top”. You tend to just get an overly expensive branded white label in the top slot which may actually be identical to the “real” best one anyway. But considering you are relying on human opinion regardless, that isn’t far off of what you were gonna get without said astroturfing.Interesting analysis thanks
There are absolutely vote manipulation campaigns still happening.
See this from 12 days ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1nldj4m/why_are_we_all_just_accepting_metas_new_spy/?sort=old
12 days ago almost every top-level comment was below -50 and responses were untouched.
Of course there are. That doesn’t mean the majority of the site is compromised.
As a user of the website for many years it’s entirely obvious that a majority of the website is gamed (besides its niche corners). Reddit’s bot prevention mechanisms just fuck VPN users - they are wholly inadequate.
That thread is evidence of a organized bot campaign that they had 12 days to clean up (and didn’t). It’s naive to believe that the rest of the website isn’t similarly (and less obviously) affected by bots - with vote manipulation still standing.
They could sell the cleaned votes to AI companies and keep the dirty data public for the scrapers.
Meta/OpenAI openly pirating everything they can to train their LLMs is a good example of how data hungry these AI/etc. companies are.
Is it plausible that companies request that Reddit narrows down data e.g. by demographic, geographic location, or likelihood of being a real person and request that data for purchase? Sure, but the LLMs seemingly require all data that exists that these companies can get their hands on - I highly doubt with the scale of data being consumed (and data theft being committed) that the big players care too much about Reddit data being tainted. If anything, it might even be desirable to them.
Okay, but it is those niche subs that are the most valuable.
Are you somebody invested financially in Reddit? Genuine question.
Those niche subreddits can also have their moments, too. Maybe it’s not bots, but there are plenty of shills that have been caught in various niche subreddits I’ve frequented over the years (thanks to unpaid moderators).
havnt they already destroyed the value of reddit, the bots already have massive hordes of downvoting/voting going on.
ability to allow bot propaganda to infest the subreddits more easily(especially politics and news)
Ok, so how does a shareholder benefit from that? My company that pays people to stomp on kittens at my kitten stomping factory has value in that in gives people jobs and controls the feral cat population, but it creates no profit for the shareholders.
Yeah reddit’s a weird one. Their financials, aside from this year, are also horrendous. Not sure what value they really bring.
Reddit shareholders also own a lot of shares in much more lucrative industries.
I didn’t ask about their other shares. I asked how Reddit’s soft power is able to actually benefit shareholders. I understand how it benefits Spez and those who make the actual decisions at reddit, but if I own 400 shares of Reddit, how do i actually benefit since Reddit will never pay a dividend since it will never actually be profitable
The people in power don’t care about people with a few shares. You can sell all your shares right now and nobody would notice.
Reddit’s power benefits whomever wants to push an agenda and a narrative while minimizing any info that could counter that.
How is that any different than what i initially said?
Companies pay for API access so profits go up and stock value go up.
I assume the reddit stock doesn’t pay dividends based on profits. But if you bought for 10 dollars and now it is 500 dollars? You can sell some of that stuck to people hoping it will go up to 1000 dollars for a solid profit. And so forth.
And if it DOES pay dividends (some kinds of stocks do) then a percentage of those profits are directly sent to the share holders based on how many shares they have.
I understand how stocks work. Reddit stock is just a legitimizes greater fool scam as no one will ever get a dividend or see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it. Reddit is absolutely worthless in an strictly economic sense. It’s value is soley in societial and political ways
see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it
So… it is a stock that doesn’t pay dividends? Like… that is what stocks are.
Which will only actually ever benefit anyone that owns massive amounts of the stock. Reddit has few tangible assets other than their data, which is of questionable value at best. It’s basically like owning stock in a piblic library
Homie? I assume you are just looking to hear “reddit bad” and… it is.
But if you are actually attempting to discuss things in good faith? You are just describing stocks and you should REALLY educate yourself on the subject if you ever intend to invest beyond retirement and mutual funds… which most people shouldn’t in the first place but that is an even bigger tangent.
The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for… so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.
They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn’t to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.
They have their public ‘sponsored’ content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you’re an angel doing god’s work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.
I understand that Reddit has value to an individual or small board that can control what is posted to reddit. What i am saying is that Reddit’s value is entirely in soft power and has no actual path to profitablity. If i am Condé Nast then i can benefit from owning reddit. But Reddit will never pay a dividend, so buying stock in the company is worthless unless you are convinced that some idiot will pay more for it down the road.
no actual path to profitablity
You don’t think reddit can make money from advertising?
It hasn’t been able to thus far, same as every other “free” social media site other than Facebook. The problem is the sheer scale of the data that these sites have to main makes their overhead costs insane. To make profit from those ad spaces would require those ads to be too expensive to justify to the companies. It would be like trying to operate the New Orleans Superdome purely on ad space. The rate would be way too high to for companies advertising to ever get a return on their investment. Reddit can run ads to subsidize their costs, but it will never be viable as a primary revenue stream for them.
its useful as a propaganda tool, much like Xitter.
I agree. But propaganda tools typically aren’t publicly traded because they are a venture that requires a lot of expenses but being it little cash value, which is the entire point of the stock market.
Yes, but Oracle’s stock skyrocketed based on the unprofitable OpenAI promising to buy >100B worth of AI data center space from Oracle. Nvidia stock also surged on the news, since Oracle builds those data centers with Nvidia chips
Obviously OpenAI doesn’t have the money to pay Oracle themselves, so Nvidia has helpfully given them the money
So now we have an incredibly large cyclic corporate dependency of money from Nvidia -> OpenAI -> Oracle, then back to Nvidia. Definitely not a financial disaster waiting to happen
They haven’t even spent the fucking money yet. It’s just announcements of intentions, with a fraction of that $100B in outlays. Nobody seems to want to say who gets to be the one holding the $100B at the end of it, either.
Presumably they’ll all just do a stock swap and tell their vendors “We’re good for it, check’s in the mail”?
This is how you can tell Reddit’s $200+/share price is insane.
Well, that and the P/E is 180. Typical target P/E on a stock is 15-20, depending on your anticipation of its growth. But we’re expected to believe Reddit’s earnings will be 9x their current income in… some nebulous amount of time?
Like, its silly to get excited about a company this hyperinflated seeing a tiny slide off its new peak. But also, you can’t help be bearish on a firm this flimsy.
While I don’t agree with the reddit valuation to begin with…
that is actually how the stock market “should” work? Reddit is a company that, at its core, produces data to sell to other companies. If other companies choose to (say they are not going to) use that data, then the value of reddit drops. That is literally supply and demand.
If Stanley’s Sprockets’ sprockets are a vital part of iphones then Stanley’s Sprockets is going to be a very valuable company. If Apple changes to the other dude’s product, Stanley’s Sprockets has now lost a lot of value.
Reddit produces nothing. They dupe their users into doing that. Which seem to largely be bots now.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer company
