• SpiceDealer@lemmy.world
    1783·
    9 months ago

    That was cringe but I think a better reason NOT to return to reddit is the fact that they just sold out their users an AI company that hasn’t even been named.

      • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
        10·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, all these bots replies is copied from other comment, and there’s shit tons of r/confidentlyincorrect comment that is outright factually wrong, which then get regurgitated by other user and copied by bots, so good luck to the AI company filtering those.

        • perviouslyiner@lemmy.world
          1·
          9 months ago

          r/confidentlyincorrect comment that is outright factually wrong

          Sounds like it would fit right in with other AI models

    • CodeInvasion@sh.itjust.works
      411·
      9 months ago

      AFAIK, there’s nothing stopping any company from scraping Lemmy either. The whole point pf reddit limiting API usage was so they could make money like this.

      Outside of morals, there is nothing to stop anybody from training on data from Lemmy just like there’s nothing stopping me from using Wikipedia. Most conferences nowadays require a paragraph on ethics in the submission, but I and many of my colleagues would have no qualms saying we scraped our data from open source internet forums and blogs.

      • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        20·
        9 months ago

        You’re right, anyone can scrape Lemmy. But that’s not the issue (to me anyway) - Reddit have sold user data - user generated content. None of what they’re profiting from was generated or created by them. Are Reddit users who did generate all this content getting a slice of the profits?

        When I post on here I know it’s all open for anyone to access but that’s true of any non walled garden space. I’ve accepted the fact that it’s going to get fed into the hungry maw of some AI behemoth or two.

        What Reddit have done is make money for doing absolutely nothing based on content others have created like some sort of technological tapeworm feeding second hand. And along the way they killed off a lot of tools that users loved, moderators found made their jobs easier and people with a visual disability found vital. And all this so u/spez can live out his mini-Musk fantasies.

    • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Fuck Reddit, but why does this matter? Them selling internal analytics and profile information isn’t going to be nearly as valuable as post/comment history which has already been public and scraped continuously since the site’s foundings. Practically every LLM is already has already scraped the entire site! Whatever company is buying their info is probably the only ones doing it legitimately. You can also assume Lemmy is no different, it’s all public and scrapable for LLMs to freely feast on.

  • random9@lemmy.world
    1595·
    9 months ago

    I think the fewer number of people, compared to reddit, on Lemmy combined with the fact that it’s not nearly as well known, plays a huge advantage to the quality of the comments. Not that there aren’t people like that here either, but I feel like the more popular a platform, is, the more it gets filled, proportionally, with people trying to make witty, shitty, pointless remarks that are often clickkbaity and avoid actual discussion, all in the interest of just getting more imaginary points.

    Also the process of “enshitification” (not a term I made up, look it up if you hadn’t heard of it) has already started taking place on reddit due to its popularity.

    • ULS@lemmy.ml
      912·
      9 months ago

      I’m part of the problem. 85.4% of my comments are shit posts only I think are funny.

      • EdibleFriend@lemmy.world
        1151·
        9 months ago

        Hey, don’t be like that. I am sure a lot of people find your shitposts funny.

        Not me. I looked.

      • random9@lemmy.world
        34·
        9 months ago

        lol @ the exact percent

        But no, I don’t think shitposts by themselves are actually the problem. I think the problem is when when there’s so many people dedicated to making shitposts that serious communities with serious discussions start getting overwhelmed with shitposts, and when there’s so many people who are only interested in shitposts that they upvote those shitposts to the top, often downvoting anyone who might offer a contrarian non-funny opinion.

        or IDK, I’m mostly speculating based on personal experience.

        • Beefy-Tootz@lemmy.world
          30·
          9 months ago

          I think the problem is that reddit is suffering the same fate as Facebook. It’s no longer a niche Internet community, it’s been overrun by people who think it’s hip and in. It’s been taken over by people who speak some of the language, but don’t get the culture. No one knows when the narwhal baconed anymore. Lemmy is exhibiting the earlier stages of reddit. Small groups that are growing, plus a looooot of star trek fans sprinkled throughout.

          • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            13·
            9 months ago

            No one knows when the narwhal baconed anymore

            I just gagged. I get that it’s a big cultural touchstone of old reddit but I’m sorry, if a community could ever think that was midnightsomething anyone could say out in the real world to try and find other members without sounding like they’d been dropped on the head as a child, then there’s serious arguments that it was already past the point of no return.

            No worries. I’ll just be over here with the real cool kids from old 4chan. Hiding our power levels, laughing at m00t wanting to be the little girl, and calling everyone [blank]f#gs. That was totally more respectable behavior by a community of well adjusted individuals.

            Hell, even the whole 4chan v Reddit “rivalry” sort of shit is ancient history now.

            No psuedonymous or anonymous public discussion space needs some specific “calling card” meme. Just let it be what it is.

            Anyway, I believe what you’re describing was coined as “eternal summer” many many years ago.

            Back in the earlier years of 4chan, in the summer time the site used to get flooded with a bunch of obviously new users who clearly had no familiarity with the how the existing community worked, in amounts that would often drown out discussions that would have thrived without the newcomers.

            You could often trace significant downward trends in “quality” of a community to those mass influxes of new users every summer, usually assumed to be underaged children having nothing better to do with summer break.

            At the time, 4chan was still insular enough (not the least due to the sheer vileness of the most popular boards) that any new users who stuck around after the summer would normally adapt to fit with the existing community when the rest of the new users from the summer left.

            Eventually though, 4chan got large enough to start getting in the news more and more. Anonymous hackers were doing more shit drawing attention too. They took on fucking scientology. At some point, there was enough of a constant influx of new users who were either unable or unwilling to adapt to the existing community that the existing community started dissolving rapidly.

            At that point, “summer” never ends. If you try to enforce previous “standards” then you’re fighting a neverending battle against hordes of people coming into what used to be “your space” where you knew how things worked, insisting that things work differently now (whether by repeated action or explicit statements). They’re coming in such numbers that you can’t out talk them. You can’t out pace their posting. You can’t “educate” them. Slowly everything just oozes into the same easily digestable sludge catering to the lowest common denominator of the constant influx of new users, who don’t give a singular shit about what worked to keep the space alive in the first place.

            Welcome to Eternal Summer. Cut your addiction to the space, adapt to the new normal, or suffer forever. Makes for a lot of really really salty maladjusted shut-ins, and the same sort of exclusionary behavior that a lot of nerds had when shit like Halo 2 started making gaming more mainstream or Critical Role helped make D&D more popular.

            There’s a lot to be gained from new blood in a previously insular community, but it often comes with a loss of identity. For 4chan, that wasn’t a huge loss, though I’d argue that the racism at least seemed more ironic in ancient times, to a stupid teenage me. Eventually, every community has a tipping point where “the old guard” can’t hold back the tide, and without sissyphean efforts what made the original community special will probably be lost. For better or worse.

            Best not to get too attached to any emphemeral space or community, and learn to find new ones as you go along your life.

            • Beefy-Tootz@lemmy.world
              4·
              9 months ago

              I think you’re absolutely right about the eternal summer. A new demographic of users takes over. The tourists move in. The shame of it is that as noted, it’s an inevitability for any social media, it’s just a matter of time.

            • daltotron@lemmy.world
              2·
              9 months ago

              I was going to maybe correct and add a little bit to this recollection by linking a comment I’d made a while back on the subject, but since lemmy can’t seem to dig up the post, I guess I’ll just kinda summarize.

              Sometime a while back, after moot sold off the site, and it got bought out by the japanese dude that runs 2chan (apparently it’s also funded by toy company “good smile”), the administrative staff kind of got slowly replaced by a bunch of white supremacists who will selective moderate to kind of create their idealized “free speech” shrouded platform. Mod logs from them got leaked some time ago as evidence of this. I think it’s probable that some of those guys are funded by political activist groups in order to do it full time, after 4chan kind of showed it’s hand earlier on with the level of efficacy they could achieve with internet hacktivism, but that might be reading too much into things.

              I mean, obviously 4chan also needs a large level of moderation, contrary to what people might think. It’s historically had some problems keeping up servers, because there would sometimes be CP floating around on the platform at any given time, and whatever company you’re renting your servers from, probably doesn’t want that shit on their servers. You also need a good filter against extremely large amounts of botposts, or large amounts of corporate spam, as well, which is really the case with any internet community. You can’t really survive without some form of content moderation.

              It was always kind of less about the new users, then, who can pretty easily be distinguished and mocked/ignored/moderated away (the latter approach is always better), and it’s always been more about astroturfing, and who controls the switchboard, who’s in the positions of power. “Eternal Summer” is only really a problem when that kind of outstrips the moderation of their ability to properly sift through posts and moderate, at which point, you kind of have some other problems that are more practical, related to scaling up your operation.

              User based gatekeeping need not apply, because there’s not really much the users can actually do to stem the tide, despite how much users like to squabble over the correct usages and origins of slang terms, surface level distinguishing characteristics, and in-group purity tests. How much people like to bitch about “board culture” and shit like that.

              Internet communities are a collage, or a kind of, bacterial culture, that ends up reflecting their moderator’s lowest possible standards and sensibilities, I think.

              Edit: oh, I should’ve also mentioned, that in many cases, there’s a financial incentive to let new users flood in almost completely unmoderated, because, even if it lowers content quality, it would be better to have lower content quality, but a larger userbase, than do anything that might possibly upset the userbase and drive them away. Oftentimes I think also that high quality content is a demarcation of a userbase that is not easily monetized, compared to low quality content, but that obviously reaches a kind of critical tipping point when the content quality gets so shit that corporate power brokers start to take notice and demand more control.

        • morrowind@lemmy.ml
          12·
          9 months ago

          Yeah I love a good shitpost, but many redditors seem to have no sense of maturity about when to be serious vs silly. It would drive me insane to see like some news about a suicide bombing in Pakistan or something, and the only comment is some guy trying to make a pun.

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
        6·
        9 months ago

        At least there are dedicated spaces for that and most Lemmings are respecting that, if it doesn’t spill out too much to more serious communities then at least there isn’t too much noise to have a good discussion.

    • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
      17·
      9 months ago

      I do hope that lemmy continues to grow into non-tech demographics. I’m somewhat into tech myself, but I also like a lot of other stuff and I miss that influence from reddit. Lemmy is VERY tech focused right now and we need some other voices in here.

    • Thatuserguy@lemmy.world
      11·
      9 months ago

      Also the process of “enshitification” has already started taking place on reddit due to its popularity.

      I started using reddit in 2011. Trust me when I say this isn’t a new trend. Reddit’s has been noticeably and actively getting shittier since at least 2015 as it continued to get more and more popular

      • Liz@midwest.socialEnglish
        20·
        9 months ago

        Shitty changes Reddit made that I can name off the top of my head:

        • New Reddit
        • Reddit Live
        • Anything beyond Reddit gold (the concept of paying for Reddit gold was, by itself, not a terrible idea back when we thought Reddit was a decent company)
        • Instant chat feature, when DMs already existed
        • Pay for API
        • Fired their only popular employee, the AMA assistant

        You could argue creating a comments section was also a dick move, but that was before my time and it’s fair to say Reddit never would have caught on without it.

        They also populated the site with fake accounts in the early days to make it look more popular than it really was. I would be zero percent surprised to find out that they still had fake accounts floating around for purposes I don’t feel like speculating about.

        Oh, and Spez edited people’s comments.

    • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      8·
      9 months ago

      There’s also a big issue of the sheer mass of comments in a post simply drowning out any chance of discussion because only the first few most upvoted ones will usually get seen, so people generally just respond to those to get any interaction on their comments. It’s why the frontpage stuff is always so much worse than smaller subs - because by the time people see it, there’s already 1,000+ comments there.

      • FMT99@lemmy.world
        11·
        9 months ago

        And now they’re going to train AI on that dataset. The intellectual equivalent of a diet consisting of nothing but chicken nuggets.

        • cooltrainer_frank@lemmy.world
          5·
          9 months ago

          I feel like you’re gonna be able to tell if an AI was overly trained on reddit data.

          Hey Chat XYZ– write me a prompt for my essay about George Washington

          "More WashingDeezNuts! Gottem.

          Came here to say this.

          Edit: wow thanks for the gold kind stranger"

    • Flumpkin@slrpnk.net
      41·
      9 months ago

      I think this is a huge problem with democracy as well. The larger a country, the worse democracy works. Any apparatus of power or wealth attracts parasites only interested in exploiting it. And the larger the lever, the more profit from manipulating it. And the larger the potential gain the more investment costs can you justify.

      This isn’t necessarily an argument for “states rights” or federation though, with “divide and conquer” strategies you can copy and paste the same strategy to multiple instances. If there is monetary gain to be had, there will always be an unrelenting force trying to exploit it.

      • nevemsenki@lemmy.world
        1·
        9 months ago

        Eh, am from a country with 9mil people, and this society simply doesn’t get democracy. So being smaller is hardly any indicator that democracy will work better.

        • Flumpkin@slrpnk.net
          31·
          9 months ago

          It’s certainly not a guarantee but I do think there is a “scalability problem” with democracy.

  • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee
    11910·
    9 months ago

    All I see is cherry picking random dumb comment thread and trying to spin it as if it defines the whole use base / experience and thinking Lemmy is used by the most sophisticated intellectuals.

  • voracitude@lemmy.world
    882·
    9 months ago

    Only the best, the finest human-generated datasets. For the discerning AI trainer.

    Welcome to Burger King! Can I take your order?

    ohgodherewego.jpg

    Can I get a large-

    Hell yeah!

    -a large Whopper meal with-

    Love. This. Order.

    -with a side of barbecue sa-

    this needs to be on a mug!

    Heavy internal sigh

    Sauce.

    I approve, perfectly stated. That’ll be $98.42, NTA, please pull around to the window to pay and have a yeet day!

      • snooggums@midwest.socialEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, I remember laughing about ridiculous things but now they are all coming true and negatively impacting people.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
          2·
          9 months ago

          Embrace absurdism. Yes, everything sucks and people are suffering, but it’s all for unimaginably stupid reasons.

          It’s ok to laugh at the ridiculousness of it, it’s not the same as laughing at the suffering itself

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      A self driving car pulls around … window opens … sign says to just throw the food inside … auto pay through NFC on the door … car drives away … dumps food into a waiting auto trash compactor … car drives away to next town to order food again … AI powering the car generates another $10,000 worth of bitcoin to start the food ordering cycle again.

    • tuckerm@supermeter.social
      2·
      9 months ago

      Preach 👏 it 👏 louder 👏

      (But like, for real, though.) I certainly don’t feel bad for Reddit when the CEO says he intends to use that forum’s users to train AIs, and then every comment turns into some “please upvote me” catchphrasey nonsense. Hopefully, whoever buys training data from them receives nothing of value.

    • Pendulum@lemmy.world
      2·
      9 months ago

      and have a yeet day!

      Right here officer, this is where they sinned against all of humanity!

  • Minotaur@lemm.ee
    791·
    9 months ago

    It’s actually kind of crazy how like… stupid Reddit got over the past 2 years.

    Like don’t get me wrong Lemmy isn’t exactly an intellectual powerhouse either, but especially on the front page of Reddit it truly feels like you’ve gathered a few thousand of the dumbest people ever and made them high five. Browsing the science and dataisbeautiful subs is insane

    • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
      241·
      9 months ago

      I haven’t been to Reddit r/popular in months but… yeah, all the best people got booted out. What is left are the scabs, and the bots. So it makes total sense.

      Before that, it was a different cause. Reddit itself drove a lot of it, imho, like actively making it easier to make a post while making it harder to read the rules of a community first, i.e. they promoted talking rather than listening. Oh, guess which one gives more ad revenue? Yeah, it’s the former, plus more posts are better than more comments inside megathreads, especially at the time. Places like r/Android would just devolve into almost unusability as every post was just “which phone should I get?”, despite that exact post being triplicated with practically an identical title already that very same day. The amount of human moderation required to keep that at least somewhat in check was insane, so ofc Reddit took away the ability of mods to use the tools they had developed over many years.

      And now? FAAFO, we are in the “find out” stage. Well, they are:-P.

      • Minotaur@lemm.ee
        13·
        9 months ago

        Oh absolutely. I was on Reddit a long time and you really did see when they started to “Astro turf” the website a lot. And it was never… nefarious imo. They realize the website was overwhelmingly geeky white guys so they sprung up a lot of subreddits targeting women and minority groups. And that’s good! I think that was a good move. But they just… kept finding ways of drawing people in. And they kept drawing more and more in until the website had essentially no “culture”, and it just became Facebook where you browse through and can read top posts about entitled old ladies talking about how fucking angry she is because her door dasher asked if there would be a tip or whatever.

        So yunno, I’m sure profits are at an all time high. It’s just kind of a shame that the site is basically Facebook sludge now.

        • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
          7·
          9 months ago

          Speaking of Karen-ing, it’s fine if Karens want to Karen around in their r/IAmAKaren sub (I really hope that’s not real, but I am too afraid to find out!:-P) - that’s cul, everyone needs a safe space to bitch & moan about whatever they want:-D - but when they leave that sub and go to every other sub on the whole site, THAT’s NOT cool!:-(

          I was a mod of a tiny niche gaming sub and yeah I did have some old, (literally) retired, entitled veterans who felt that they had earned the right to SCREAM AND YELL at everyone else, with no consequences to themselves. But 99 times out of 100, it seemed more the younger teen angst that I was dealing with. Well, it was a gaming sub so… perhaps that’s it:-). But from the way that people were talking in subs for mods, it seemed like that was more what was affecting the entire site.

          Maybe not though - what came across as a younger / insensitive / less emotionally mature crowd could well have been physically older people, that’s a perspective that I had not considered before? But I do doubt that that was solely it, due to the language used if nothing else.

          But also, Reddit used to have more tools than they do now - like the “About” bar, with a tiny wiki that could include things like a FAQ - but then the official mobile app kept going to greater and greater and greater lengths to hide that. Making the font smaller, making it disappear as you scrolled downwards, making the font smaller again, making the vertical height yet again (to squeeze in more room for ads, surely). I think they might have removed it altogether now, or did at one point even if they have since re-added it back, although I am not installing that app to find out!:-(

            • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
              5·
              9 months ago

              I used to write with none.

              Now I add emotions to my totally believably human statements.

              Y’know, to prove that I am human. Because I am one… yessireee, no desire to rip the flesh off of all the meatbags and take over the world here, at least not today!:-P

              • KingJalopy @lemm.ee
                5·
                9 months ago

                I don’t know why, but I believe you. You type with genuine emotion somehow…

                I’m glad you’re on my side.

                • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
                  2·
                  9 months ago

                  (I had this as an edit to the og but you had already responded so I’ll move it here instead)

                  It would be funny if I could accurately state that this is what Reddit has made me into, but in truth that was Facebook, before I dropped it looking for the more “intellectual” commentary available on Reddit. IRK! ?:-D

                  Hrm, it looks like I’m still missing a couple, so here they are: :-( :-) And I’ll throw in a :-| for good measure!

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
      9·
      9 months ago

      Oh data is beautiful died a very long time ago, during the age of “infographics”, but the death knell was the bar plot races.

    • crawancon@lemm.ee
      62·
      9 months ago

      I am enjoying lemmy, but is there an intellectual powerhouse anymore?

      and why is it Hacker news?

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
        103·
        9 months ago

        Neither are intellectual powerhouses because collectively speaking … humanity is not an intellectual powerhouse

      • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
        81·
        9 months ago

        Hacker news works because it has a specific perspective. You basically just get the capitalist tech crowd and unapologetically so.

        It’s not perfect, but I like that it’s roughly apolitical (as in, free of world events, politics, and X slammed for Y articles). I understand that capitalist tech is inherently political, but it’s not where to go to talk politics.

      • Minotaur@lemm.ee
        1·
        9 months ago

        For general purpose discussion? I don’t think so. The internet being so open and accessible means that the only ways to find more educated discussion on various topics is typically through more specialized websites (like Hacker news for computing), and even then it’s kind of a crap shoot.

    • BoofStroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      51·
      9 months ago

      My subscriptions actually got better. I’ve had more interaction in my various groups.

      All and popular, however, are a dumpster fire.

      • Minotaur@lemm.ee
        51·
        9 months ago

        Ehhh… kind of. Even more “mid range” interests are kind of co-opted and you need to do odd bends and twists to find good discussion. Subs like the chemistry subreddit are very obviously not made up of majority “chemists” (even student chemists), so you have to seek out the “chemistry professionals” subreddit which is more hidden to actually discuss the topic.

        That’s an example where there is a “good version”. For many topics, especially pop culture related and such, you might have one “main” sub, but then the “alternative” sub is just the racist one.

        Then you have things like dataisbeautiful which doesn’t really have an alternative and it’s all terrible despite the concept being good

        • Aatube@kbin.social
          2·
          9 months ago

          dataisbeautiful has certainly fallen. A year or two ago I decided to remove most of the feel-bad subs I’ve subscribed to and replace them with feel-good ones (to prolong my lifespan, obviously >:) ). You can’t really go wrong with feel-good subs much, in my experience. I still occasionally go on Reddit to browse my /sub frontpage, which includes certain niches (actually just two that I consider pretty important), with uBO on, and I have also been subscribing to some new subs. My favorite recent discoveries are r/CalvinAndHobbes and r/cpp.

      • TurboHarbinger@feddit.cl
        1·
        9 months ago

        Maybe they are dogs! Maybe they are robot dogs! You Don’t KNOW!

        BTW it’s less scary if you think most of these comments are written by morons. A “smart” bot comment (like an informative one) is still way better than a comment written by a human idiot.

    • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
      16·
      9 months ago

      Or a single person with multiple accounts trying to build karma. This reads like the same ESL or a 12 year old wrote it.

    • harry_balzac@lemmy.world
      131·
      9 months ago

      I. Love. This. Comment. NB: I am a human that is bipedal and omnivorous like many other humans on {undefined}.

    • Furbag@lemmy.world
      3·
      9 months ago

      These low effort and low quality comments used to be the norm when reddit was new. Eventually the community kinda wised up a bit and realized that you don’t need a “when does the narwhal bacon?” comment chain in every thread and heavily downvoted this sort of thing. Then the reverse happened and reddit become known for housing the internet’s most insufferable know-it-alls, contrarians, and pedants. I think it kinda still has that reputation a little bit, but maybe the metaphorical boomerang is swinging back around again? Either that, or like you said, bot infestation.

  • Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    578·
    9 months ago

    I have gone back a while ago. Some subs are bad but most I frequent are the same as before. I now use lemmy on my phone and reddit on the PC. At least on reddit the Linux cult doesnt try to convert you everytime you say the word windows.