This is similar to when I heard reddit was doing the API lockdown, I wrote an automation bot over the weekend that self-destructed my subreddit and the entire post history. The bot also automatically downloaded and archived all of the content on my local machine.
It was annoying because at first I couldn’t get access to older posts since at the time reddit had changed their API to only show the first X posts (100 or 1,000 or whatever). So I told my bot to delete the posts as it archived them so as I deleted content, reddit had no choice but to populate the page with the older posts.
And that’s how I archived my subreddit. Reddit banned me two days later for automation, lol. I did not break any of the reddit or reddit api ToS during this process but I guess I upset someone.
I don’t think I’ve been banned, but I did a similar thing. I requested all my data from Reddit, then used that list of comment/post IDs to mass-edit them. I think I’m in the clear because I used the official third party API, with an official “app.” If you used the private API or instrumented this via the browser, that may be why you were banned.
Anyway, if you or someone else wants their full history, Reddit will give it to you via a data export request.
Unfortunately they still have everything. It’s good for the “human” visibility (lack of) but they have the data still
Oh I know, I just wanted a copy too.
Deleting posts from the user PoV was the only way I could come up with to force the API to show them to me.
We can’t even communicate with out being leeched upon. Fuck this is grim
Stack Overflow just earned a place under Reddit in the hosts block list.
It’s just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you
As if it didn’t happen already
I feel like this content craze is going to evaporate soon because all the new content from here forward is sure to be polluted by LLM output already. AI is fast becoming a snake eating its own tail.
That reminds me. I should go update my licenses to spit in the face of AI training companies.
Good luck with the deleting. It often just means
UPDATE comments SET is_deleted = 1 WHERE ID = 666;.There was similar things done on Reddit during the big exit. I doubt it achieved what people expected it to achieve. Even if they’re not visible externally, I’m sure they can easily access (thereby make deals to license) the data out of their backend / backup; just a matter of how hard they want to try (hint: it’s really not very hard).
Yeah during the reddit exodus, people were recommending to overwrite your comment with garbage before deleting it. This (probably) forces them to restore your comment from backup. But realistically they were always going to harvest the comments stored in backup anyway, so I don’t think it caused them any more work.
If anything, this probably just makes reddit’s/SO’s partnership more valuable because your comments are now exclusive to reddit’s/SO’s backend, and other companies can’t scrape it.
It was to make the data inaccessible to general people, therefore removing the reason people visit reddit. Even if reddit could still get the data, regular people would be inconvenienced (in theory) and look somewhere else.
Based users
Data Rule Numero Uno:
Garbage in, garbage out.
Have fun training your LLM on a big steaming pile of hot garbage. That’s 80% of Stack Overflows content.
Mostly “this has been answered in another thread” and “why don’t you Google it” comments in my experience.
The other 20% is mostly high quality however, and I’m sure they’d filter out the heavily downvoted crud.
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SO has mechanisms in place to filter out AI-generated content.
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StackOverflow: *grabs money on monetizing massive amounts of user-contributed content without consulting or compensating the users in any way*
Users: *try to delete it all to prevent it*
StackOverflow: *your contributions belong to the community, you can’t do that*
Pretty fucked-up laws. A lot of lawsuits going on right now against AI companies for similar issues. In this case, StackOverflow is entitled to be compensated for its partnership, and because the answers are all CC BY-SA 3.0, no one can complain. Now, that SA? Whatever.
Why now? Other people have been profiting off of your Stack Overflow answers for years. This is nothing new.
Those answers were given in good faith under the presumption that they would be read and used by another person. Not used to train something to remove the interactions which motivated the answer in the first place.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “remove the interactions which motivated the answer in the first place”? I’m not sure I follow.
People like being social and having discourse online. Probably what brought you here in the first place.
The internet had a social contract. The reason people put effort into brain dumping good posts is because the internet was a global collaborative knowledge base for everybody.
Of course there were always capitalists who sought to privatize and profit from resources. The source materials were generally part of the big giant digital continuum of knowledge. For the parts that weren’t there we’re anarchists who sought to free that knowledge for anyone who wanted to access it.
AI is bringing about the end of all this as platforms are locking down everything. Old boards and forums had already been shuttering for years as social media was centralizing everything around a few platforms. Now those few platforms are being swallowed up by AI where the collective knowledge of humanity is being put behind paywalls. People no longer want to work directly for the profit of private companies.
Capitalists can only see dollar signs. They care not for the geological epoch scale forces of nature required to form petroleum. All that matters is can it all be sold and how quickly. Nor do they care for environmental damages they cause. In the same way the AI data mining do not care for the digital ecological disaster they are causing.
More over it’s a thought terminating cliche when someone says, “<thing> existed before so why’s it suddenly a problem?”. It seems to be yet another out of the bag of rhetorical tricks that wipes the slate of discourse clean. As if all the arguments against it suddenly need to be explained as if none of it had any validity. Not only that but the OPs are often seemingly disingenuously naive. It provides the OP with a blank slate to continually “just ask questions”. Where every response is “but why?” which forces their interlocutors to keep on elaborating in excruciating detail to the point where they give up trying to explain minutiae. Thus the OP can conclude by default they were correct that it’s not a problem after all because they declare nobody has provided them with answers to their satisfaction.
Simple answer: people vs corporations. A dev or homelabber getting help from you is very different from a company making billions just by mass shoveling your knowledge to the highest bidder.
The reason we need this as a fediverse service is that everyone can take in this knowledge and one corp doesnt have the ability to sell it. Thats what the worth comes from. Someone holding they key to it.
That’s not what I mean. When you contribute content to Stack Exchange, it is licensed CC BY-SA. There are websites that scrape this content and rehost it, or at least there used to be. I’ve had a problem before where all the search results were unanswered Stack Overflow posts or copies of those posts on different sites. Maybe similar to Reddit they restricted access to the data so they could sell it to AI companies.
Nobody smart scrapes them, they provide full dumps for you to download: https://data.stackexchange.com/
Does GDPR apply to stackoverflow? Since my data there probably does not identify me as a person?
You van delete your data but I don’t think it magically makes derivative works disappear. Its licenses SA. This is good.
Why delete the answer, why not edit it so that a human can see the answer but for AI its a load of nonsense?
There’s no way that would work either, they can just store the full edit history and auto-curate as needed.
Like AI doesn’t know how to use the way back machine?
This isn’t really comparable to reddit, since users can just send a request to SO for all the content. Reddit locking down the API meant we lost access to our content.
There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It’s not a forum; there’s no such thing as “your posts.” It’s more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren’t “yours” any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don’t have the right to take it back.
Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don’t think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like “destroying it to save it.”
