It's so weird how fragile digital history is. When things first became digital I remember sentiments of "things can now be maintained perfectly forever" but today it feels like that in 30 years we'll have a better record of 1820 than 2020.
duxup · 1h ago
Everyone wants to close down their corner of the internet because they think AI is going to make them a ton of money. We're getting the first part but I'm not sure we're seeing the latter ... anywhere as far as platforms go.
necovek · 1h ago
Well, Reddit is getting a ton of money out of licensing deals for using their data to train AI.
Whether you classify that as "AI-related" or not, I don't know.
phil21 · 52m ago
It's funny/interesting/terrifying to me that developers went from the near-religious mantra of "Garbage In, Garbage Out" when I was learning computers - to now training our supposedly super intelligent AIs off of reddit posts or even worse.
Basically laundering outright wrong information into something the next generation is now going to believe as scientific truths.
I often wonder how many people/organizations are seeding places like Reddit with malinformation/beliefs for it to become canical truth in the AI age once it's too late to tell the difference for most people?
Lord knows I've made trolling-level posts that are only marginally accurate back in the day that are now part of the AI corpus of knowledge. Mix those in with some of my well-researched stuff and you couldn't even really filter it based on "this account is a shitposter" to weight it lower. Nevermind plenty of earnest posts made that were outright wrong simply due to... being wrong in the moment and later learning better.
BeFlatXIII · 40m ago
Every company who pays is a chump. They ought to get better at scraping and hacking IOT devices as residential proxies.
PaulHoule · 1h ago
What they're really afraid of is that people will read content using LLM inference and make all the ads and nags and "download the app for a crap experience" go away -- and never click on ads accidentally for an occasional ka-ching.
Yeah, the front end for de-enshittification looks a lot like that other archive site,
In the summer of 2020 I was driving to Buffalo a lot with my son and getting cheap hotel deals thanks to the pandemic and thinking about missile defense systems and I was sick and tired of the awful shape of the web and dreaming up a system that would "archive" 100% of web pages before I read them. I spent two weeks on a spike prototype and concluded that an "archiver" can never really know if a modern web page is done loading so it at best uses heuristics to make the page load completely and waits a long time -- which makes following a link even slower than waiting for all the ads and trackers to load. I finally got Fiber-to-the-Node at home so downloading all the trash of the annoyances economy became more tolerable, a lot of the ideas I had that the time made it into my RSS reader a few years later.
freedomben · 1h ago
I had (and still have to some extent) the same dream, though I'm ok with the archiving happening after-the-fact. ArchiveBox has worked reasonably well for me
ChrisArchitect · 34m ago
What is the source? Where did Reddit say this? No blog post or release anywhere
mikestew · 4m ago
Well, there is TFA that quotes a Reddit spokesperson. What do you want, stone tablets?
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/internetarchive/comments/1gpn54q/is...
Whether you classify that as "AI-related" or not, I don't know.
Basically laundering outright wrong information into something the next generation is now going to believe as scientific truths.
I often wonder how many people/organizations are seeding places like Reddit with malinformation/beliefs for it to become canical truth in the AI age once it's too late to tell the difference for most people?
Lord knows I've made trolling-level posts that are only marginally accurate back in the day that are now part of the AI corpus of knowledge. Mix those in with some of my well-researched stuff and you couldn't even really filter it based on "this account is a shitposter" to weight it lower. Nevermind plenty of earnest posts made that were outright wrong simply due to... being wrong in the moment and later learning better.
Yeah, the front end for de-enshittification looks a lot like that other archive site,
https://archive.today/
In the summer of 2020 I was driving to Buffalo a lot with my son and getting cheap hotel deals thanks to the pandemic and thinking about missile defense systems and I was sick and tired of the awful shape of the web and dreaming up a system that would "archive" 100% of web pages before I read them. I spent two weeks on a spike prototype and concluded that an "archiver" can never really know if a modern web page is done loading so it at best uses heuristics to make the page load completely and waits a long time -- which makes following a link even slower than waiting for all the ads and trackers to load. I finally got Fiber-to-the-Node at home so downloading all the trash of the annoyances economy became more tolerable, a lot of the ideas I had that the time made it into my RSS reader a few years later.