- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.world
When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you’re giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that’s the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what’s the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don’t allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for “security reasons”, meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it’s our data. That’s exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to “communicate with other people”: your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
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It’s pointless anymore to try infoposting on reddit.
Take for example the soldering subreddit. The info on that sub is that you must slather everything in flux in order to solder properly. A guy posted yesterday citing 40 years of experience, saying that’s not how he’s done it. The comments are a mess.
Another post today, someone asks about air filtering the solder smoke. The consensus in the comments is it’s not a big deal. You can literally measure the particulate matter yourself to see how bad it is. Basically an average residential room size, say 100-200 sq/ft. You’ll basically hotbox yourself with smoke.
Another one that’s seen less often but the false idea persists. It’s that capacitors never short and burn out. I don’t know how or why that false idea floats around, but I’ve seen it over the years. I’ve replaced tons of caps that spontaneously combusted. Both electrolytic and SMD caps. Sometimes they just fail and short. No other fault.
Reddit is full of bad info. It’s site that relies on word of mouth and popularity contest. You do not build a knoweldge base of technical information this way. You’re getting an entropic game of telephone. That’s all reddit ever was and ever will be. It’s flawed paradigm by default.
A paradigm that lemmy is built off. So don’t you all be getting the idea that good knowledge is going to be getting sourced from here either.
It’s that capacitors never short and burn out.
As a long time maintenance technician, this made me unreasonably angry. This is something I would punch somebody for asserting.
It is also one of the first things you learn when experimenting with capacitors. You burn a few while building faulty circuits.
Right after having burned a few resistors.
The second thing we learned in electronics class was that putting a 12v cap in a mains line makes a really loud bang.
Our benches were left unplugged every day and when we came in, we were to plug them in.
This devolved into finding ways to hide caps in the outlets in each other’s benches and a desire to show up very early to class.
O.o
I’ve been in it since the late 90’s, I feel, at most, like peeing in their shoes when they’re not looking.
They won’t learn anyway, least you can do is make them uncomfortable for while.
It’s kind of insane that integrated wikis with citations/documentation aren’t the centerpiece of (Reddit) communities.
Instead, we got… Discord?
Early iterations of the community did try to incorporate these features.
But simply tapping the sign that reads “Go read the wiki on this solved issue” doesn’t generate the kind of traffic and community participation that repeating the same copypasta every month or two does. Also, god forbid one of your mods does something like…
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post something unPC in a Politics community
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argue with content from a native advertiser
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piss off an admin… somehow
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sign in from a device in a way that triggers an automated unchallengeable ban
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fail to constantly scour your community of shitposts
Plenty of the old subs have been hollowed out, transferred, or otherwise denuded of their professional contributors for some stupid reason or another. And now the site is so aggressively policed that you can’t really join (much less re-join once you’ve been booted) to add anything useful.
This has been the OG Wikipedia’s fate as well, with mods getting older and links going stale and new contributors all getting hyper-policed for fear of bots, marketing accounts, and shitposters.
Small forums full of active users are more reliable for useful information than big forums full of lurkers and attention whores. That’s not unique to Reddit. Just very obvious, given the long and deplorable history of the platform.
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Don’t worry, they’re next, they’re just run by some what quiet assholes instead if fuckyou spez
Meanwhile I’m playing Oxygen Not Included, and like half the time I look something up about the game, half the results are on reddit. There’s a lot of accumulated stuff on there that’s still helpful.
Of course, any false or outdated info will quickly be obvious when you start up the game again. Lower stakes than soldering safety.
The only subs that kept me around for years was r/electricians and r/askelectricians, which admittedly does usually have pretty accurate answers and info, and sometimes I just like to riff about work. Wrong answers get downvoted and removed at an almost scary speed.
But finally after like years of the same exact questions from homeowners that are just like “how do I wire a smart switch? What’s a switch loop / what do you mean my white wire is not a neutral? I took apart this mess of wires and didn’t take before pics how do I put it back together?? Do I need grounds???” I could go on lol. But I just realized how much a huge waste of time it all was. I wouldn’t call any of the troubleshooting or commenting “fun” it was just a way to pass time. I guess it’s better people get real answers than trust AI because a lot of time they try that first and post some of the answers these chat bots gave them and wheeeewwww boy are they some schizo hallucinated bullshit haha
I’ve been off all social media other than Lemmy for a while now. Since it’s not as active here it’s been better for me personally. It’s easy to refresh reddit and get a new thread every few minutes. On here I notice I’m seeing the same articles a couple times in a row and that’s my cue to hop off and read manga or play chess online instead or something.
Also yeah caps can go bad lol. We had these giant 18" tall ones on the solar industrial sites I worked at. This was 10 years ago so I forget the value I just know we had dozens of them each on 6 AWG wire. Part of our maintenance was to check for leaky ones. Because they’d leak then they’d eventually fail and then without the proper filtering for the system, usually the cabinet would catch on fire.
I was on a few narrow interest subs. I mean really narrow interest. There were folk they’d turn to for reliable historical analysis, folk they’d turn to for reliable cultural analysis, I was one of their data crunchers (I could basically find the line entries that looked wrong and the folk who had time to do more in depth forensic bullshit could dig into them) I mean on one of those narrow interest subs some people thought they were taking down a cult, I just helped shine a light on things. And learned about cults of course, can’t start a good cult without knowing how the toxic ones work
Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially.
Real “I grew up doing content farming in the early 2000s” energy.
It’s a good thing that this could never happen to Lemmy and some vindictive mod would just take their instance offline, right… Right?
Remember they can’t afford mods or to pay anyone. They can rip off your content for themselves though!
Don’t Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit
(Emphasas mine.)
So shitposts are fine?
I’ve been training my whole life for this.
Yeah. I only post sarcasms without the /s until I get banned from all the subs.
great post. im glad it has so many upvotes.
additionally:
i think it ties back to many issues:- privacy
- stance and dividend of LLMs
- online culture. digital communities
- citizen rights
- and lots more!
People exist here who didn’t get [edit: perma-] banned for stupid and belligerent reasons? Like this one?
I left a long time ago. Don’t think they were as trigger happy back then, so they never got the chance. You think I should open an account and start posting reasonable criticism of disinformation so they can ban me and I get to be one of the cool outcasts rather than a boring old emigrant?
we’re all heathens here friends
I never got banned at all. The toxicity of the company itself pushed me out about 3 or 4 years ago. Seeing how reddit was getting enshitified so fast and in real time was the queue to just delete everything and get the fuck out. No regrets.
I haven’t got banned, and I still visit reddit for communities that don’t have an alive lemmy equivalent, but in the past year I’ve used lemmy a lot more, it’s better for conversations.
what about the subreddit posionai, they are doing the lords work out there
Open up junk data subreddits
We need distributed webscrapers going on refit 24/7. Distributed because they shouldn’t be allowed to tell whether or not a request is a user or a scraper
Lots of both legal and illegal devices in people’s homes surreptitiously use their connection to do that already. E.g. Bright Data sells proxy access with 400M+ residental IPs via its SDK embedded in lots of smart TVs. AI scrapers love this one weird trick!
I stopped doing that a long time ago.
Every time I visit someone’s house or coffee shop or whatever, I create a new reddit account and see how long it takes to get banned from as many subs as possible
Since they ban by ip address, that is pretty fucked up
That’s genius. Guess I just found my new mid-tier hobby. Thanks.
“your valuable data.”
Hilarious.
The irony is that this argument will probably get more attention on Reddit than on any open forum: Centralised platforms are great for discovery and awful for preservation. Use them as the billboard, not the library. Keep the valuable stuff where you control the rules, the backups and the future.
agreed there, the rule should be, if your goal is to make sure your information is out there… don’t limit it to one place. Post it to Lemmy, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, keep it on your PC, and a flash drive, and have off site backups.
Exactly. Platform loyalty is a bad archiving strategy. If one platform disappears, changes the rules, or buries old content, your work and links still survive instead of vanishing with someone else’s business decisions.
I’ve been slowly replacing, by hand so it doesn’t trigger their detection alerts, all of my 15 years of comments on Reddit, a lot of it valuable answers to tech questions or programming problems, with a randomly prompted unrelated paragraph of ChatGPT whatever.
When one of the first exodi(?) came, a lot people replaced their comments with random words through scripts, back then it was not as detected and prevented (which Reddit promptly scrambled to prevent), and thanks to people doing that I’ve eventually blocked Reddit from my Kagi altogether, simply because 90% of what I found was either questions with scrambled answers, comments that are just ads from bots, or just unrelated bullshit. So, it does have an actual impact.
Have fun selling that to AI companies.
i think the reason reddit deleted both my accounts, was so that i couldnt modify or delete my contributions.
after the accounts are deleted, they probably still have copies saved somewhere. but it revokes my access to remove or tamper with my content.Unfortunately, I think there is a pretty easy way for them to detect comments that were deleted/edited with the intent of making them useless to Reddit: check the age of the comment/post when it was modified.
Whether they would bother to do this is a different question.I’d be interested in your results a few weeks/months from now.
LIke you I deleted all my comments and verified they were deleted. When I looked a couple of months later, Reddit had actually restored each and every one.
I’m slowly deleting them again. Maybe this time they’ll stay gone.
Deleting (or editing) comments does not change what the hosting website has, it just updates what they display. so there will be lines in a database saying:
- the original comment was “blah”
- on the 6th of August 2024 it was changed to “blah2”
- and the 20 of January the comment was deleted
There isnt a way for you to remove that unless there is some legal mechanism for you to force them to remove all data about you.
Even with GDPR requests there’s zero guarantee they actually comply with deletion requests. They may decide to show something that may lead to think they have complied. That’s it…
That’s why I went with editing them to something random, unrelated to the thread, but still a feasible paragraph, in hope that this won’t trigger this mechanism.
This is one of those cases where AI generated comment pasted over the original comments to poision the data comes in handy. So AI is training off AI.
Have you tried a GDPR request?
You should back those up first and consider contributing them elsewhere. Maybe even just a WriteFreely blog with all your old comments and context.
I wish there was a third-party reddit archive, because before it enshittified it was a great resource for a lot of niche topics.
