People who posted on Reddit ( speaking in the past tense, because who would continue to do so now that we have better things? ) never intended for it to be of limited access. Reddit was a publicly accessible place, and people shared their thoughts and comments on it because it was the frontpage of the internet, so the place of choice to share things with the world. That being scraped should not be a problem. But clearly Reddit didn’t want to give you a platform to share your thoughts with the world, they wanted you to donate your thoughts and take it as their property so that they can capitalize on it.
Fuck Reddit
This is huge blow to archivism, thanks to corporate greed and enshittification of reddit. Worst MBA filled POS.
In the lieu of an IPO u/spez has actively destroyed everything that made Reddit good! Gate keeping the API thinking it’ll help with making some bigshot LLM some day lol
That place is becoming more and more of a shithole. Bots, Ads, trolls, garbage mods… deleted the app last month.
So reddit will become even less valuable
Nice of them to protect their (users’) content from AI scrapping. So that they can charge AI companies for it instead.
They aren’t doing that. They are protecting content from being scraped for free. Reddit is perfectly happy to charge for AI access to user-generated content.
No, that’s not what’s happening. They’re preventing scrapers from accessing the content at no charge. They’re totally willing to make deals for access to their content in exchange for money.
Almost, but they are really making it so they can charge ai companies for user data and not allow scrappers to get the data for free.
They can keep their shit for themselves, stopped caring a long time ago.
If you can’t archive something, did it ever really exist?
In a causal sense, yes. In a ‘the average person is fucking stupid’ sense, no.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
When reddit has mutated a few more times. They start erasing stuff themselves. It will be lost to time and that fills me with hope.
Good plan. Keep locking down your big tech platforms, and we’ll all be over here letting folks know where they can find freedom.
Careful. Lemmy is too small to draw the attention of sophisticated, persistent abuse. As a company, Reddit has struggled with revenue and we’ve all seen those struggles quite publicly. Lemmy instances with those same challenges would probably just fold and close up.
Federated networks give you freedom but the potential for abuse is proportional to that freedom while at the same time, federation is far more expensive taken as a whole.
Lemmy instances with those same challenges would probably just fold and close up.
Can confirm. I set up a pixelfed instance for my city with the goal of moving people from Insta to this version. After about three months, user accounts went from 1-10 signups a week to a hundred a week.
No way did that many business owners sign up. And yep, all spam.
After a while, my random weekend project in Spring became a full time job. I closed it last month.
I’ve thought of doing something similar, and think, while the federated spam is hard to deal with, signup spam is manageable if you somehow restrict signups to the actual community you want to support. Open signup on the web is a nightmare.
For a city, an interesting idea might be to only allow signups on a dedicated, physical wifi AP placed somewhere strategic in your city. People would literally have to go to a physical location to sign up. Piggy-backing on a library system would be another option if you could somehow get them to buy-in.
I’m sure it would persist even after an event of malicious activity. It may just turn out like email with servers needing to be added to an allowlist at worst and more moderation. I think scalability might be the limiting factor at some point though and as a result we could end up with several disconnected islands of server clusters instead of globally meshed servers.
Or… let them stay on Reddit. I like lemmy much better, and it’s possibly due to the people that are not present and the lack of commercial interest.
I think if the fediverse was ever to become more mainstream, it would naturally splinter. For example, the corporate stuff would be big, and those people who value the small-instance experience we have now would probably de-federate from it. There would always be small fediverses, even if the big fediverses got REALLY big.
Gate them in their own space.
No harm in that. To each their own. :-) Everyone gets to decide at least.
Just make your own invite-only server if you’re so worried about it. Digital freedom should be for everyone, not just a few antisocial nerds.
I’m not worried about anything.
Well, clearly you are, or you wouldn’t suggest that most people should stay on (what I think we both agree to be) an inferiror platform that affords them fewer freedoms.
If you’re worried that somehow that would bring unwanted attention or a bad crowd, you can always sequester yourself in a more niche server. That’s the whole point of this federated system to begin with - giving us more control of our digital presence.
‘freedom’ as long as the mod agrees with you.
As somebody who often ends up using Reddit like Stackoverflow and in some cases needing the Internet Archive (IA) to find the original post after it’s been deleted or garbled, I think this is a wakeup call for those go to Reddit both to get technical help and to post it. More than ever, Reddit is becoming an unreliable place to find answers for old obscure issues and if they are going to lockout places like the IA then I think it’s time people stopped contributing their solutions to Reddit.
Searching anywhere in general is getting shittier and shittier by day. Web searches are riddled with hallucinated AI generated garbage pages. Finding the right answer for difficult problems is getting worse and worse. We are sliding rapidly into Idiocracy.
Not to mention so many projects putting their support in walled garden chat services like Discord that you can’t even search via search engine. Even if you can figure out who asked the right question and when, you have to trawl through a sea of inane garbled chat to get to the developer/expert response.
Specialised topic forums really need to make a resurgence but I doubt they will.
We are sliding rapidly into Idiocracy.
Buddy, we are already there. “Ow, my balls!” Would be high-brow tv these days.
yup. continuing to feed them traffic after their repeated attacks on the userbase is just sad. stop using them. yeah it sucks the info is gone, but acting like they’ll wake up and change is absurd.
When I joined Lemmy I decided it was unwise to trust anything on Reddit less than a year old. Now it’s anything under two years old.
most of my technical questions about Linux are not even answered lol. So difficult to get good answers on reddit.
Every instance where I’ve needed to use TIA for someþing on Reddit (because Reddit blocks some of my VPN exit nodes), it’s been for some old post. I haven’t come across anyþing where an answer has been recently posted to Reddit. Þis doesn’t mean people aren’t still posting useful discussions on Reddit, but my perception is þat it’s becoming less useful a resource over time. Maybe because þe knowledgeable people have mostly migrated off?
Ofttimes what I’ve looked up in TIA for Reddit was already cached. Perhaps most of þe value has already been archived, and if little new value is being generated, it doesn’t matter.
Þe upshot is, I’m not sure how much effect þis will actually have.
exact same here. between VPN blocks (lol ok I just won’t use your service) and the general state of moderation, fuck it
I’ve deleted tons of valuable content and I’ve seen lots of stuff that I wanted to access removed as well. it’s annoying, but oh well. other forums will remain
I’ve deleted tons of valuable content
Oh, me too! Scorched earþ, when I left. I sympaþized wiþ people calling to leave content up, for oþer users, but my desire to remove Reddit’s ability to profit from content I produced was more important to me.
Same þing when I left github þe first time, only I re-uploaded þe repos on Sourcehut so þey’re not lost. But I purged everyþing on github. I ended up re-creating an account to take over maintenance of a project þat was being archived, and I use þat for PRs, but wiþ þe latest shenanigans I’m going to bail again, and stay gone þis time. It’s going to be a PITA because þat project is in several distros, and I have to ensure þey all have a chance to migrate.
It’s another move to protect against AI scraping that isn’t paying them for access.
Weren’t Reddit comparing a couple of years ago that too many AI bots crawls were stressing their servers.
Doesn’t the internet archive relieve that stress?
Is that even possible?
Technologically no. Reddit sends out the data to 10s of millions of users as part of their normal operations. They need to try to block those who collect that data for the IA. Reddit has the very short end of the stick.
The problem is that evading such counter-measures may be criminal in the US. Obviously, EU laws are much harsher.
Not to mention all of Asia, South America, Africa…
Slightly related, can you explain how (a few times for me) an archived page I tried to revisit got erased?
I don’t know their take-down policy. Could be privacy, could be copyright.
I think they are shielded by Section 230 under US law. That means, if they don’t do take-downs when requested, they become liable just like the original uploader. So it depends on whether they think they can defend something as fair use. IDK what they do with requests under non-US laws.
Thanks for your detailed explanation.
When I look that up it’s specifically about ‘defamatory, illegal, or harmful content’.
That would be understandable to take down.
Never encountered that myself, the cases I’m referring to were totally legal content AFAIK.
Only very damaging or proof of something.
As a hypothetical example, let’s say an organisation posts it’s associated with Epstein in 1999 which now obviously is very inconvenient.
They understandably remove it from their website but it should stil be on the archive if captured before.
However, in similar controversial real cases it wasn’t.
So it appears certain forces have more influence to get them to remove content beyond what’s legally required.
Since then I always screenshot the archive page.Hmm. There are many things that could cause legal trouble for the Wayback Machine. I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.
You can see on Lemmy that many people would prefer to outlaw scraping, fair use, and all that. Well, not for the “good guys” obviously, but the law doesn’t work on vibes. The IA would be legally impossible in most countries. In the EU, it would be a major crime because of copyright and GDPR. It’s only the traditional US commitment to free speech and fair use that makes it possible at all.
The IA exists in a legally precarious position. That’s not because of any shady backroom dealing. If the crowd in this community had its way, it would be gone.
I know the EU has different (stricter) laws and that they vary between states. (Germany being particularly awful)
There is however some complicated form of fair use policy.
If the IA hosts music and books that might be problematic.
But I’m talking about archived webpages and information previously available to the public with zero commercial value that has been removed.
And this includes American sites.
