Not that reddit isn’t hot garbage right now, and has been for a while actually, but there’s a lot of people here who have glazed over the reason why reddit instituted this policy.
AI companies are scraping the Wayback Machine. This is something that should concern all of us.
Why?
Circumventing sites with ‘no ai scraping’ rules
And what do I care about Reddit getting paid?
If the IA doesn’t complain about being used, then it’s fine for me. The ideal outcome would be, if the archive can make some arrangement where they scrape the data and provide it to everyone. That way, sites only get scraped once and not constantly hammered.
There are plenty of sites out there not owned by major conglomerates that have norobots and noscrape tags that AI companies can use Wayback as a way to circumvent their policies.
This isn’t about reddit, it’s about AI companies stealing everything on the internet and then selling it back to you while taking your job away.
This is why we can’t have nice things. Tell you what. I will have as much support for you, as you have for blue collar workers. Sound fair?
Since I’m a union worker, sounds good.
Ahh, the next Ronald Reagan.
Fuck Spez
Reddit warned my account ( first warn in 10 years ) and deleted the comment when I told a American he can strike peacefully to show the government they are against it.
I got a warn for recommending violence by an ai , the human that checked it agreed and didn’t remove the warn haha.
Reddit is just feared that their censorship goes public.
I was on Reddit for like 15 years, then got all my warnings and a ban in like a month or two earlier this year. Oh well, lol.
I just replied “Liar, or fucking liar.” To every republican lie I saw. Only took 2 days for a permaban. I feel if they can lie we should be able to call them out on it at least.
I was on reddit for 11 years before getting banned due to zionists. I have a throwaway reddit account now for porn and other shit, but I dont post.
Yup, same thing happened to me. Called a local politician pond scum and got a permaban for “inciting violence”. Now everytime i try to make an account it gets permabanned within 24 hrs.
reddit can go fuck itself.
That’s the kind of talk that can get you banned from Reddit. 😜
I imagine almost my entire Post history can get me banned on Reddit.
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.
I don’t know… I mean, I agree. But I’m seeing a lot of demands that instances should prevent scraping. Ok, it could be astroturf; a campaign by Reddit/data brokers to neutralize the free competition. But you have seen all those deleted posts on Reddit. Those are some special little minds.
you’re right, there’s probably some anti-ai/anti-scraping folks on there aswell as here. Personally I most definitely hate intellectual property more than I do generative AI. But you’re right, different people on there will feel differently. But the point still stands that for those who thought they shared their thoughts with the world, their ideas that they donated were taken from them.
I stopped using reddit long ago.
Fuck Reddit
This is huge blow to archivism, thanks to corporate greed and enshittification of reddit. Worst MBA filled POS.
That place is becoming more and more of a shithole. Bots, Ads, trolls, garbage mods… deleted the app last month.
I quit reddit, cold turkey, the day they shut off free API access for 3rd parties. Except for a couple of fairly niche subs I haven’t missed it at all.
Same here. I’ve been better off ever since.
So reddit will become even less valuable
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.
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.
Seeing this happen has been one of the saddest most desperate parts about watching the internet dying.
It was obvious what was going to happen years ago, that didn’t stop people from acting like I was a reactionary foolish cynic when I voiced concern about this though.
Seriously FUCK Discord (and Reddit).
We are sliding rapidly into Idiocracy.
Buddy, we are already there. “Ow, my balls!” Would be high-brow tv these days.
“Ow, my balls!” was already a thing in the 90s, on BIG time tv. It was called america’s funniest videos.
Ah, back when it was “America’s Funniest Home Videos”. Yes, they pioneered the crotch-smashing format. I’m just saying, shit like Real Housewives makes getting hit in the balls look like Masterpiece Theatre.
The two things that just make me boggle, specifically about that, was just how filthy bob saget was (sort of like robin williams) in his comedy outside of the tv roles, and apparently how much straight up home-made porn was sent in to that show.
I wish his 2007 stand up ‘that ain’t right’ was still around. He was fucking hilarious.
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.
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
Lol every platform seems to live long enough to shoot themselves in the foot.
Phpbb/mybb/smf haven’t seemed to do that.
lol i think that might be the worst/best thing I have seen in a long time
Unrelated but is your username a play on benzene?
yes, in a way. this benzene ring
there was a band called Hum and in one of my favorite songs of theirs called The Scientists, the song talks about a couple who are scientists and creating and experimenting with drugs.
she tells him to keep this benzene ring around your finger, and think of me when everything you ever wanted is about to end
i fucking love that song but that moment in the song is just peak layers upon layers of music and poetry and love and adventure.
there was a band called Hum
Wow, what a memory trip! I listened to that song, I don’t think I have heard it before, but it is great! I’m pretty sure I heard a different song from them at the time, but they probably live in my mind from looking at BMG and CD warehouse catalogs at the time. Other artists have popped up over the years from there.
I’m glad I asked, and thanks for answering! Somehow that took me back to my Candlebox days.
their big hit was called Stars
oh yeah, I listened to Candelbox. They didn’t put on a good live show sadly
Ya that was the one , i listened to it, also. The very beginning sounded very familiar but I’m not sure about the rest. But maybe it’s been 30 years and, well 🤷♂️ I never saw Candlebox live, guess I didn’t miss out. I really liked Alice in Chains but only got to see Cantrell tour while “waiting”
I never got to see AiC either 😩
Core memory unlocked! I remember catching a couple mix demo cds the 01 warped tour and Hum’s stars was on it. I actually green album with the zebra on it shortly after.
Cuck boy getting pegged by post top op Garfield is definitely not something I had jotted down in my day-at-a-glance.
I would have at least expected him to ask Spez to put some lasagna on his bumhole as lube.
fuck spez
What a terrible day to have eyes.
Art.
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?
Doesn’t the internet archive relieve that stress?
I think that was probably the real reason for the block, the Internet Archive is too functional, scalable and accessible of a service for reddit’s lame excuses about needing to gatekeep access to the community created content on their website to not make reddit look totally stupid unless they came up with an excuse to block the Internet Archive.
Given that the Internet Archive is the de facto standard way to cite material as seen on a given date — they’re a trustworthy party that will probably persist for a long time — that’s going to make it harder to cite content on Reddit.
Damn, guess if you want reddit data to train your AI that you’ll need to pay Spez for access.
It’s important for people writing papers and such who need to cite material.
I wonder if there’s some way to use the TLS certificate to get a cryptographically-signed copy of a webpage with timestamp that someone could later validate as having been downloaded on that date. I don’t know if existing TLS libraries are capable of that. Like, Web browser menu option “Store cryptographically-signed webpage”. Absent a later certificate compromise, I’d think that that’d at least provide people a way to credibly say “this is really what was on that webpage on August 15th, 2026”. Like, you’d have to save a copy of the TLS session and then have libraries that could read and validate an already-generated session. The timestamp is already embedded in the session.
Some protocols, like OTR, are designed to specifically not allow that, but AFAIK, TLS could.
EDIT: Well, technically the timestamp is gonna be during the handshake, not tied to the HTTP request internal to the TLS session. It might be possible to game that by establishing a TLS session, holding it open without activity, and issuing a request much later. I’d think that that’d potentially be disallowed by Web servers one way or another, since otherwise you could probably do a denial-of-service attack by holding open a lot of sessions for a long time.
EDIT2: Oh, wait, no, shouldn’t be an issue, because the HTTP Date response header is gonna have a timestamp tied to the response.
deleted by creator
Unfortunately, it’ll be more than that, as that’ll be saving the plaintext files transferred internal to the TLS connection. The information that would need to be saved will normally just be thrown out, as it’ll be the TLS connection itself.
On second thought, though, I don’t think that it’d be viable, since the way that something like this normally works is to just use (slow) public key encryption to transfer a symmetric session key and to then use (fast) symmetric encryption on the bulk data, and once you have a copy of the session key, you could forge whatever you want with it. This would only work if you were using asymmetric encryption to encrypt the data in the connection.
kagis
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-a-session-key/
What is a session key? Session keys and TLS handshakes
The TLS (historically known as “SSL”) protocol uses both asymmetric/public key and symmetric cryptography, and new keys for symmetric encryption have to be generated for each communication session. Such keys are called “session keys.”
Yeah. Oh, well. It was a happy thought for a moment.
Don’t forget, Reddit is legally allowed to train on your content, but not the other way around. It’s consistent with US law, where corporate tax is half of income tax.
