Oh. I came here a month ago because reddit took their IPO public, and within about 2 months, I had 3 different bans for 3 different comments. None of which were remotely offensive. This on a 10+ year old account that never had issues before the talks of IPO. In 2021 they even awarded me as being the 1% of top karma earners for the whole site.
One of the comments on reddit that I got banned for 3 days was “Awwwww, what a cute kitty!!!” on /r/aww. It was flagged for “Bullying and harassment” by a bot, and supposedly reviewed by a human on appeal who still agreed with the bot. Which is how I know that humans are not reviewing the human reviewed appeals.
And they were all similar to that in different subreddits… With the 3rd one banning me outright a month ago.
You know what WAS all over my account though? Absurdist humor. Probably 90% of my account was nothing but absurdist humor. You know, the kind of comments that a HUMAN would have no offense over, but an AI bot may not be able to identify as not being serious.
The kind of comments that would result in glue as a pizza topping. Not that I’m responsible for that exact fiasco, but my comments might cause an AI to create a similar situation. I’m sure before all these bans came, my name was predesignated for ban as my account would muddy their whole plans of selling real people’s comments to google for AI training.
I mean one of my comments was “WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH WAH! WAH! WAH!” because somebody had mentioned Wario (from nintendo). What’s an AI supposed to do with that? What are you, the Lemmy user reading this, supposed to do with that comment without context? But in regards to that exact post? It made sense and was a funny joke…well, I thought it was funny anyways. It only got 10 upvotes.
So as they try to turn a profit on reddit, they will absolutely alienate their audience. This is ALREADY a disaster…but it kind of feels like 8:48am on 9/11. The second plane hadn’t hit yet. There was already one disaster, but there was still a bunch more disasters to come that would continue to keep happening for years to come. That’s where reddit is right now. 8:48am. If they kill old.reddit.com, that will be 8:56am (I think?).
And the worst part is, it’s all self inflicted. Selling reddit user data to train AIs is just immediately the worst idea I can think of. It’s reddit. Have you SEEN what gets talked about there??? Do you know what a cum shoebox is? I do. I wish I didn’t. But I look forward to the day it’s somehow misused by AI and reccomends people buy Nike for their own cum shoebox. It’ll be especially funny because while 90% of the reddit userbase knows what a cum shoebox is, I’d say only 10% of society does. Coincidently enough, that 10% are also reddit users. I cannot WAIT for the news stories, where they have to dance around what happened, and how to report it without saying the word “cum”.