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Blocking AI bots from Microsoft, others has been “pain in the a**”: Reddit CEO | Huffman says companies must pay to scrape Reddit data even though Reddit itself relies on free, user-generated content

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is standing by Reddit’s decision to block companies from scraping the site without an AI agreement.

Last week, 404 Media noticed that search engines that weren’t Google were no longer listing recent Reddit posts in results. This was because Reddit updated its Robots Exclusion Protocol (txt file) to block bots from scraping the site. The file reads: “Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content.” Since the news broke, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, which can show recent Reddit results.

The change came a year after Reddit began its efforts to stop free scraping, which Huffman initially framed as an attempt to stop AI companies from making money off of Reddit content for free. This endeavor also led Reddit to begin charging for API access (the high pricing led to many third-party Reddit apps closing).

In an interview with The Verge today, Huffman stood by the changes that led to Google temporarily being the only search engine able to show recent discussions from Reddit. Reddit and Google signed an AI training deal in February said to be worth $60 million a year. It’s unclear how much Reddit’s OpenAI deal is worth.

Huffman said:

Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used.

“[It’s been] a real pain in the ass to block these companies,” Huffman told The Verge.

ChadCMulligan ,

Reddit is dying anyway.

iAmTheTot ,

It’s easy to say this as someone who is “on the other side”. But the data doesn’t really back up that statement.

catloaf , (edited )

I don’t have data, but the quality of the content certainly seemed to be declining, even as the quantity went up.

_haha_oh_wow_ ,
@_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works avatar

I think autocorrect might’ve gotten you: You posted “quality” twice in a contradictory way.

catloaf ,

Fixed.

li10 ,

It’s awful. Politics is unavoidable at this point, and the amount of general anger on the platform is crazy.

People love watching their videos of people getting TBIs… Or getting too excited about a “justice served” post where a woman gets hit.

It’s kinda nice to see someone get their comeuppance, but then you look in the comments and there are just weirdos saying stuff like “glad that bitch got hit”, like… wtf?

catloaf ,

And yet reddit is happy to make money off our content for free.

Or at least it did. Personally I overwrote and deleted all my content a while back.

iAmTheTot ,

You think that Reddit didn’t already have the previous content saved?

mp3 ,
@mp3@lemmy.ca avatar

Bingo, the only winning move is not to play at all and stop using Reddit.

Animoscity ,
@Animoscity@lemmy.world avatar

Yep that’s how it works. Older content past a certain date is cached which is why you can’t comment or post on some old posts.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Everyone always says this like it’s some kind of gotcha, but all of my nuked posts still have my “fuck you, reddit” content and haven’t been reverted. It’s been nearly exactly a year.

Maybe reddit has an offline copy of my old content and that of others somewhere, but if so they’d be handing that directly over to whoever under some kind of agreement – that certainly wouldn’t be the subject of any kind of site crawling which is the crux of the issue here.

stevedidwhat_infosec ,

You’re ignoring the idea that they could still be working on a way to restore content and haven’t completed that process yet

Or that they could start feeding your archived (not cached) data directly to the AI companies anyway for a price

IMO, you can win by jamming your “transmissions” with noise. It’s easier to hide in noise as noise than it Is to be silent IMO. Muddy the waters as it were

finley ,

You’re ignoring the idea that they could still be working on a way to restore content and haven’t completed that process yet

there’s no evidence to suggest this, though.

stevedidwhat_infosec ,

Content is absolutely archived and they have financial incentive to restore the quality of their “knowledge base”

That’s a fair amount of circumstance and motivation to support my idea, regardless of tangible evidence

finley ,

Motivation and circumstance, absent actual evidence, does not make for a convincing argument.

stevedidwhat_infosec ,

Alright well I guess evidence is needed before we can have ideas - crazy

iAmTheTot ,

I certainly wasn’t implying that they were going to revert your comments.

Womble ,

it never was deleted, all that happened is that an extra line was added to a database that said “comment 65432426542654 now should be displayed as “fuck you, reddit” rather than the original text”. The original post is still in an earlier row available to reddit, it just isnt being displayed on their web page.

finley ,

i went looking for old comments and posts i had made after i overwrote then wiped them. They’re still gone. i looked again several months later, and they were still gone.

so, unless reddit did a massive restore of everyone’s comments/posts except for my 4 accounts, then i don’t believe they did it at all except for a select number of top contributors who deleted their content.

iAmTheTot ,

As I said in another comment, I was not suggesting that Reddit would restore your comments to public view.

finley ,

there’s no evidence to suggest that, either.

SpaceNoodle ,

Except for incidents like This

BorgDrone ,

You are assuming edits overwrite existing content. Instead of overwriting, they could just store the edited post as a new entry in the database with a higher version number. Then, you only show the latest version of each post to the end users while keeping the older versions available die Reddit’s own use.

In fact, it is extremely likely they do this. It is basically a necessity if you want to be able to properly moderate a site like Reddit. Otherwise you could simply post spam or unsavory content, and then overwrite it with something benign an hour or so later, before there were enough reports and a moderator would have gotten a chance to review it.

finley ,

You are assuming edits overwrite existing content

i have seen no evidence to suggest otherwise, but thanks for sharing your theories

In fact, it is extremely likely they do this

based on what evidence? your baseless speculation?

BorgDrone ,

The fact that they managed to restore overwritten posts after people started to delete their history.

finley ,

this could also be explained by sketchy scripts failing to completely delete posts/comments, which i even noticed myself when checking that they had done their jobs properly. as i mentioned in another comment, i had to run the shredder scripts several times for complete overwrite/deletion. or it could be database errors failing to register edits/deletions due to extremely heavy loads at the time. it could be a lot of things.

the point is that we don’t have any direct evidence of what it actually was, just a lot of circumstantial evidence and a lot of speculation. nothing definitive.

BorgDrone ,

Reddit used to be open source. There is still a copy of that source available on github. It’s 7 years old so it’s probably significantly different from what they are running now. Still, it gives some insight into the design.

For example, deleted comments aren’t deleted, it just sets a deleted flag. Example code that shows this.

I haven’t dug around the code enough to figure out how editing works, it’s Python code so an unreadable mess. The database design also seems very strange. It’s like they built a database system on top of a database.

finley ,

This is not evidence that overwritten and deleted comments could be restored to the original state. Moreover, that points to the original source code of Reddit, not the current code of Reddit.

This is also not evidence that deleted or overwritten and deleted comments have been restored. This is merely evidence that, at one time, this is how deleted comments used to be handled.

All this is evidence of is, as you put it, things are very strange in the code.

BorgDrone ,

I never claimed it was evidence of how it currently works, only that it gives some insight into how Reddit was designed. I would be very surprised if they changed this aspect of the design. It makes sense to not delete comments or edits for reasons I mentioned before. Unfortunately we won’t know for sure unless Reddit confirms it.

_haha_oh_wow_ ,
@_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works avatar

It seemed to happen to some people but I wouldn’t be surprised it it was just some sort of coincidental database fuck-up

finley ,

i suspect that was more likely incomplete deletions than reddit restoring content. those scripts were pretty janky. i had to run mine several times to get everything, as it didn’t work fully the first couple of times. same with the overwrites. took a few times for those to get everything, especially on older accounts with lots of posts and comments.

_haha_oh_wow_ ,
@_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’d read some claims that posts appeared to be deleted but then later came back. Could’ve even been some sort of caching shenanigans with their local browser though I guess.

finley ,

oh, right. i suppose that’s possible. i’ve seen similar browser cache fuckery on other sites before.

finley ,

as i said in a previous comment:

so, unless reddit did a massive restore of everyone’s comments/posts except for my 4 accounts, then i don’t believe they did it at all except for a select number of top contributors who deleted their content.

but there’s no evidence they’re keeping everyone’s deleted-but-restored comments from public view or whatever it is you’re suggesting. or even anything past whaat this one person found. in fact, there isn’t even any evidence that what happened to this user was intentional and not a bug or some other fluke.

sure, reddit would have a vested interest in doing this, and what you’ve presented is suspicious, but it’s hardly conclusive of anything. all it does is raise more questions. but it doesn’t provide answers.

Mic_Check_One_Two ,

On the other side of the same coin: When I mass edited my comments before quitting Reddit, I got site-banned. Basically, my first account’s automated edit got me auto-banned from several subs with pro-spez mods. Some subs had set their automod to detect when people were using the more popular methods of auto-editing, and set the automod to ban for using them. Then when I did the same with my second (and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc…) account, it almost immediately got site-banned for ban evasion.

Basically, account 1 was banned from a sub, so when account 2 started doing the same thing on the same IP address, it was flagged as ban evasion. And ban evasion is one of the few things that will get you banned site-wide instead of just from a specific sub.

I went back and checked a few months ago, and all of those site bans were lifted and the edits were undone. Likely because a site ban prevents the comments from showing up (which hurts Reddit’s bottom line, because they show up as a bunch of [removed] comments instead,) but also prevented any of the edits from actually being published. So when they lifted the site ban (to get those old comments to show back up again) it was as if I had never edited them at all. I had probably a million karma spread across my various accounts. I was extremely active at one point, so Reddit had a direct incentive to unban those accounts with literal thousands of comments.

dmtalon ,

They aren’t making money off my content anymore/in the future

AlexanderESmith ,

All you did was screw over people looking for potentially useful content while searching online. Reddit still has all your content.

dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Sure, but if they’re not displaying it what good is it doing them or their advertisers?

AlexanderESmith ,

They're not selling the ability to scrape their publicly viewable site, they're selling API access to their database. Deleted posts aren't removed from that database.

Brkdncr ,

What if I had an agreement with MS that they can scrape my data and anything I post online?

Shdwdrgn ,

What if Microsoft updated their Windows EULA to state that all users agree to allow MS to scrape their online data (if they haven’t already), and then take that to court against reddit? It would certainly be an interesting court case to watch, especially if they could get actual users to stand up in court and confirm that they did indeed approve of this. And it might settle the issue once and for all regarding companies trying to block freely-visible internet content just because someone scraped the info.

Brkdncr ,

What if I had an agreement with MS that they can scrape my data and anything I post online?

morgunkorn , (edited )
@morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Honestly, any platforms hosting user-generated content who use the legal argument that they only provide hosting and aren’t responsible for what their user post shouldn’t also be able to sell the same data and claim owning any of it.

Otherwise, take away their legal immunity. Nazis or pedophiles post something awful? You get in front of the judge.

edit: typo

aramis87 ,

Good point!

givesomefucks ,

Can’t sell something you don’t own.

So if they’re selling the parts people want, they need to own the parts no one wants.

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