- cross-posted to:
- tech@pawb.social
- stembolts ( @stembolts@programming.dev ) 91•5 months ago
This is similar to when I heard reddit was doing the API lockdown, I wrote an automation bot over the weekend that self-destructed my subreddit and the entire post history. The bot also automatically downloaded and archived all of the content on my local machine.
It was annoying because at first I couldn’t get access to older posts since at the time reddit had changed their API to only show the first X posts (100 or 1,000 or whatever). So I told my bot to delete the posts as it archived them so as I deleted content, reddit had no choice but to populate the page with the older posts.
And that’s how I archived my subreddit. Reddit banned me two days later for automation, lol. I did not break any of the reddit or reddit api ToS during this process but I guess I upset someone.
- ubergeek77 ( @ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat ) 19•5 months ago
I don’t think I’ve been banned, but I did a similar thing. I requested all my data from Reddit, then used that list of comment/post IDs to mass-edit them. I think I’m in the clear because I used the official third party API, with an official “app.” If you used the private API or instrumented this via the browser, that may be why you were banned.
Anyway, if you or someone else wants their full history, Reddit will give it to you via a data export request.
- GBU_28 ( @GBU_28@lemm.ee ) English17•5 months ago
Unfortunately they still have everything. It’s good for the “human” visibility (lack of) but they have the data still
- stembolts ( @stembolts@programming.dev ) 10•5 months ago
Oh I know, I just wanted a copy too.
Deleting posts from the user PoV was the only way I could come up with to force the API to show them to me.
- henfredemars ( @henfredemars@infosec.pub ) English52•5 months ago
I feel like this content craze is going to evaporate soon because all the new content from here forward is sure to be polluted by LLM output already. AI is fast becoming a snake eating its own tail.
That reminds me. I should go update my licenses to spit in the face of AI training companies.
- CaptObvious ( @CaptObvious@literature.cafe ) 50•5 months ago
Stack Overflow just earned a place under Reddit in the hosts block list.
- darkphotonstudio ( @darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org ) 44•5 months ago
I think people would have less issues with AI training if it was non-profit and for the common good. And there are open source AI projects, many in fact. But yeah, these deals by companies like this are sleazy.
- NeatNit ( @NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de ) 23•5 months ago
OpenAI was literally that until it wasn’t
- darkphotonstudio ( @darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org ) 8•5 months ago
I don’t think OpenAI actually released any FOSS code, did they?
- pe1uca ( @pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev ) 37•5 months ago
It’s just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you
As if it didn’t happen already
- davel [he/him] ( @davel@lemmy.ml ) English29•5 months ago
Good luck with the deleting. It often just means
UPDATE comments SET is_deleted = 1 WHERE ID = 666;
.- chiisana ( @chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net ) 12•5 months ago
There was similar things done on Reddit during the big exit. I doubt it achieved what people expected it to achieve. Even if they’re not visible externally, I’m sure they can easily access (thereby make deals to license) the data out of their backend / backup; just a matter of how hard they want to try (hint: it’s really not very hard).
- duncesplayed ( @duncesplayed@lemmy.one ) English12•5 months ago
Yeah during the reddit exodus, people were recommending to overwrite your comment with garbage before deleting it. This (probably) forces them to restore your comment from backup. But realistically they were always going to harvest the comments stored in backup anyway, so I don’t think it caused them any more work.
If anything, this probably just makes reddit’s/SO’s partnership more valuable because your comments are now exclusive to reddit’s/SO’s backend, and other companies can’t scrape it.
- Lemongrab ( @Lemongrab@lemmy.one ) 7•5 months ago
It was to make the data inaccessible to general people, therefore removing the reason people visit reddit. Even if reddit could still get the data, regular people would be inconvenienced (in theory) and look somewhere else.
- verassol ( @hagar@lemmy.ml ) 26•5 months ago
StackOverflow: *grabs money on monetizing massive amounts of user-contributed content without consulting or compensating the users in any way*
Users: *try to delete it all to prevent it*
StackOverflow: *your contributions belong to the community, you can’t do that*
Pretty fucked-up laws. A lot of lawsuits going on right now against AI companies for similar issues. In this case, StackOverflow is entitled to be compensated for its partnership, and because the answers are all CC BY-SA 3.0, no one can complain. Now, that SA? Whatever.
- Captain Beyond ( @beyond@linkage.ds8.zone ) 21•5 months ago
There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It’s not a forum; there’s no such thing as “your posts.” It’s more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren’t “yours” any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don’t have the right to take it back.
Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don’t think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like “destroying it to save it.”
- tetris11 ( @tetris11@lemmy.ml ) 12•5 months ago
Fine, but when coding projects undergo licensing changes that the contributors are against, the code author has to remove those contributions and replace them.
- i_am_not_a_robot ( @i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de ) English18•5 months ago
Why now? Other people have been profiting off of your Stack Overflow answers for years. This is nothing new.
- haui ( @haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ) 14•5 months ago
Simple answer: people vs corporations. A dev or homelabber getting help from you is very different from a company making billions just by mass shoveling your knowledge to the highest bidder.
The reason we need this as a fediverse service is that everyone can take in this knowledge and one corp doesnt have the ability to sell it. Thats what the worth comes from. Someone holding they key to it.
- i_am_not_a_robot ( @i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de ) English4•5 months ago
That’s not what I mean. When you contribute content to Stack Exchange, it is licensed CC BY-SA. There are websites that scrape this content and rehost it, or at least there used to be. I’ve had a problem before where all the search results were unanswered Stack Overflow posts or copies of those posts on different sites. Maybe similar to Reddit they restricted access to the data so they could sell it to AI companies.
- haui ( @haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ) 3•5 months ago
Maybe similar to Reddit they restricted access to the data so they could sell it to AI companies.
Which would be a way to circumvent cc by sa.
- wuphysics87 ( @wuphysics87@lemmy.ml ) 14•5 months ago
Those answers were given in good faith under the presumption that they would be read and used by another person. Not used to train something to remove the interactions which motivated the answer in the first place.
- jsomae ( @jsomae@lemmy.ml ) 4•5 months ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “remove the interactions which motivated the answer in the first place”? I’m not sure I follow.
- mbirth ( @mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk ) 9•5 months ago
Currently, all answers are properly attributed. But once OpenAI will have trained and sell a “hackerman” persona, do you really think it will answer people’s questions with ”This answer was contributed by i_am_not_a_robot” or will it just sell this as its own answer?
- helenslunch ( @helenslunch@feddit.nl ) 17•5 months ago
Would be a shame if someone used ChatGPT to generate bad answers and a short script to resubmit them back to Stackoverflow. So awful.
- delirious_owl ( @delirious_owl@discuss.online ) 12•5 months ago
Like AI doesn’t know how to use the way back machine?
- baseless_discourse ( @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz ) 12•5 months ago
This is a violation of GDPR, no?
EDIT: user created content is not directly protected under GDPR, only personally identifiable data is pertected under GDPR.
Dunno. GDPR is a Europe only thing, and isn’t it only related to how your private data (like name, IP address, phone number) is cared about ?
- AccountMaker ( @AccountMaker@slrpnk.net ) 5•5 months ago
Right, I think it only covers personal information: companies can only collect what they need to run their service, users can request to see their data etc. I don’t think it applies to comments and posts.
- Captain Beyond ( @beyond@linkage.ds8.zone ) 1•5 months ago
I would certainly hope so. Stack Overflow content is Creative Commons licensed, so the argument is basically that the GDPR would take precedence over the CC license grant. It’d be scary if GDPR could be weaponized against forks of free software projects in this manner.
- TachyonTele ( @TachyonTele@lemm.ee ) 2•5 months ago
How so?
- baseless_discourse ( @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz ) 5•5 months ago
User should have the right to delete their data stored by the company.
- flux ( @flux@lemmy.ml ) 4•5 months ago
Would that kind of provision allow me to have my code removed from a git repository history, if that git repository is hosted by a company?
- interdimensionalmeme ( @interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ) 2•5 months ago
As long as you didn’t give those rights by signing a CLA or a copyleft license. Never sign a CLA unless you’re fully compensated.
- baseless_discourse ( @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz ) 1•5 months ago
I am not a lawyer, but I believe in general, yes.
Git is not even that convoluted, as all the history is stored in the
.git
folder within the repo. Unless there is some convoluted structure built on top, they would only need to move the repo folder to a trash disk, waiting to be formated.That being said, GDPR is somewhat poorly enforced at the moment, unfortunately. I don’t know if you can sue the company and expect some result within couple of years.
- refalo ( @refalo@programming.dev ) 3•5 months ago
No because user generated content is not protected.
- WldFyre ( @WldFyre@lemm.ee ) 3•5 months ago
Doesn’t that just mean the data would have to be anonymized ?
- baseless_discourse ( @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz ) 3•5 months ago
I am not a expert or a lawyer, but I believe user actually hold the right to completely erase personal data:
The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay
https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/
Note the word “erasure” as opposed to “anonymize”
- WldFyre ( @WldFyre@lemm.ee ) 5•5 months ago
I don’t think that addresses my point. Is my opinion on the new Star Wars movies that I post online or some lines of code I suggest “personal data”? I thought personal data had a specific definition under GDPR
- baseless_discourse ( @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz ) 3•5 months ago
I think you are right, user generated content doesn’t seem to be protected. This is surprising to me, as user should hold the right to their content, which in my mind should enjoy stronger protection than personal data.
- Spaenny ( @Spaenny@discuss.tchncs.de ) 2•5 months ago
Technically, they could retain posts from users if they are irreversibly anonymized. However, ensuring with 100% certainty that none of your posts ever contained any personal data that could lead to the identification of you as an individual is challenging. The safest option is therefore to also delete your posts.
- TachyonTele ( @TachyonTele@lemm.ee ) 1•5 months ago
That only applies to personal data.
- refalo ( @refalo@programming.dev ) 1•5 months ago
How does GDPR get away with not defining what a website is when referring to them directly in the law? Like what counts, only html? http? ftp? gopher?
- Matt The Horwood ( @mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud ) English8•5 months ago
Why delete the answer, why not edit it so that a human can see the answer but for AI its a load of nonsense?
- chicken ( @chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 10•5 months ago
There’s no way that would work either, they can just store the full edit history and auto-curate as needed.
- gjoel ( @gjoel@programming.dev ) 7•5 months ago
People did that. Stack overflow reverted the change.
- Matt The Horwood ( @mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud ) English2•5 months ago
So we need to up vote wrong answers only?
- delirious_owl ( @delirious_owl@discuss.online ) 7•5 months ago
This isn’t really comparable to reddit, since users can just send a request to SO for all the content. Reddit locking down the API meant we lost access to our content.
- Sibbo ( @Sibbo@sopuli.xyz ) 4•5 months ago
Does GDPR apply to stackoverflow? Since my data there probably does not identify me as a person?
- delirious_owl ( @delirious_owl@discuss.online ) 1•5 months ago
You van delete your data but I don’t think it magically makes derivative works disappear. Its licenses SA. This is good.