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.
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.
Unfortunately they still have everything. It’s good for the “human” visibility (lack of) but they have the data still
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.
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.
Stack Overflow just earned a place under Reddit in the hosts block list.
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.
OpenAI was literally that until it wasn’t
I don’t think OpenAI actually released any FOSS code, did they?
deleted by creator
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
Good luck with the deleting. It often just means
UPDATE comments SET is_deleted = 1 WHERE ID = 666;.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).
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
the claimants were set back because they’ve been asked to prove the connection between AI output and their specific inputs
I mean, how do you do that for a closed-source model with secretive training data? As far as I know, OpenAI has admitted to using large amounts of copyrighted content, numberless books, newspaper material, all on the basis of fair use claims. Guess it would take a government entity actively going after them at this point.
deleted by creator
Thank you for sharing. Your perspective broadens mine, but I feel a lot more negative about the whole “must benefit business” side of things. It is fruitless to hold any entity whatsoever accountable when a whole worldwide economy is in a free-for-all nuke-waving doom-embracing realpolitik vibe.
Frankly, not sure what would be worse, economic collapse and the consequences to the people, or economic prosperity and… the consequences to the people. Long term, and from a country that is not exactly thriving in the scheme side of things, I guess I’d take the former.
deleted by creator
Yep. Can’t wait to overfit LLM to a lot of copyrighted work and share it to public domain. Let’s see if OpenAI will get push back from copyright owner down the road.
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.”
Fine, but when coding projects undergo licensing changes that the contributors are against, the code author has to remove those contributions and replace them.
Why now? Other people have been profiting off of your Stack Overflow answers for years. This is nothing new.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
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 ?
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.
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.
How so?
deleted by creator
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?
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.
deleted by creator
No because user generated content is not protected.
Doesn’t that just mean the data would have to be anonymized ?
deleted by creator
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
deleted by creator
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.
That only applies to personal data.
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?
Like AI doesn’t know how to use the way back machine?
Why delete the answer, why not edit it so that a human can see the answer but for AI its a load of nonsense?
There’s no way that would work either, they can just store the full edit history and auto-curate as needed.
People did that. Stack overflow reverted the change.
deleted by creator
So we need to up vote wrong answers only?
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.
Does GDPR apply to stackoverflow? Since my data there probably does not identify me as a person?
You van delete your data but I don’t think it magically makes derivative works disappear. Its licenses SA. This is good.
