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Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

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Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#131

Post by adql »

flandre wrote: post #87
rjh29 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby. It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it. What are the alternatives? Facebook an…

My favorite alternatives are email and going outside.

I'm sure random passerby is great information on how to configure network equipment /s

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#132

Post by whimsicalism »

csdvrx wrote: post #82
toomuchtodo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github acquisition was a savvy, Reddit has more peril involved but similar value.

I'm in full agreement, but I see an even better integration in other product lines (mostly gaming and search) Also, Microsoft doesn't have a generic social network to mine data from. They may prefer to stick to the professional world, but then acquiring a few high value sites just to close their API would be another move. How much $$$ do you think it would take for YC to say "hell yes!" to put HN under Microsoft cont…

> They may prefer to stick to the professional world, but then acquiring a few high value sites just to close their API would be another move.

They already have LinkedIn, which is far more valuable than HN for this purpose.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#133

Post by simias »

spacephysics wrote: post #105
skilled wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you but not in entirety. This comment from spez[0] about blaming the API price changes on LLM's is too far fetched. A lot of commenters here on HN have already pointed that out already too. Unless they build a literal brick wall (paywall) around the site, that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model. You could get it down to a science where you only scrape any new data whenev…

Yeah I think their real intention is to kill off third party Reddit apps so people are forced to use their own app, with all its tracking and garbage. Reddit on mobile browser is a case study of insane dark patterns Click to sort comments while not logged in? A popup appears asking to log in, with no close button. You have to click out of the box, but that’s not easily apparent View an 18+ subreddit? Let them browse…

Yeah they've been trying to kill old.reddit and third party apps for a long time. The experience degrades more and more as they add new features that are only fully supported (or supported at all) on new.reddit and the official app. This has been going on for years.

I'm convinced that this would have happened with or without OpenAI, especially with the mirage of an IPO on the horizon. Controlling the client to show ads and siphon data is just too valuable. Maybe the OpenAI thing pushed them to speed up the process.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#134

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

rjh29 wrote: post #98
flandre wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite alternatives are email and going outside.

Going outside is a great alternative to mindlessly consuming Reddit, but we're talking about researching opinions here. That's something that Reddit is actually good for.

So is going outside though. In fact, I think talking in person is usually a much better way of actually understanding someone else's opinion, because normative rules of social behaviour tend to stop the discussion from becoming a flamewar.

I could spend hours just neutrally asking someone questions about a particular view they hold, why they hold it, etc. I think you gain a lot more insight into how people think this way than through an online forum.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#135

Post by jmye »

rjh29 wrote: post #76
duxup wrote: post #64

> There is no question that Reddit is extremely valuable as training data. How often do you append “reddit” to your searches? Is it? When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations. Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic. For e…

Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby. It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it. What are the alternatives? Facebook an…

Literally anything else. Having seen the general/highly upvoted Reddit opinions on things I have domain expertise in, and having seen the outsized effect that angry subs can have on media opinions, there is absolutely nothing I trust on Reddit at face value or without having interacted in very small subs long enough to know who has useful opinions.

The only consistently good advice I see on Reddit is "call a local expert/call a lawyer." Anything else is almost certainly abject nonsense.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#136

Post by rchaud »

ok123456 wrote: post #46
zdragnar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search. The provenance of information is just as important as the resulting information for pretty much anything I search for. I almost never accept a single search result as authoritative unless I'm pretty familiar with the source. Reddit in particular seems like a terrible set of training data. Pretty much any opinion is going to have a counter-opinion somewhere in…

The appeal is that now regular search engines are so bad at giving you useful content that using a LLM is now the equivalent of "google-dorking" to find relevant information.

Only because the LLM didn't have any AI generated blogspam to get trained on. That's going to change very quickly.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#137

Post by PaulHoule »

OpenAI has nothing to do with it I think

I think it is about forcing people to watch ads, particularly keeping reddit safe for "dark patterns".

It's an awful experience to follow a link from a search engine for reddit because reddit systematically injects ads into results and discussion to try to trick you into clicking them and injects even more blended links to irrelevant discussions to increase your chances of getting confused and clicking on an ad accidentally.

Third party clients destroy all that.

People who want to harvest text from reddit can just do it on the web. (Pro tip: ignore the API and implement your own 'IPA' that just works like a web browser; APIs are almost always nerfed in some way; if you have to crawl 20 web sites odds are a generic web crawler will work for 19 of them; if you are using APIs you will have to implement something different for all of them, maybe 3 out of 20 will have some feature in the API such as a complex and poorly documented authentication process that will take a few hours.)

APIs are not a gift, they usually are an attempt to take access away. (Considering Hacker News, there is no API to make a post or get your upvotes. It's like 20 lines of Python to code up an "IPA" for either against the web interface.)

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#138

Post by [deleted] »

ltadeut wrote: post #70
skilled wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you but not in entirety. This comment from spez[0] about blaming the API price changes on LLM's is too far fetched. A lot of commenters here on HN have already pointed that out already too. Unless they build a literal brick wall (paywall) around the site, that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model. You could get it down to a science where you only scrape any new data whenev…

> , that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model. How would that work from a legal perspective, though? Let's say there's no paywall and Reddit's terms of use disallow unauthorized commercial use of their data. Wouldn't that be a violation of Reddit's terms and liable to some legal procedure?

[deleted]

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#139

Post by [deleted] »

eggbrain wrote: post #42

I think from Reddit's perspective, they are extremely upset with OpenAI, in the same way that I'm sure StackOverflow is upset -- OpenAI took: - The entire corpus of data the community had curated over the last XX years - The "goodwill" that these platforms had developed towards third party developers in allowing developers to work with their data - Potentially large amounts of traffic that would normally come to thei…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#140

Post by mminer237 »

dom96 wrote: post #122
ltadeut wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> , that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model. How would that work from a legal perspective, though? Let's say there's no paywall and Reddit's terms of use disallow unauthorized commercial use of their data. Wouldn't that be a violation of Reddit's terms and liable to some legal procedure?

How does Google use Reddit's data in its models? You can access most (all?) Reddit pages without hitting Reddit at all via the "Cached" link in the search results. Does Google have a special agreement with Reddit (and all other sites?) or is it legally "fair use" to reproduce web pages that are available freely online?

I think that's a different legal question than LLM training, but webpage caching has been found to be fair use based on a number of factors: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/google-cache-does...
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