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June 2023 Data Dump is missing

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Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#71

Post by endisneigh »

benrutter wrote: post #67
the_pwner224 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all; the centralized systems are easier to sign up for and use. It's been demonstrated over and over and over again. Even if the underlying tech is decentralized, the community will settle around one or a few big instances (for example, Gmail and GitHub) which often end up having significant control over the trajectory of the entire ecosystem.…

I don't know that I agree. I think most people don't care about decentralization but they do care about the effects it brings. Email is a great example where most people wouldn't be interested in a version of email that only let's you email other @gmail.com users. Having a email address that can contact anyone, a phone number that can ring any other phone number etc instead of being locked into a single corporation n…

> I don't think it's a question of preference, or people being uninterested. It's just a boring and repeated story of corporate monopolies intentionally reducing consumer choice.

not really. nothing at all is stopping one from starting a new social network that's federated. the issue is users have no reason to move.

it's more a question of incentives, and there's basically none to use something that you're not already using unless it's better, heavily advertised or you're simply paid to.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#72

Post by abetusk »

As a reminder, all the SE sites have content under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Share Alike license, allowing for, among other things, commercial re-use [0] [1].

Yes, it sucks that the SE sites are getting more draconian about allowing access to their content but the SE sites are well insulated against it completely disappearing precisely because they're under a libre/free license. Note that Reddit [2], nor HN I might add [3], have any such licensing terms that allow for commercial reuse.

Decentralization might be a viable option in the future, but for right now, centralized sites are the norm and the way to protect against the content from disappearing is to put it under libre/free licensing. Note that Wikipedia is centralized and it would certainly be a tragedy if they became more draconian about sharing their data but the content itself is and will be available to the general public, effectively the "commons", because of the licensing terms.

To me, this is yet another reminder of why we need to future proof with libre/free/open licensing terms. Or reform copyright, but I don't see that happening within my lifetime.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice...

[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[2] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/developer-terms#text-cont...

[3] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#73

Post by nukeman »

Zetice wrote: post #56
sschueller wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, it worked before and it is the reason the internet even exists. The core issue is that user generated data is owned by one individual company. There are existing system that don't have this issues e.g. Usenet or bittorrent. We don't need to idiot proof the web. There are enough people to gather some place for a social network even if it's hard to use. The others can stay and will stay on reddit anyway unt…

The "value" of Reddit as a website is vastly overrated anyway. There's nothing on Reddit that can't be obtained elsewhere, folks just get stuck in patterns that are familiar and presume it's because options are limited. The world will continue to spin without Reddit, or if Reddit isn't popular anymore, or if Reddit kicks all of its current users out, and so on.

Reddit’s value these days is as a super-forum. Instead of needing five logins and five accounts for separate hobbies, you can have one login, one account, and if you occasionally want to comment or ask questions about something else, you can do so without having to create another account. Doesn’t hurt that Reddit has a very good network effect.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#74

Post by dataflow »

tedivm wrote: post #40
the_pwner224 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all; the centralized systems are easier to sign up for and use. It's been demonstrated over and over and over again. Even if the underlying tech is decentralized, the community will settle around one or a few big instances (for example, Gmail and GitHub) which often end up having significant control over the trajectory of the entire ecosystem.…

>If you run your own email server and you get put onto Google's spam list - you're fucked. It's even worse than that- I ran my own email server, and for some reason gmail delayed any emails from their system to outside of their system. That meant that people would send me an email but I wouldn't get it for 20 minutes. These delays don't exist when using big email providers (it stopped being a problem when I switched…

I assume you didn't have anything in between Gmail and your setup? Like a forwarding layer or something?

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#75

Post by rileymat2 »

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #51
josephcsible wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we need is a legal way for companies to keep the data open, but also require OpenAI and friends to pay them for it. Couldn't that be accomplished by a law or ruling that using something for training AI doesn't exempt you from having to follow its license? OpenAI is already in blatant violation of both the "BY" and "SA" parts of the existing license.

Arguably, a model created by training on a corpus of data is a derived work of that corpus. Let's say I take a collection of images and use a program to compress them. When decompressed, the images are close to, but not exactly the same as the originals. Despite being in a different format, and despite not being exactly the same as the originals, the copyright to the compressed images is still held by whoever previou…

By this logic, isn't remembering something in your brain also a derived work? But that would not make any sense to protect until you create and distribute something based on that memory. The same logic should be applied to this.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#76

Post by ori_b »

keyle wrote: post #23

Yikes. Reddit. Stack overflow. It's all going south. Maybe we won't even have to wait for LLMs to destroy the web we used to know.

This is LLMs destroying the web we used to know.

I would be willing to bet that the driving force behind the decision was to make it less trivial for LLMs to say "the data was already there under an open license, so we legally undercut stack overflow".

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#77

Post by dylan604 »

lumb63 wrote: post #16

This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…

How did newsgroups work in the days of yore? Depending on which ISP you used, you may or may not have all of the posts within a group if they even had the group. I remember paying for access to specific (can't remember the name) provider that had the most complete listing of newsgroups and had the longest retention of posts. viva a.b.m.a!!

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#78

Post by b3morales »

lumb63 wrote: post #16

This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…

This was one of the promises originally of Stack Overflow: all the content is Creative Commons licensed so that if they "turned evil" (I believe it was Joel that put it this way) the community could, in a way, create a fork. https://web.archive.org/web/20230203170609/https://stackover...

Unfortunately the dumps themselves are not a legal requirement, just a gentleman's agreement, so realistically exercising this ability was still at the whim of the company.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#79

Post by scarface_74 »

lumb63 wrote: post #16

This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…

> when all they did is provide the platform, and store the data

And all Google did was build a search engine.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#80

Post by nightski »

lumb63 wrote: post #16

This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…

I like the idea of decentralized but I'd suggest you don't need to go fully decentralized where every peer has a full copy. Actually I kind of like the Bitcoin approach in that you have the ability to create a full peer, but most people do not. This would allow some decentralization and reduce risk, but not burden everybody with running a full peer.
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