Reddit Migration

The real #redditmigration starts the 30th or the 1st, I hope lemmy and kbin are ready for the traffic!

Things to think about and lessons to learn.

I realized I interacted / posted / commented less and less on reddit these last couple of years. Couldn't even tell you why exactly. Now I've been here for a week and, I don't know, I just like interacting again... Hope it stays like this for a while :)

Something that I really appreciate after moving here from Reddit: I can finally edit titles!

No more having to delete and re-post when I notice a typo. No more having to endure the embarrassment when I don't notice one until after the comments have already started.

It's a small thing, but a relief nevertheless.

This was posted some weeks ago, but I feel it might be useful for many folks these days, so reposting the link here.

Is this new to post-blackout reddit is or has it been this way for a while. Top post of r/all is a tweet from like 2 years ago about a "current event" that no one has talked about since then and 100% of the comments are talking about this like this topic is the focus of today's or any recent time's 24 hour news cycle. Nearly 30K upvotes. 100 comments. Feels like ai/bot cosplaying what an actual hot reddit post would be like but in a world without people.

It's fine to talk about Reddit here and there but let's not talk about Reddit 24/7 on here. For the health of the platform, it's better to talk about a variety of things and build out communities here, rather than complaining about Reddit incessantly.

I've noticed the same thing happen in waves on the Mastodon end of the Fediverse, where people will complain about one thing Twitter does for two week. It makes sense to be upset but at the end of the day you're not on Reddit anymore, and you're probably never going back.

It's the same energy as when a newly single dude can't stop talking about his ex.

So for the #RedditMigration - the next turn in the road is July 1st. When the Apolo app goes dark. First thing: everyone should support @christianselig - buy merch, if you subscribe to the app decline your refund (see below)... But the #Threadiverse should also be ready. And any ways to do messaging, onboarding and welcoming folks into the larger Fediverse should be in the planning stages NOW. cc @fediversereport @fediversenews @fediverseobserver https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/06/28/reddit-client-apollo-is-shutting-down-on-july-1st----please-decline-your-refund

I was looking at reddit today, and the front-page felt like nothing happened. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and clicked into comments. Everything is popping off buzzing with activity. All the subreddits I was subscribed to that went dark are now back up and business as usual.

I knew we were a minority, but I didn't expect this level of apathy. It feels like Spez was 100% right and this did in fact blow over. What's your take on it it? I didn't expect Reddit to immediately be a failure, but man I guess I expected a bigger impact than that.

A new study shows that LLM models that are fed too much content that was generated by LLMs eventually collapse. Essentially, text generated by AI is poison if it makes its way into an LLMs training data. If the model eats too much of this poison, the model dies. By replacing your Reddit comments with AI generated text, you can effectively increase the toxicity of Reddit's dataset, and thereby decrease its value to firms training new LLMs. This will probably happen naturally anyway as spam bots and so forth continue taking over Reddit, but if you want to go out in a petty way, this is a good option.

I linked the actual study, but I first read about this on Platformer, where he was writing more broadly about how the AI is filing up the web with synthetic content and the problems that is causing. He was using this study to point out that it will be increasingly hard for developers to find good content for the LLMs to train on due to there being so much AI generated content, and the risk of the LLMs consuming too much AI content. Here is what he wrote:

A second, more worrisome study comes from researchers at the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University of Toronto, and Imperial College London. It found that training AI systems on data generated by other AI systems — synthetic data, to use the industry’s term — causes models to degrade and ultimately collapse.

While the decay can be managed by using synthetic data sparingly, researchers write, the idea that models can be “poisoned” by feeding them their own outputs raises real risks for the web.

And that’s a problem, because — to bring together the threads of today’s newsletter so far — AI output is spreading to encompass more of the web every day.

“The obvious larger question,” Clark writes, “is what this does to competition among AI developers as the internet fills up with a greater percentage of generated versus real content.”

When tech companies were building the first chatbots, they could be certain that the vast majority of the data they were scraping was human-generated. Going forward, though, they’ll be ever less certain of that — and until they figure out reliable ways to identify chatbot-generated text, they’re at risk of breaking their own models.

Even the study's abstract doesn't make a lot of sense to me, so here is an AI generated ELI5 (I am fully aware of the irony):

This paper is about how computers learn to write like humans. They use a lot of text from the internet to learn how to write. But if they use too much text that they wrote themselves, they start to forget how humans write. This is bad because we want computers to write like humans. So we need to make sure that computers learn from humans and not just from other computers.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/29/23778407/reddit-cannot-survive-without-its-moderators-it-cannot

For those looking to buy the "Goodbye Apollo" wallpaper set, but not on iOS, you can now buy it online! Includes phone, tablet, and desktop wallpaper sizes! It's a beautiful way to support Apollo and get 20+ amazingly designed wallpapers. 💙🎉 https://christianselig.gumroad.com/l/goodbye-wallpapers

This is a great idea. Let's get as many one-star reviews up there as we can!

How low can you go-oo-oo-oo

Reddit's downfall is, shocker, Greed and Stupidity

Protests on the social platform have entered a new phase, with users shirking the platform’s NSFW content rules en masse. The development has some media buyers on high alert, experts say.

Reddit protest by its community moderators has impacted user engagements, traffic and visits to its ad portal since its beginning on June 12.

Trying to migrate to kbin, but have several small questions after using it for some minutes now.
Can anyone please expain how to ask simple questions within this magazine, like:

How can I ask questions here without posting a new link, photo, article or video?

Questions like:

• How can I add magazines to my favourites?
• How can I search a specific magazine (like RedditMigration for those quesions I have...)?

Finally:

• Is there a more extensive user guide than kbin's user guide on Github?

#RedditMigration

I am filled with a sadness at losing Apollo but it will always amuse me that searching reddit showed the apollo app.

Can anyone explain to me what a Microblog is and how is it different from a thread? Are they similar to what a Toot is on Mastodon?

#RedditMigration

While the technology shows promise, early testers have found that it falls short of a well-known search trick: adding "reddit" to the end of queries. Instead of directing readers to sites targeting SEO traffic, this straightforward technique draws on the knowledge of Reddit's community to provide actual help from forum discussions.

The ripple effect of the protest is really showing despite of how some may call it useless. It hurts to see the only source I trust to get good info and reviews from falling apart like this, but nothing lasts forever I guess.

most of the time you'll be talking to a bot there without even realizing. they're gonna feed you products and ads interwoven into conversations, and the AI can be controlled so its output reflects corporate interests. advertisers are gonna be able to buy access and run campaigns. based on their input, the AI can generate thousands of comments and posts, all to support your corporate agenda.

for example you can set it to hate a public figure and force negative commentary into conversations all over the site. you can set it to praise and recommend your latest product. like when a pharma company has a new pill out, they'll be able to target self-help subs and flood them with fake anecdotes and user testimony that the new pill solves all your problems and you should check it out.

the only real humans you'll find there are the shills that run the place, and the poor suckers that fall for the scam.

it's gonna be a shithole.