Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is standing by Reddit’s decision to block companies from scraping the site without an AI agreement.

Last week, 404 Media noticed that search engines that weren’t Google were no longer listing recent Reddit posts in results. This was because Reddit updated its Robots Exclusion Protocol (txt file) to block bots from scraping the site. The file reads: “Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content.” Since the news broke, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, which can show recent Reddit results.

The change came a year after Reddit began its efforts to stop free scraping, which Huffman initially framed as an attempt to stop AI companies from making money off of Reddit content for free. This endeavor also led Reddit to begin charging for API access (the high pricing led to many third-party Reddit apps closing).

In an interview with The Verge today, Huffman stood by the changes that led to Google temporarily being the only search engine able to show recent discussions from Reddit. Reddit and Google signed an AI training deal in February said to be worth $60 million a year. It’s unclear how much Reddit’s OpenAI deal is worth.

Huffman said:

Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used.

“[It’s been] a real pain in the ass to block these companies,” Huffman told The Verge.

    • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
      18·
      6 months ago

      Bingo, the only winning move is not to play at all and stop using Reddit.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      6 months ago

      Everyone always says this like it’s some kind of gotcha, but all of my nuked posts still have my “fuck you, reddit” content and haven’t been reverted. It’s been nearly exactly a year.

      Maybe reddit has an offline copy of my old content and that of others somewhere, but if so they’d be handing that directly over to whoever under some kind of agreement – that certainly wouldn’t be the subject of any kind of site crawling which is the crux of the issue here.

      • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        6 months ago

        it never was deleted, all that happened is that an extra line was added to a database that said “comment 65432426542654 now should be displayed as “fuck you, reddit” rather than the original text”. The original post is still in an earlier row available to reddit, it just isnt being displayed on their web page.

      • stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pubEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        You’re ignoring the idea that they could still be working on a way to restore content and haven’t completed that process yet

        Or that they could start feeding your archived (not cached) data directly to the AI companies anyway for a price

        IMO, you can win by jamming your “transmissions” with noise. It’s easier to hide in noise as noise than it Is to be silent IMO. Muddy the waters as it were

          • stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pubEnglish
            3·
            6 months ago

            Content is absolutely archived and they have financial incentive to restore the quality of their “knowledge base”

            That’s a fair amount of circumstance and motivation to support my idea, regardless of tangible evidence

                  • stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pubEnglish
                    2·
                    6 months ago

                    Right, which means it can be fairly considered when discussing the real crux of the issue with AI and big tech companies right now, which is the monetization of other peoples content.

                    If we’re discussing this, we should be looking at whether or not companies are doing this, given they have motive and specific, relevant circumstance to enact such behavior.

                    Lack of evidence means you need to investigate for said evidence. It does not mean you should not investigate. Privacy advocates, members of any org/cert with an ethics statement should be blowing the whistle on any kind of activity that would mean a users data is not being deleted upon their request, especially considering reddits global usage.

      • BorgDroneEnglish
        7·
        6 months ago

        You are assuming edits overwrite existing content. Instead of overwriting, they could just store the edited post as a new entry in the database with a higher version number. Then, you only show the latest version of each post to the end users while keeping the older versions available die Reddit’s own use.

        In fact, it is extremely likely they do this. It is basically a necessity if you want to be able to properly moderate a site like Reddit. Otherwise you could simply post spam or unsavory content, and then overwrite it with something benign an hour or so later, before there were enough reports and a moderator would have gotten a chance to review it.

          • BorgDroneEnglish
            5·
            6 months ago

            The fact that they managed to restore overwritten posts after people started to delete their history.

              • BorgDroneEnglish
                7·
                6 months ago

                Reddit used to be open source. There is still a copy of that source available on github. It’s 7 years old so it’s probably significantly different from what they are running now. Still, it gives some insight into the design.

                For example, deleted comments aren’t deleted, it just sets a deleted flag. Example code that shows this.

                I haven’t dug around the code enough to figure out how editing works, it’s Python code so an unreadable mess. The database design also seems very strange. It’s like they built a database system on top of a database.

                • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  6 months ago

                  For example, deleted comments aren’t deleted, it just sets a deleted flag.

                  FWIW even when you properly delete something from a database table, the deleted row can be reconstructed from the audit tables. And even if that weren’t the case, databases are regularly backed up to tape drives or whatever - when people delete or munge all their comments, Reddit doesn’t go back into all the backups and make the same changes there. In fact, I would imagine that when they sell their shit to companies for AI training, they sell old pre-AI backups rather than a latest copy.

                  • BorgDroneEnglish
                    5·
                    6 months ago

                    I never claimed it was evidence of how it currently works, only that it gives some insight into how Reddit was designed. I would be very surprised if they changed this aspect of the design. It makes sense to not delete comments or edits for reasons I mentioned before. Unfortunately we won’t know for sure unless Reddit confirms it.

      • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        6 months ago

        As I said in another comment, I was not suggesting that Reddit would restore your comments to public view.

      • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.comEnglish
        6·
        6 months ago

        On the other side of the same coin: When I mass edited my comments before quitting Reddit, I got site-banned. Basically, my first account’s automated edit got me auto-banned from several subs with pro-spez mods. Some subs had set their automod to detect when people were using the more popular methods of auto-editing, and set the automod to ban for using them. Then when I did the same with my second (and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc…) account, it almost immediately got site-banned for ban evasion.

        Basically, account 1 was banned from a sub, so when account 2 started doing the same thing on the same IP address, it was flagged as ban evasion. And ban evasion is one of the few things that will get you banned site-wide instead of just from a specific sub.

        I went back and checked a few months ago, and all of those site bans were lifted and the edits were undone. Likely because a site ban prevents the comments from showing up (which hurts Reddit’s bottom line, because they show up as a bunch of [removed] comments instead,) but also prevented any of the edits from actually being published. So when they lifted the site ban (to get those old comments to show back up again) it was as if I had never edited them at all. I had probably a million karma spread across my various accounts. I was extremely active at one point, so Reddit had a direct incentive to unban those accounts with literal thousands of comments.

      • _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        It seemed to happen to some people but I wouldn’t be surprised it it was just some sort of coincidental database fuck-up

    • Animoscity@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      Yep that’s how it works. Older content past a certain date is cached which is why you can’t comment or post on some old posts.