• owatnext@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    See, I’m torn. I have been endlessly helped through college and now university through decades old Reddit posts. But I hate enabling evil companies.

    • stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub
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      9 months ago

      Information isn’t proprietary. What you once were told about, doesn’t go away with that one instance.

      Everybody wants to act like Reddit is somehow an encyclopedia of verifiable fact, but it wasn’t. It’s a bunch of internet posts from accounts you don’t even know are human or bot, truth or twisted subjective testimonial presented as fact

      Try your local library.

      Try Wikipedia.

      Fuck GPT scores better on these tests than most humans do so, it’s at least as correct as Reddit was.

      People get so addicted to rage bait and these micro dopamine hits from apps that they don’t even know how to function without them anymore ig. Wild.

      • papalonian@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I mean, this is useful for textbook information, sure. But when I’m trying to solve a niche technical problem, trying to fix a mod for a game, looking for a specific guide I’ve followed before etc, my local library/ ChatGPT is completely useless. Whereas Reddit has like a 99% chance of someone having the exact same issue I’m having, posting about it, then editing the post with “nvm I fixed it” (/s).

        Some of these solutions are so specific that the chances of finding them elsewhere are slim, especially for older issues where Google’s algorithm has been pointing the the same reddit post for over a decade. No one else bothers making a new post because it’s already been answered on Reddit. Now that post with the information is gone, and the only solution we can get is “Deleted by a script. Fuck Spez!”

        • stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub
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          9 months ago

          From my experience, those same answers I find all over the rest of the web.

          Just because it’s what everyone’s parent Google was feeding people with, doesn’t mean that it was the only solution or the best solution. And it certainly doesn’t mean that I’m fucking harming anyone

          • papalonian@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            I don’t think people are under the impression that literal harm is being done. “more harm than good” is just a saying. “more inconveniencing the general public rather than damaging the financials of the corporate entity” doesn’t roll of the tongue as nicely.

            Personally I think the mass Exodus of content creators was enough of a nail in the coffin. People removing their previously posted content feels more of a symbolic " fuck you" to Reddit than anything else; I still have to visit the page to see it’s been removed, so I don’t know how much is being done. This is just my opinion though, and it’s not my content to police, so people will do what they feel is right. It just sucks seeing a comment that almost certainly would’ve fixed my problem, and not finding it anywhere else, and that comment has been removed. I’m sure eventually the information will pop up elsewhere, but until then people are gonna bitch about it, me included.

            • stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub
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              9 months ago

              Have you ever tried seeing if the username is in use on other platforms? Maybe they’d be willing to help out.

              They probably remember the problem well enough if their time and effort spent on making the post or comment was so well received by search algorithms.