from Hacker News

Ask HN: Are the recent social media changes because of AI?

by robinduckett on 7/1/23, 8:42 AM with 4 comments

Reddit API access being repriced / revoked Twitter going private (unless you have an account, as well as API changes)

It seems to me that these sorts of things are happening because the social media sites would like the AI companies to pay them for access to their vast amounts of unlabelled training data.

I feel like this is at a real detriment to the users of the platform and that locking things up like this is a risk. How do they calculate, that the risk of ruining their platform, for the potential reward of an AI company chucking them some cash to access stuff that we submitted to them for free?

  • by skilled on 7/1/23, 8:50 AM

    It’s a bit of both, more than anything it is an excuse to lock users in, particularly for Reddit which has been archived vertically and horizontally, and it’s quality of content has been degrading for years.

    The idea was there before ChatGPT came about, it just happens to be the perfect trojan horse to get the ball rolling and let people think it’s the one and not the other.

  • by gmerc on 7/1/23, 2:26 PM

    It’s narrative shaping. The value of twitter for AI is questionable at best. But they’d like investors and others to think it’s valuable.

  • by eimrine on 7/1/23, 9:13 AM

    Those omni-present ChatGPT or similar did a lot of noise. But what has changed really? There were always a lot of data mining since the beginning of the Web2, but pre-ChatGPT internets used to be mined just for the sake of scammers, governments and adtech, and post-ChatGPT internets are using to be mined for the sake of ChatGPT providers for the sake of exactly same scammers, governments and adtech.

    One of my favourite social media is [1]. A colossal Web1 forum dedicated to a super-narrow topic, with no bullshit like: apps, phone number verification, scum advertisement, artificial limiting of devices who have an access to a content. How so-called Artificial Intelligence can harm [1]? How it can harm HN?

    [1] https://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/