It’s another move to protect against AI scraping.
  • conorab@lemmy.conorab.comEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    As somebody who often ends up using Reddit like Stackoverflow and in some cases needing the Internet Archive (IA) to find the original post after it’s been deleted or garbled, I think this is a wakeup call for those go to Reddit both to get technical help and to post it. More than ever, Reddit is becoming an unreliable place to find answers for old obscure issues and if they are going to lockout places like the IA then I think it’s time people stopped contributing their solutions to Reddit.

    • cashsky@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Searching anywhere in general is getting shittier and shittier by day. Web searches are riddled with hallucinated AI generated garbage pages. Finding the right answer for difficult problems is getting worse and worse. We are sliding rapidly into Idiocracy.

      • dizzy@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Not to mention so many projects putting their support in walled garden chat services like Discord that you can’t even search via search engine. Even if you can figure out who asked the right question and when, you have to trawl through a sea of inane garbled chat to get to the developer/expert response.

        Specialised topic forums really need to make a resurgence but I doubt they will.

        • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Not to mention so many projects putting their support in walled garden chat services like Discord that you can’t even search via search engine.

          Seeing this happen has been one of the saddest most desperate parts about watching the internet dying.

          It was obvious what was going to happen years ago, that didn’t stop people from acting like I was a reactionary foolish cynic when I voiced concern about this though.

          Seriously FUCK Discord (and Reddit).

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Given that the Internet Archive is the de facto standard way to cite material as seen on a given date — they’re a trustworthy party that will probably persist for a long time — that’s going to make it harder to cite content on Reddit.

    • Deceptichum@quokk.auEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Damn, guess if you want reddit data to train your AI that you’ll need to pay Spez for access.

      • PastafARRian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Don’t forget, Reddit is legally allowed to train on your content, but not the other way around. It’s consistent with US law, where corporate tax is half of income tax.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        It’s important for people writing papers and such who need to cite material.

        I wonder if there’s some way to use the TLS certificate to get a cryptographically-signed copy of a webpage with timestamp that someone could later validate as having been downloaded on that date. I don’t know if existing TLS libraries are capable of that. Like, Web browser menu option “Store cryptographically-signed webpage”. Absent a later certificate compromise, I’d think that that’d at least provide people a way to credibly say “this is really what was on that webpage on August 15th, 2026”. Like, you’d have to save a copy of the TLS session and then have libraries that could read and validate an already-generated session. The timestamp is already embedded in the session.

        Some protocols, like OTR, are designed to specifically not allow that, but AFAIK, TLS could.

        EDIT: Well, technically the timestamp is gonna be during the handshake, not tied to the HTTP request internal to the TLS session. It might be possible to game that by establishing a TLS session, holding it open without activity, and issuing a request much later. I’d think that that’d potentially be disallowed by Web servers one way or another, since otherwise you could probably do a denial-of-service attack by holding open a lot of sessions for a long time.

        EDIT2: Oh, wait, no, shouldn’t be an issue, because the HTTP Date response header is gonna have a timestamp tied to the response.