Re: A timeline of a web forum site

Stefan Ram <[email protected]> wrote:
> |                     A Timeline of Reddit
> | 
> | 2005   Reddit is founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian as a
> | simple link-aggregation site.
> |
> | 2005 Reddit rewrote its entire platform from Common Lisp to Python
> | in December 2005, just six months after the site initially launched.
> | 
> | 2008   Reddit goes open-source, allowing the public to see its code.
> | The platform positions itself as an unmoderated haven for free speech.
> | 
> | 2011/2012   The platform experiences massive growth. Subreddits are
> | entirely managed by volunteer moderators with almost no corporate
> | oversight.
> | 
> | 2015   Steve Huffman returns as CEO. Reddit makes the controversial
> | decision to shut down its open-source code repository, shifting toward
> | proprietary software.
> | 
> | Content Bans   Reddit begins actively banning subreddits that violate
> | hate-speech rules or generate negative press, marking the first major
> | shift toward making the platform attractive to mainstream corporate
> | advertisers.

I gave up here. You (or your chatbot) have just made the return of
"Steve Huffman" appear like a major milestone by implying that he
implemented "content bans" immediately afterwards. But your (AI's)
timeline hasn't even mentioned when he'd left before that!

>   Lines marked with "| " come from my editing, where I start by writing
>   prompts for the chatbot and then edit the generated texts and format
>   them for USENET. Chatbot might make mistakes and misrepresent or hal-
>   lucinate facts.

Yeah so why bother? It's a big company, it'll have this info on a
Wikipedia page with cites and at least some minimal form of peer
review. Typically I do a web search for a topic an AI has babbled
about and find lots of similar text on Wikipedia pages in the
search results - even when those pages are incorrect results
irrelevent to the subject (and the AI's response was complete BS).

In this case of course there _is_ a big Wikipedia page about
Reddit, and even a separate "Timeline of Reddit" page, which
although containing some similar entries, has many more overall,
and to me paints a quite different picture of the organisation.
Their first "Major Event" for example is:

"2005   Reddit's creators help seed Reddit with numerous fake
        accounts to make Reddit seem more populated than it
        actually was.[1]
 [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2/
"
That'd be enough to turn me off the platform if I'd ever
considered using it (which I haven't), but not worth a mention in
your (AI's) timeline. Of course Wikipedia also bothers to mention
when "Steve Huffman" left, before he returned:

"2009 October   Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman leave reddit.
                Steve Huffman helps form Hipmunk, and Alexis helps
                form Breadpig.[19][20]

 [19] http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/fare-thee-well-reddit.html
 [20] https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/reddit-cofounder-alexis-ohanian-to-join-y-combinator/
"

Oh and it says "Steve Huffman" returned _after_ the "content bans",
following a backlash, which completely reverses the clear
implication in your (AI's) timeline that "Steve Huffman" was
responsible for them:

"2015 June 10   Reddit bans five subreddits, citing an 
 anti-harassment policy.[63][64] The largest of the banned 
 subreddits, "fatpeoplehate," had an estimated 151,000 subscribers 
 at the times of its banning.[63] The other four subreddits are 
 "hamplanethatred," "transfags," "neofag," and "shitniggerssay."[63]
 
 2015 June-July   Reddit bans multiple subreddits and fires Victoria 
 Taylor, the site's director of talent, who has served on the Reddit 
 team since 2013. Taylor served as a liaison between the moderators 
 of specific subreddits (such as IAmA) and Reddit itself, helping 
 organize and verify interviewees for Reddit's user-led "AmA" 
 sessions. As a result of this and other frustrations with 
 Reddit--such as its moderation tools and its new conduct under 
 Pao--numerous subreddits (such as IAmA, todayilearned, pics and 
 science) temporarily shut themselves down in protest.[65] 
 Subsequently, to these and other recent events a petition asking 
 Pao to step down as CEO reaches over 160,000 signatures.[66] On 
 July 10, 2015, Pao resigns and is replaced by cofounder Steve 
 Huffman as CEO.[67]

 [63] https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/10/8761763/reddit-harassment-ban-fat-people-hate-subreddit
 [64] https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/06/10/business/ap-us-reddit-subreddit-bans.html?_r=0
 [65] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/reddit-amageddon/
 [66] https://time.com/3946626/ellen-pao-reddit-petition/
 [67] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-10/ellen-pao-resigns-as-reddit-interim-ceo-after-user-revolt
"
Now I don't have great faith in Wikipedia pages either, I prefer a
good old fashioned article from a single author, but your AI has
clearly left out so much important information from its timeline
that I have to consider it useless. Worse in fact, since any
conclusions one may draw from it will be based on a deeply
misleading narrative, and once formed it's difficult to forget
those conclusions even after the surrounding facts are better
revealed. Especially about something like Reddit where I'm going in
with barely any existing knowledge of the topic.


Well that's my AI-poster rant for the month. I was trying to ignore
these and not waste time arguing with Usenet's AI-fanbois anymore,
but I guess if you're just trolling then you got me. This AI BS is
always full of holes, but it takes 50x as long to find and prove
those holes than it takes to have the AI pump them out, and just so
the AI user can reply to me saying something like "Huh, well
everyone's using it, so who cares anyway?". Which depresses me
because it's probably true.

I will say if anything is going to push me off Usenet, it will be
if too much of this AI rubbish takes over here. I don't want to be
tricked into joining the fantasy land where you AI users seem happy
to live. In fact I'm increasingly worried that I'll have to avoid
everyone else in the world in order to achieve that...

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