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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36063172
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
243 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
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What does "Fuck" mean in this use case?
I know that people generally use it to express dissatisfaction or disrespect, As intensifier generally.
But Why the Fuck do we have to bring sex into degradation?
What does this serve exactly?
Am I the only one here thinking about this
Fuck that.
Am I the only one here thinking about this
Yup
Am I the only one here thinking about this
Probably.
Most insults are scatterological or sexual in nature. But you must understand that the word isn't the thing itself. I don't think anyone has sexual aspirations of Spez
Yeah; I just chalk it up to the fact that humans for thousands of years have been obsessed with sex and poop on a level more basic than language - it's not as surprising then to think our language is riddled with allusions to it.
I always read into as a Vlad the Impaler situation. Sex is not involved whatsoever.
fuck Fuck
We (smart people) knew this was the end result of ai and why the far right and ccorporations love it. But holy fucking shit this is dangerous and people should be terrified of this. Stop using these platforms (I know it doesn't matter the platform, we're all fucked, but still)
My concern is that Reddit can sell their profiling algorithm to other companies, who then can federate with Lemmy, mastodon, etc. to build profiles against users.
It's getting to the point where I may need to go back to cycling usernames every few years.
That's probably a massive GDPR violation. Automated processing of extra sensitive data like political beliefs and religion is not outright forbidden but it's subject to extra protections.
Yeah this seems illegal as fuck
Sadly you consented to all of it
GDPR article 9 (1) says you can't play algorithmic guess with people's religion or political opinions unless you gave express permission to the service provider to do it (i.e. it's not covered in the general GDPR boilerplate)
Hard agree with this. Does Reddit even have lawyers, or are they just using ChatGPT? Google, Meta, and Tik Tok already paid PII misuse fines for less than this. everything listed is part of the GDPR extended PII list.
Unrelated question: How do I short reddit stock?
GDPR prevents using underhanded tactics to assume consent for this type of use.
Nah, I think all of it is literally just public data offered up by users themselves. If you didn't want those opinions shared, you shouldn't have posted them on Reddit.
GDPR also applies to data you get from public sources.
I don't understand.
If someone writes a reddit post and says "I'm fasting for Ramadan," can I not infer from that public post that the user is probably Muslim?
You cannot use an algorithm to correlate it with other data without express consent.
They will get your data from everywhere not just reddit. There needs to be many more laws and punishments for doing this.
The title is likely inaccurate. The post only contains a summary of the user's posting history. It makes no statements regarding the user's beliefs.
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This is a great example of how profiles on all of us are going to be made by governments and corporations unless we take privacy seriously.
*Have been made long ago and are being constantly updated.
Snowden already warned us about this over a DECADE ago. Their scopes and powers will have increased exponentially. And that was under 'trustworthy' administration. I guarantee there's a type of system in place that flags people before they do anything, just on pattern recognition alone. Of course, they can't use that system as a legal basis for anything, so they don't and use parallel constructions instead.
Anyone who thinks "this is coming" hasn't been paying attention. We're already there and beyond.
I already assumed that all project 2025 purges to date have been done with input from statistical modeling, in a way that removes far more "liberals" who might refuse orders, and retains as many MAGA/fascist bootlickers as possible.
Corporations have been already making profiles of various types for a while now in the form of adtech, social media, data brokers, people search websites, credit scores, devices and services that harvest sensitive and intimate data (e.g. mobile phone apps, watching habits from smart TVs, driving data from cars).
Our society has been set up for mass surveillance in a thousand different ways as a form of social control and dominance by those who wield power.
It's time people realize that privacy is a right instead of normalizing abuses of consent.
Yep.
And if anyone doubts this, 15 years ago I had made a tool that created these types of profiles as a proof of concept.
I had scraped tons of subreddits, then you could pass in a user and based on both their subreddits and key words would categorize users across a few axes. That was just using naïve bayes, but worked pretty well.
The AI is just much much better at natural language processing to pull out more detailed info about patterns.
If youre even near someone with a photo on fb and they got you in it, you already have a record and a ghost fb profile waiting for you.
And those who read your comment, already knew. Those that SHOULD read it, never will. The same problem as with warning-labels et al.
Too late.
Let this be a reminder to anyone with an account with over a thousand comments: time for a new one.
Facebook can figure out all of this about you just from what you like and what links you click. Now imagine what a fucking goldmine a few years of your post history is to a deep learning algorithm – let alone someone who’s been using the same Reddit account for two decades. I bet they know those people better than they know themselves.
The screenshot shows an llm summary of a users posting history. Is that what you mean by “determine belief values stance and more” ? Is there more to this? How is that summary different from scrolling through someone’s posting history to see what they post about?
It's made by a machine and can be biased by its prompt, training, and owners political beliefs (see Elon's Grok).
The post title makes it sound like Reddit is doing some sort of automated classification of user politics with some sort of ml technique. But the screenshot does not show that. It shows an llm summary of a users posting history . If the tool was run on a user that posted exclusively to a cat subreddit, the summary would have been about how the user likes cats. Despite the utility or accuracy of llm summaries, what the screenshot shows is far more anodyne than what this post’s title implies is happening.
How is that summary different from scrolling through someone’s posting history to see what they post about?
How is reading the Clif notes/summary different from reading the book? Time and effort taken, as well as a much shallower understanding of the material (assuming your summary is even relatively accurate).
It's an easy way to get an instant opinion of someone so you can make a determination on whether you like it without having to tax your poor brain into actually thinking, and you can let something decide your opinion before you even know what you want to know. A summary provided by a product that is notoriously frequently wrong or lies and makes shit up out of whole cloth.
Every now and then I've been tempted to make a Reddit account to post in some subreddits but shit like this reminds me not to fucking do it.
You wanna know how you can avoid that temptation? Get yourself a nice little permaban. Worked for me.
Good thing we're not on reddit
How exactly is it a good thing in this particular case? All this information is only more accessible on Lemmy.
Lemmy instances are summarizing their users. You can do it on ChatGPT, but Lemmy isn't doing it.
But what's the good thing? Yeah Lemmy might not be doing it but I can do it, and Elon can, and Zuck, and Putin and your grandmom. Whatever you post on Lemmy is as public as it can get.
The good thing is that we aren't sucking reddit's teat. If you are so worried, then why are you here? Why do you keep posting comments?
I’m just trying to pick your brain and figure out what exactly is good about Lemmy in this case, but you seem reluctant to give me a cohesive answer.
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