Unbelievable behavior from SD. The subreddit is currently an unmoderated mess, illustrating they have no clue how to run the community.
I am unsurprised at Discord's behavior, handing over a server like that. They have essentially been hostile when not silent to us at WSB with our 600K user server.
Reddit has an opportunity to do better here. Hand back control of r/StableDiffusion back to OP.
Steve Huffman alluded to the disaster that is sub transitions in the recent Mod Summit. If someone at Reddit is reading this, this is your opportunity to do better.
OP handed over the subreddit willingly and did not say they wanted it back... There really isn't a big deal other than supposed possible censorship and conflict of interest, but AFAIK there's been no hate threads censored anyway. The only thing "censored" was auto's webUI being removed from the stickied guide and the illegal novelAI leak torrent being removed.
There's nothing to indicate they wanted to leave. They are still a mod there (without full perms).
They handed over the subreddit under a promise that was immediately broken by the other party. So yes, I suppose you could say they handed it over willingly, but they did so about as willingly as handing money over to an advance-fee scam.
However, this is largely irrelevant because what Reddit truly cares about (insofar as community management) is stability, and I think it's fair to say the community is very unstable right now, and is unlikely regain that stability.
Could you link to the Mod Summit your talking about? I wonder if 'sub transitions' is code for stealing subreddits from mods the admins don't politically agree with.
I cannot, as it was invite only. (Edit: As lrae said)
The context is more around how communities should be able to naturally transition as opposed to only doing so during event-driven periods of great distress (E.g. r/AntiWork -> r/WorkReform).
There doesn't seem to be much post-summit discussion about it that I can find. I suspect because it's largely been overshadowed by other, more... spicy, topics.
Reddit management may sometimes have to accept marching orders from a higher power - geopolitically, AI is strategically very important as we've seen in various news stories over the last month or so, and being in control of narratives is plain old common sense if you ask me.
I think Discord's use of the word server is misleading, and it leads people to think they own something when they don't. Discord owns it and can pull the rug out from under you at any time, regardless of how much hard work you put into building a community, and that hurts.
I understand that "server" is an abstract term and just means "something which provides a service", but most other uses of the word relate to something owned by the person operating it. E.g., if I run a Matrix server instance, it's mine to administer, manage, destroy, etc. If I start a Discord "server" it's a glorified chat room or set of chat rooms owned and maintained by the company.
Language is powerful and helps shape our world, and by redefining "server" to mean a segmented part of someone else's website, it's another nail in the coffin for the concept of real ownership.
I've also never quite liked the term, but I guess they wanted to go with terminology that gamers were already familiar with. For voice chat people would have been used to Vent, TS, or Mumble where you actually did connect to individual server instances. It seems unlikely to me that causing confusion over ownership was their intention even though that has been the effect.
(Interestingly it seems like the choice to call them servers must have come late in development, because in the API they're called guilds)
EDIT: A comment elsewhere in this thread is implying that they were officially called guilds initially but then changed because users kept calling them servers. I don't know if that's true. I don't recall ever seeing them called guilds even in the early days of Discord, but I also wouldn't have been reading their official user-facing docs and support page for pleasure.
Indeed. "Our server got hacked" sounds awfully more dramatic in a self-proclaimed crisis, laying the ambiguous notion of responsibility toward the "service" while maintaining the guise of ownership. Hey ho.
Wait, so you can't run Discord servers in your own server? I supposed they distributed at least a proprietary binary for running the server or something like that
Was there a dedicated HN submission for this topic?
This is extremely fascinating to me. In what Andrej Karpathy calls "software 2.0"[1], leaking your model is equivalent to leaking the main IP of your company. Unlike source code where it loses value quickly out of context (e.g. twitch leaked their code yet that didn't spawn a bunch of twitch clones), models can be fine-tuned and transfer-learning-ed for many other purposes
Since these models take millions of dollars to train, I see these sort of hacks becoming a thing! I wonder when companies will start adding "trap streets"[2] to prove that others are using their stolen models?
I did actually submit a link to a GitHub issue about this, but it seems to have been blocked by HN. I can see the post title when I'm logged in but as a guest it doesn't show anything at all. The post wasn't even flagged as dead. It doesn't show up in my submitted links list when logged out either.
I don't know if it tripped an internal filter on HN or something. Here is the link to the post in case you're curious.
If you're going to make those claims you need to be providing evidence, like side-by-side comparisons. What you have posted there reeks of a hit-and-run.
Kind of with automatic on this one, good imperative code can only take so many forms.
Plus there is the argument that no IP deserves protection, and that no IP owner should have any rights, ever, given that information is infinitely copyable and yearns to be free.
That drama is most likely the catalyst of the current drama. (i.e. StabilityAI getting control of the subreddit to control the NAI leak/discourage use of the AUTOMATIC1111 UI)
Which violates a number of Reddit's conflict of interest rules for moderators.
> Which violates a number of Reddit's conflict of interest rules for moderators.
Those don't exist. There is something called the "Reddiquette" which is by the community and completely informal.
Subreddits owned by companies is the new normal and if you look at games, most reddit users these days even prefer it to community-run ones. Not uncommon to have two subreddits at a launch of a game and the unofficial one will always "lose".
Besides that, Reddit itself reaches out to brands & product owners and influencers to make official subs for them, managed by those entities then.
Subreddits are the new Facebook Groups and Reddit is completely "mainstream". I wonder what's next in a couple of years. Maybe we can go back to forums :)
This is such a weird drama. The way I read it SD was effectively trying to put pressure on a guy because he developed a popular UI for using SD, and made that UI also support another model. So all their moral grandstanding is effectively just about trying to keep the popular gateway site pointing only at them, but their throwing shit at the guy who gave them that huge free PR push... What an odd position, but understandable, it looks like the people behind SD are a bunch of amateurs who weren't ready for the widespread attention and rather than ride the wave they are trying to shut down the beaches to claim that they own the ocean.
it's seem a case of "build an audience and monetize later" except they gave the golden gose itself to the audience instead of the egg,
now they're in "monetize later" and some rando's internet repo is more usable and has a better pipeline than their "dreamstudio", and to boot now these rare gtx aren't rare anymore thanks to the bitcoin crash, so enthusiast can readily use the model at home.
Indeed it's a decision that feels like it was made in a tonedeaf echo chamber. As a rule of thumb, if it is allowed on GitHub then coders are probably okay with that, and individual companies will have to use the dmca process.
This goes beyond that, taking the stance that by merely conforming your api to work with a user-provided proprietary checkpoint, you're in the wrong? This same philosophy forbids sharing open source game emulators, and we all know how that turned out (can be the best way to play a game).
Different trained model, which was extracted from its creator via unauthorized system access and is illicitly available via BitTorrent. The drama appears to have started because an open-source developer who wrote a web frontend to control SD adapted that frontend to control the hacked model also, which has offended SD's CEO (because of the general principle of "Don't help software pirates").
The additional drama includes that said open-source author has looked at the leaked code and concluded that it stole some of his open source work in the way it tunes text parameters.
So, to summarize: Both Reddit and Discord force transfered seemingly officially named communities to the trademark owning entity. That sucks, but it’s also something that social media companies have been doing 10 times a week since forever. Is there something special about this instance that makes it news?
Mostly that yet another online community is shocked to learn that they thought they were living in a house they'd invested their own sweat equity into building when the whole time, they were really living in a shantytown parked in a spare corner of some corporation's city.
If it ain't your computer (and if no money even changed hands), it ain't your property.
Reddit did not "force transfer" the community, the top moderator was convinced to hand it over.
Reddit, for all its faults, goes to great lengths to give its moderators latitude and discretion to operate their communities, and only steps in as an absolute last resort.
The top moderator was changed at the request if stability to someone they had more trust in (but was still a community member and not an employee), and then they convinced that person to transfer. That person identified themselves as a minor.
I wonder if Stability fucked up by using a minor in this case. They seem to still view Stability in high regard, mostly it seems because they are hoping for future gain from the relationship, but I doubt they'll feel that way forever. Probably they won't feel that way for much longer given Stability's heavy handed approach. It might be a lot easier to reverse some of this once it's made obvious they took advantage of a minor.
Many people are under the false impression that Discord, Reddit, Twitter, etc., treat ordinary people the same way they do corporations and celebrities. Which is obviously false, as we see here--on these platforms, corporations win every time.
Social media died the day that Shaquille O'Neal was no longer @THE_REAL_SHAQ.
>Is there something special about this instance that makes it news?
I suppose one could go the, "SD had a minor doing the work, which they then capitalized on" route, but I find it a little uncompelling.
If SD had asked the minor to moderate the subreddit, then took it away from him afterward, that would be an issue. Doubly so if they were aware of his age. From the description that was given, none of that applied.
As it is, I see it as fixing up a parking spot for the CEO; cleaning the ground, repainting the lines, putting up a nice shiny plaque, all unasked. Then getting upset when the CEO parks in the spot and leaves garbage strewn about. It's not nice, or even fair, but it is not particularly surprising either. Hard work is rarely appreciated, even when it is actively being paid for. "Took you long enough" is a phrase I have heard thrown about on projects before. When work is unfunded? You will be lucky to get so much as a mention, let alone a head nod or thumbs up.
I just hope that he can learn from this experience and remind himself how much he is making the next time he takes up a project of this kind. There is nothing wrong with working for free, but it is crucially important to remember that the merit of working for free does not somehow entitle us to anything. It's not something that brings me any joy to say, but it is true.
Yikes. I know there are points in an early-stage company where things are very unstructured and you end up in situations that you maybe wouldn't want as a larger company.. but in this case, it sounds like it would have been better for them to allow official and community-based channels of communication to live separately.
And that's going to have a titanic political-shift effect once those young folks come to voting age and start shaping policy around intellectual property ownership.
Definitely makes me want to avoid discord. As far as Stability goes, it doesn't make them look great either. This kid showed a lot of good will and they still felt like they needed to pull the rug from under his feet.
Readit News
The entire subreddit is in a process of community migration now: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/
I am unsurprised at Discord's behavior, handing over a server like that. They have essentially been hostile when not silent to us at WSB with our 600K user server.
Reddit has an opportunity to do better here. Hand back control of r/StableDiffusion back to OP.
Steve Huffman alluded to the disaster that is sub transitions in the recent Mod Summit. If someone at Reddit is reading this, this is your opportunity to do better.
They handed over the subreddit under a promise that was immediately broken by the other party. So yes, I suppose you could say they handed it over willingly, but they did so about as willingly as handing money over to an advance-fee scam.
However, this is largely irrelevant because what Reddit truly cares about (insofar as community management) is stability, and I think it's fair to say the community is very unstable right now, and is unlikely regain that stability.
The context is more around how communities should be able to naturally transition as opposed to only doing so during event-driven periods of great distress (E.g. r/AntiWork -> r/WorkReform).
There doesn't seem to be much post-summit discussion about it that I can find. I suspect because it's largely been overshadowed by other, more... spicy, topics.
I understand that "server" is an abstract term and just means "something which provides a service", but most other uses of the word relate to something owned by the person operating it. E.g., if I run a Matrix server instance, it's mine to administer, manage, destroy, etc. If I start a Discord "server" it's a glorified chat room or set of chat rooms owned and maintained by the company.
Language is powerful and helps shape our world, and by redefining "server" to mean a segmented part of someone else's website, it's another nail in the coffin for the concept of real ownership.
(Interestingly it seems like the choice to call them servers must have come late in development, because in the API they're called guilds)
EDIT: A comment elsewhere in this thread is implying that they were officially called guilds initially but then changed because users kept calling them servers. I don't know if that's true. I don't recall ever seeing them called guilds even in the early days of Discord, but I also wouldn't have been reading their official user-facing docs and support page for pleasure.
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apparently, there is a separate drama about hacking at SD and accusations of ownership of code.
This is extremely fascinating to me. In what Andrej Karpathy calls "software 2.0"[1], leaking your model is equivalent to leaking the main IP of your company. Unlike source code where it loses value quickly out of context (e.g. twitch leaked their code yet that didn't spawn a bunch of twitch clones), models can be fine-tuned and transfer-learning-ed for many other purposes
Since these models take millions of dollars to train, I see these sort of hacks becoming a thing! I wonder when companies will start adding "trap streets"[2] to prove that others are using their stolen models?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y57wwucbXR8
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
I don't know if it tripped an internal filter on HN or something. Here is the link to the post in case you're curious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146603
In case it matters I used the GitHub issue title as the name of the post - "Stable-diffusion-webui is using stolen code".
Here is the actual link I posted.
https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/issu...
Kind of with automatic on this one, good imperative code can only take so many forms.
Plus there is the argument that no IP deserves protection, and that no IP owner should have any rights, ever, given that information is infinitely copyable and yearns to be free.
Which violates a number of Reddit's conflict of interest rules for moderators.
Those don't exist. There is something called the "Reddiquette" which is by the community and completely informal.
Subreddits owned by companies is the new normal and if you look at games, most reddit users these days even prefer it to community-run ones. Not uncommon to have two subreddits at a launch of a game and the unofficial one will always "lose".
Besides that, Reddit itself reaches out to brands & product owners and influencers to make official subs for them, managed by those entities then.
Subreddits are the new Facebook Groups and Reddit is completely "mainstream". I wonder what's next in a couple of years. Maybe we can go back to forums :)
now they're in "monetize later" and some rando's internet repo is more usable and has a better pipeline than their "dreamstudio", and to boot now these rare gtx aren't rare anymore thanks to the bitcoin crash, so enthusiast can readily use the model at home.
This goes beyond that, taking the stance that by merely conforming your api to work with a user-provided proprietary checkpoint, you're in the wrong? This same philosophy forbids sharing open source game emulators, and we all know how that turned out (can be the best way to play a game).
The additional drama includes that said open-source author has looked at the leaked code and concluded that it stole some of his open source work in the way it tunes text parameters.
If it ain't your computer (and if no money even changed hands), it ain't your property.
Reddit, for all its faults, goes to great lengths to give its moderators latitude and discretion to operate their communities, and only steps in as an absolute last resort.
I wonder if Stability fucked up by using a minor in this case. They seem to still view Stability in high regard, mostly it seems because they are hoping for future gain from the relationship, but I doubt they'll feel that way forever. Probably they won't feel that way for much longer given Stability's heavy handed approach. It might be a lot easier to reverse some of this once it's made obvious they took advantage of a minor.
Social media died the day that Shaquille O'Neal was no longer @THE_REAL_SHAQ.
I suppose one could go the, "SD had a minor doing the work, which they then capitalized on" route, but I find it a little uncompelling.
If SD had asked the minor to moderate the subreddit, then took it away from him afterward, that would be an issue. Doubly so if they were aware of his age. From the description that was given, none of that applied.
As it is, I see it as fixing up a parking spot for the CEO; cleaning the ground, repainting the lines, putting up a nice shiny plaque, all unasked. Then getting upset when the CEO parks in the spot and leaves garbage strewn about. It's not nice, or even fair, but it is not particularly surprising either. Hard work is rarely appreciated, even when it is actively being paid for. "Took you long enough" is a phrase I have heard thrown about on projects before. When work is unfunded? You will be lucky to get so much as a mention, let alone a head nod or thumbs up.
I just hope that he can learn from this experience and remind himself how much he is making the next time he takes up a project of this kind. There is nothing wrong with working for free, but it is crucially important to remember that the merit of working for free does not somehow entitle us to anything. It's not something that brings me any joy to say, but it is true.
Open source AI art has likely been the biggest catalyst of getting teenagers interested in computer science/machine learning in years.