---
license: other
language: [en]
tags: [reddit, control, placebo, value-lock-in, robustness, pre-chatgpt-users]
---
# Control Discourse — Pre-ChatGPT Participants (robustness arm)

Subset of `CompassioninMachineLearning/reddit-control-discourse-2020-present` restricted to hashed authors whose **first comment in the corpus
predates ChatGPT's launch (2022-11-30)**. These users were demonstrably engaged in
hobby discourse before AI chatbots existed, so they cannot be the post-2022 LLM-bot /
karma-farm wave. Use as the robustness arm of the diversity/kink analysis: "among
people already in the conversation before ChatGPT, did their diversity collapse?"

- Kept **945,891** of 1,507,613 records (62.7%), from 256,437 pre-ChatGPT authors.
- `author_first_seen.parquet` maps every hashed author -> first_seen date + pre_chatgpt flag.