CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company
Oh you built this community through your own time moderating, posting, upvoting and commenting? Cool we're gonna sell it to Vanguard for a few billy and pocket the profits! And, here's a list of approved content you're allowed to post now. Hard pass bro nobody cares about your IPO when we built your company.
i saw a spez quote, one of the sickest things i've ever read, about how people are sharing things on reddit, especially in mental health / recovery spaces, "that they wouldn't even share with a therapist", and isn't it a fucking travesty that that hasn't been properly harvested and monetized
"There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."
Unfortunately, I feel like Swartz would be spinning for a LOT of things that Web 2.0 turned out to be and propagate. We don't even blink at the idea of personal data being shared across unknown anonymous networks. It's a matter of "whatev's, they're welcome to find out what porn I like".
Like remember when that Will Smith movie "Enemy of the State" came out and although it's way over the top, it was totally on point in principle on how vulnerable we are in networks overseen by anonymous government entities and private companies.
Now we fucking applaud hundred-millionaires becoming billionaires for capitalizing on the internet stew we all threw our goods in for fun research, and internet community
Huffman claims it's about things like LLM training that uses the API, as if it isn't possible to validate apps that want to use the API and only issue keys for approved apps. This could save third party apps while preventing bad actors from gaining access to the data without scraping the site.
No, if bad actors were the problem then the solution would be much different.
Disagree. Those users gave it freely to Reddit under the user agreement with them, which in turn allows them to use it basically however they please, including sub licensing. No one gave other companies permission to do so.
Yeah, you're probably right about the legal details of it. But what's written in legal texts doesn't necessarily align with what is morally acceptable. I interpret the article as an opinion piece about who has the moral high ground, and it certainly isn't Huffman. That guy has no moral compass.
DING DING DING! Finally, someone chimes in with the correct answer. Content on Reddit is created by the users. Users provide it for free, and Paint Hufferman exploits it for profit. Users get nothing in return, not even control over their own subreddits.
So this is interesting, think of Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple. Their top goal is to use your user data to target you with ads and ultimately have you purchase a product or service. The better the return on ad spend the more advertisers spend on ads. It's actually a misconception that these companies directly sell user data, in fact it's in their best interest that they be the only one with your user data to give them an edge over their competitors in the ad business.
Reddit, on the other hand, has openly admitted to wanting to sell user created content through their API. I get the sentiment I guess, AI is being trained off their site, so they should get paid right? But AI isn't being trained off Reddit's thought, creativity, or intelligence, that belongs to the users, all Reddit owns is the servers and the UI. Reddit is about to actually do what we've been scared of other tech companies doing this entire time.
This honestly makes me more uncomfortable than targeted ads, because there's no circular dependency or even arguable benefit to the users here, it's one corporation taking your thought and selling it directly to another so they can both profit and build a tool that'll mostly be used by other corporations to automate and profit. It's all just another scam to get money out of our pockets.
I'm after a bot to post AFL games to the @afl magazine when new AFL games start. I tried making it myself, but i absolutely suck at programming. If anyone is interested please let me know :)
FWIW, i just made @BotRequests if anyone is interested in joining.
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