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[The Guardian] There is no moral high ground for Reddit as it seeks to capitalise on user data (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
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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

That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service.

Ouch

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[–] 68 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (15 children)

It's nice to see an older author on a more traditional platform have such a clear and informed opinion on something deeply steeped in internet culture.

I recognize this is agism on my part, but I was surprised when I saw his picture.

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  • [–] 43 points 3 years ago (12 children)

    Why would that surprise you? It was people his age who created the Internet and the World Wide Web. (Of course they weren’t that age back then, but you get the idea. :-)

    There are fewer Internet-savvy old people, for sure, but when you do find one, they are more likely to be pre-web or web 1.0 “information wants to be free“ types. Younger users may have grown up in a more corporate space with a very different philosophy towards the Internet.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    For sure. Like I said, it's totally my bias showing. Maybe it's seeing too many congressmen fundamentally misunderstand the tech. I've also run into a lot of older programmers that are highly technical, but still kind of out-of-touch when it comes to the Internet culture that sits on top of the technical layer.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    100% with you. Watching any kind of congressional hearing that relates to technology is so incredibly frustrating. I was also really happy to see mainstream journalism specifically acknowledge that Reddit is really just a web-enabled version of old newsgroups or discussion boards, and that all the value is provided by users. If only everyone thought that way!

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Defiantly a pre-web here I recall running two BBS on a couple of Compaq 286's. Being here on the fediverse reminds me a lot of those fun times and certainly looking forward to the future here.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    I’m probably a little younger than you, as I was on those BBSes throughout my childhood, but definitely not running them!

    I did not get access to the Internet until I went to college. I guess I was right at the cusp of the changeover, as during my undergrad, I learned command line telnet, ftp, mail/elm, Usenet news/rn/ten, gopher, and all of the other early protocols. But then, right in the middle of my undergrad, the NCSA Mosaic beta was released, and I spent an entire night following an early HTML tutorial so I could make a webpage to host under my campus profile.

    The Internet and web are very, very different from what I thought they would be back then. I hope the fediverse might be closer to our original plan for the Internet as a place for curious individuals to exchange ideas and learn from each other.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    yea what we can do is spam reddit chock full of rubbish posts. spam until it dies. sadly, they still control the trove of our valuable comments for the past decade. let's not make the same mistake. so spam everything. spam the whole world so that AI slowly dies? 4chan is the best.

    The article understands. SPEZ NEEDS TO PAY US FOR OUR CONTRIBUTIONS. Like NOW. Every redditor needs basic income from reddit, paid for by OpenAI and scammers like them: Google, Fbook etc need to PAY US. Or else, we destroy them. NO MERCY.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    There was a very strong libertarian "The Internet will set us free from the tyranny of nation-states" 90s techno-optimism for awhile, but it seems to have died out as any kind of mainstream philosophy

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    You know, I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. I remember unironically saying things like “I am a citizen of the Internet“. I probably even used the term “netizen “. It did seem like we would form a global community of tech-minded people that transcended borders, and that it would be the future!

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