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

this guy should be put in a fucking padded room

edit: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html

"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."

The greedy always forget their riches came from other people.

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.

Spez is just trying to get that bag and run.

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.

Monied interests have no morals

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.

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 a real shitstorm – and one that, for a change, does not involve Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.

LOL! I know I should just let this go, but I do love watching a good dumpster fire!

Steve Huffman's a twat. Change my mind.

reddit should be paying us

A shame the article doesn't mention alternatives such as kbin or lemmy

I know it's an opinion piece, but it's always kind of funny to see a word like "shitstorm" pop up in a credible news source.

It was always so funny redditors saying things villanizing Meta, Apple or Amazon while thinking Reddit was so special