Huffman has said, “We are not in the business of giving that [Reddit’s content] away for free.” That stance makes sense. But it also ignores the reality that all of Reddit’s content has been given to it for free by its millions of users. Further, it leaves aside the fact that the content has been orchestrated by its thousands of volunteer moderators.
touché
“There is nothing special about Reddit except its community and the content the community created.”
This is the fundamental truth that rules all others.
It used to just be a regular forum for people to post and discuss. It was special because of the upvote/downvote karma system. The user count got money hungry people’s attention, it went corporate and it became a place to take in revenue.
Now people have learned from it, and used it to create their own forums based on the structure of Reddit.
The thing that made Reddit special was it was everything you wanted all in one place, instead of having multiple forums on multiple different websites for multiple different interests, it was all on Reddit.
Now we have the fediverse, it’s multiple different websites, that follow the same principles, and they all work harmoniously with one another.
Just like nature finds a way, genuine humanity finds way too, even on the internet.
It’s literally not “Reddit’s content”. Says so in the user agreement:
You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content […]
Huffman should be careful calling it “Reddit’s content” — by claiming ownership, he’s arguably taking on liability.
The [stuff in brackets] is editorial. That’s when they add on their own reference to something said elsewhere.
In this case, huffpig didn’t actually say content. He said data.
It’s actually worse, because it dehumanizes everyone on reddit, via that the data is our only value to him.
So, fuck huffpig
I think the word “data” also supports the theory that this is actually about training data for LLMs rather than ad revenue. If it was actually about 3rd party apps, then why not just require all apps to feed the ads? But according to the Apollo developer, there wasn’t even a way to fetch the ads through the API.
I think spez saw what OpenAI/Microsoft were accomplishing using parsed data and got dollar signs in his eyes. The irony is that OpenAI probably already ripped every comment off Reddit up until now, and don’t really need more going forward.
I’d hate to see the community I helped build be destroyed. However, I will love watching the folks that made it great join the federation! Here’s to us!
Sure - only people who create content give it away for free.
Reddit is in the business of taking that free labor and telling people they own that data and set rules for it. Got it.
Personally I’ve left it for good. Lemmy is so active and diverse I don’t miss reddit at all. I’m still sometimes looking at it through Boost, but come July 1st I’ll be gone forever
I’m planning to stay active on Lemmy, but I am a bit worried. I feel like the engagement on here has dropped the last few days as Reddit’s traffic mostly recovered.
July will be another big test, so we’ll see.
positively surprised by general news coverage of this whole thing
To be fair, much of the modern news cycle comes from Reddit. When I worked as a tech journalist years ago, we had half a dozen bots watching relevant subs and alerting us to breaking news. We’d clean it up, fact-check, call sources for comment, and do all the “journalistic” stuff you’d expect, just like with any other story, but Reddit was absolutely part of our workflow. You’ve got to look for news wherever the news is happening, be that a press release, a leak on twitter, or a convo on Reddit, and frequently it happened to be Reddit.
These days you even have tictokers cutting out the middleman and straight-up reading r/AmITheAsshole posts over Minecraft footage for views. Is it any surprise that news sites are commenting on their content firehose being turned off?
Great article, except super cringe at the end suggesting Beehaw specifically and not saying “Lemmy” or something to indicate it is part of a wider service.
Unless Reddit reverses course … a new site, such as the user-funded Beehaw … will take its place.
Honestly kind of a hilarious misunderstanding of Lemmy too. Beehaw will never replace reddit because they explicitly do not want to and have already taken aggressive steps to make sure that they don’t (i.e. detailed application requirements and defederating multiple instances).
The application requirements are merely a way to manage growth and keep bots out. Defederation is also an essential management tool that all major instances are utilising. Both of these are being used to restrict bots and trolling.
Because people keep unintentionally hyping up Beehaw, they do not understand that Beehaw is nothing special and that everyone would be better off unsubscribing from its communities to let it be its own island since it doesn’t like the whole federation concept anyway (at least not since it finished exploiting it to grow to its current user count). I already unsubscribed from all their communities after their dick move.
I was reading these comments on beehaw yesterday defending the defederation from shitjustworks because of T_D sub with like 10 subscribers and I was already getting a little worried thinking what I’ve gotten myself into. Glad to see the view on this on other instances seems a bit more balanced and reasonable. Beehaw seems toxic as hell.
Toxic? Do you know what this word means?
They made it their stated goal to create a safespace for people who are, for example, in a vulnerable state.
They should defederate entirely and become an island. The world is not a safe place.
That’s like saying “kill yourself because you die anyway”
I see that their mass defederation is potentially temporary.
But the point that hairtrigger defederation results in fragmentation, up to the point of insularisation remains valid. Islands naturally tend to become obscure.
The biggest mistake* Mastodon made was that they promoted “Mastodon” instead of a specific instance.
I think they’re absolutely right to just pick an instance and recommend that, or if that instance doesn’t work, try this other one. Which instance they pick is not what I care about more than just picking some specific instance. Beehaw may or may not have been the best choice, but I’m glad they picked one.
*I understand why Mastodon wanted to be neutral, but it was horrible for onboarding people.
I wonder who owns the content posted on Lemmy. I haven’t seen it explicitly called out as Creative Commons or any other license.
Massively underrated comment. I know legalese isn’t going to be super popular around here, but we can still clarify & enshrine some fundamenatl values here to shore off corporate interests, in the same spirit as copy left. Just because creative Commons are common, and GDPR protects things implicitly (albeit completely untested–perhaps even problematic), that doesn’t mean they don’t warrant mention and protection.
GDPR protects things implicitly (albeit completely untested–perhaps even problematic)
I will grab my popcorn the first time someone seriously tries to pursue a GDPR erasure request for their fediverse content. I don’t think it’s even possible to honor such a request in theory, let alone in practice, given that nodes can come and go from the network and when they go, they could easily keep their local copies of everything.
In theory you’d have to send a GDPR request to every instance.
