[The Guardian] There is no moral high ground for Reddit as it seeks to capitalise on user data

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There is no moral high ground for Reddit as it seeks to capitalise on user data | John Naughton
theguardian.com

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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spez should start paying the redditors, especially the mods, with that logic. He gets it all for free and now he wants to profit while we would have to pay.

Pay the unwashed masses? Please. They should be thankful his highness deigned to create such a platform similarly to the way the landed gentry should be thankful for their high position.

Isn't Facebook starting to pay some contributors?

Some sort of profit sharing arrangement seems to be the trend in social media these days. YouTube has a setup like that of course... Instagram and TikTok both pay people (max of like 100 a month i think) and Twitter is planning to start.

No idea. It would not surprise me, though. I could see it for people who are "content creators" posting their videos or whatever their form of media is.

It's unclear to me to what extent this actually happens, but some people say reddit mods get offers to promote or allow certain posts for thousands a month. It would make sense on subs that have a seriously large audience.

Never thought about it like that. There's youtube millionaires from posting content. Imagine an only fans going private and the service was all "nah, get back in there".