[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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Plus AI companies can just scrape reddit without using the API. It's still a website after all.

For how much longer though? I wouldn't put it past them to try to make it only available through an app

If the data is that important to them that they kill the site, then they're more dumb than I think. Apps can be scraped too. It isn't even difficult.

I highly doubt Reddit is gonna shut down their website.

I saw a post saying they were testing restricting mobile access to only through the app.