 "Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things," Huffman said. "We are not in the business of giving that away for free." You and me, we're just data sets. Years of interaction with fellow human beings, building community, sharing insight and creativity…it’s all just data. Data to be mined and monetized. Huffman's not mad Reddit was scraped for a chatbot. He's mad he wasn't paid for the privilege. It's his data, you see. His. Not yours. 138 comments
  @jaredwhite Oh, they start paying the people who create the value they are thriving on? Just kidding 😂 @jaredwhite It's funny, cause I've been thinking, I believe that there are no grownups left at the top. If there were, they would not have allowed to reach this point. Capitalism had a good thing going for a while. (edit: Capitalism has never had any good things going.)  @jaredwhite Maybe paying the Moderators for their labor would be an Adult thing to do.   Does Reddit's TOS grant them the right to sell the dataset? Because if not, a pre-emptive cease-and-desist from the user base as a class would probably do wonders for their IPO. Did I say "for"? I meant " to".  @jaredwhite hmm shades of The Prisoner 'I am not a number, I am a free man'. Like the fact he ignores the communities and friendships built puts him in competing for the Mark Zuckerburg robotic award. Because he is acting just like Mark here, and acting like Mark is not something that will appeal to the populace. @PaladinQuinn @jaredwhite oh he explicitly said that Musk is an example to follow The entire man, just throw away at this point @jaredwhite https://mastodon.social/@Oozenet/110552924679192021 They are labouring under the delusional conception that they have a greater claim to this creation than all the other cocreators. They are instances of Commander Bruce Maddox. A guy so arrogant and blind to the desires of all others that he thinks he own Data.   @jaredwhite He got it for free unless he paid for those discussions on all those topics. Just running the site is the least of it. People keep seeing things backwards. We're not the clients of free software or apps, we are the product being sold.  @DeborahForPlus @jaredwhite Companies that lose sight of quality in favor of increasing sales over the short term never succeed in the long term.  @jaredwhite Actually "giving it away for free" is what helped it get that interesting in the first place... @jaredwhite This makes me think that the real reason AOL Instant Messenger went away is that they couldn't figure out how to sell our conversations without it being totally creepy. @raddude12 @stylinstainless @jaredwhite And let's not forget that The Internet becoming a thing is why AOL went away. @raddude12 Remember when we had cell phones with AOL Instant Messenger on them? What was that about? Ha ha. @stylinstainless No. By the time I had my first smart phone (circa 2010), it was dead.  @jaredwhite @jaredwhite don't take him at his word that this is about ai training scrapers, either. If it was, he would have just given free access to the established app developers and avoided this whole issue  @jaredwhite @jaredwhite You might enjoy my post about this... https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/05/03/with-its-API-update-reddit-should-start-paying-its-users.html @jaredwhite Possibly even society.  @jaredwhite@indieweb.social wow, that disgusts me, "giving it away" it was never his to begin with and it can be easily deprecated by people never again contributing to any of it anymore. @jaredwhite it would be “hilarious” if someone started to organize to destroy the data. Like have the EU citizens send en masse to Reddit a request for erasure under GDPR regulations 💀 @jaredwhite If it's not your server, then it's not your data. It has been this way since day one of the internet and it will be forever. People are stupid. @mannix @jaredwhite No, fuck that. People have a right to expect to be treated like, uh, people. All that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” is cynical bullshit. Not everyone is a cunt. @nic @jaredwhite Most companies are indeed cunts. Sorry to destroy your illusions but just because something is cynical doesn't mean it's not true. @jaredwhite @mannix @nic nobody ever said that it isn't, but that it shouldn't everyone knows that it works that way; the point is that it shouldn't work like that @mannix @jaredwhite And trusting some law that "forces" to delete the data after the profits is naive.  @jaredwhite would be a real shame if all UK and EU Redditors would make GDPR demands that Reddit properly perma-delete all of their data.. @jaredwhite it’s fucked that Reddit exists because of the hard labor of UNPAID mods! It should be illegal to have people preform labor, to contribute value to a company, without paying them. If it’s legally possible, the mods should unionize.   > It’s HIS data, you see. His. Not yours. Great summation to help common (non-techie) folk understand it.  @jaredwhite this is how the whole "ai tools were trained on data without compensation" turns into chaos. Never will the people who wrote the text, the code, or made the image will be compensated for the AI training. But the places they chose to host their text or images will be. Seems like it actually was a really bad idea that we centralize the web on a few select websites.. @jaredwhite The way he speaks about monetizing his website user’s data doesn’t gel with what his website’s users actually believe, so something’s gotta give. @mazzeri @jaredwhite Belief does not denote reality. I think that's the single most forgotten point among people these days. You could also believe that murderous psychopaths are actually nice people with everyone's best interest at heart, but murderers are gonna murder. @jaredwhite it’s also a lesson in reading the TOS (and demanding readABLE TOSs). Huffman’s being an arrogant arse, but he’s not technically wrong :-/ It *is* his data as we freely gave it to him “in return” for using the site. I agree his attitude stinks & lacks any ethics, but it’s also on all of us to learn from this. To consider where we pour our conversations and creative endeavours. To vote with our digital feet for social-good spaces over for-profit. @jaredwhite Seeing everyone as walking Dollar signs isn’t the way to go. Without the community reddit wouldn’t be what it is today. This is very sad to see  @jaredwhite I don't believe there is anything wrong with wanting to get paid. After all, Reddit provides a service and there is a cost to everything. However, the exorbitant prices and lack of consideration for their community (including third-party developers) are real problems. @jaredwhite Already deleted my content out of Reddit, not that I had much on Reddit, but scorched earth and gone. Will be looking over Kbin and/or Lemmy soon. @jaredwhite He's also apparently undeleting comments when people try to scorched earth their accounts, which probably means they're doing some GDPR violation under the hood @vikxin @jaredwhite My suspicion is that either he's decided that the EU will move slow enough that it won't catch up to them until after an ipo and he's got his payout, or they think the fines will be worth it. Or their legal thinks they can argue that they can somehow keep the content despite the eu regs i guess. @jaredwhite which is why people must stop feeding these corporations our lives. There is no upside for us - none. @jaredwhite Kbin and lemmy and federated alternatives to reddit. Switching to lemmy personally.  @jaredwhite time to search for an alternative. I wonder if it would be possible to create a Masterton plugin that displays posts more like a reddit discussion. @nomis1234 @jaredwhite Apparently Lemmy is basically that - powered by the same federation as Mastodon @jaredwhite@indieweb.social Imagine how much the WordPress dataset is worth. It's decentralised but I assume it is worth a lot. 20 years of posts, drafts and more. 20 years of peoples' lives.  @jaredwhite Can we make migrating to Lemmy easier für Redditors? I want to see Reddit bleed @jaredwhite @Jyoti It is all fine to monetize a social network, using the revenue to fund operations, growth, marketing, and profits. But if you make it all about that, and even do it in a way that damages your core value proposition, then you messed up. #reddit grew off the free labor of its mods, posters, and commenters. But they also do not take kindly to being ignored. And ultimately a link sharing site can be easily replaced. I went to #kbin .  Sorry, I don't think it's okay for profit to exist at all, we have a basic political disagreement on that. Profit = theft. @Jyoti @jaredwhite What you say could be argued on a theoretical level. But the way our societies operate today, profits are an important element. For instance, as a business owner I am legally required to intend making a profit, otherwise I might lose my business license. I do see what you mean but I don't care that a capitalist law says that capitalism is essential. That's exactly the same as a slave-owners' law saying slave-owning is essential. Fuck the law. I suspect we'll never agree on this so it's kind of pointless debating, haha. Sorry if I come over as a nuance-less Marxist but it's what I am. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In the meantime, live long and prosper! @free_spleens @Jyoti @jaredwhite It can be. But that is a discussion about economical system and government, and not the current discussion, which is about a social network forgetting that its active users are the ones who built their house. @jaredwhite great. They can have my years of incessantly trolling libertarians. I hope it helps train a better AI :D  @jaredwhite@indieweb.socialon a related tangent - I used to periodically do freelance creative work for a company that ran focus groups for broadcast media. Their business started rapidly drying up after web too point owe. @jaredwhite I mean, this is just kind of how capitalism works. You stake out ownership of the public square, insist that anything said in it belongs to you and you need to be paid for, and depend on unpaid volunteers to keep things profitable. It's a terrible system that will always result in garbage like this and it's absurd that we stick with it. He is right though, they can do wtf they want: "you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of...." and on & on. They problem isn't spez, it is that people put their data on closed, proprietary sites. I mean, fuck spez, but he's just one stooge in a larger system. @jebba ...to the extend permitted by law. (s.c. GDPR, right to be forgotten etc.) But, very much yes, ToS (& PP) do apply and the fact people are not reading them hurts them. At the very least use https://tosdr.org (if possible contribute too) The tech giants don't seem to have many qualms about violating EU's laws, they just pay some token fine as a cost of business. The "huge" fines that are levied against them are pocket lint in comparison to their resources. asked elsewhere: who was it created all the "data" he now claims is "his"? was it him? all by his lonesome?  @jaredwhite all of the bigger tech companies that rely on advertising for the bulk of their revenue think like this. They always have. They’re just now starting to say the quiet part out loud. Some of us realized this sooner than others, but we all should have known better. We should have moved on years ago — we let them overstay their welcome. @jaredwhite Of course it is. Not arguing for the rightness or wrongness of that, but it still astounds me that we use services like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, &c with no consideration for the fact that we’re giving them ownership of our data when we do. What did we think the price was for using these services? Did we actually convince ourselves they were free? For the most part, yes… we did.  @jaredwhite Yeah, giving data away for free is a mugs game. Everyone should definitely stop giving their data away to Reddit for free. ... megh'.. it failed for me.. been off it for months before all the hooplah.. if a soci net does not function properly through chrome browser i dont want it.. :mastodon: won. thus far.. see? @jaredwhite we are all feeding the machine. Relying on “free”platforms that own our data and govern our relationships. @jaredwhite annoyingly the data belongs to them isn't wrong, almost every place ppl post, owns the data they store and host.  @jaredwhite From what I hear, kbin works actually better, than Lemmy. Migration seems rather easy to me. I don't think, that we can migrate existing content. So all that remains is, explaining relevant aspects of federation/Fediverse¹ and pointing them towards the right instance. ¹i.e. @jaredwhite Wasn't it your job, 18 years ago, to be smart enough to not place the "largest data sets of human beings talking about interesting stuff" in a walled garden like that? I don't understand all that crying. Reddit can do those things, like Facebook and Google can, whenever they want, whatever they want. And you knew that beforehand. But decided to go there anyways. So, what's the point? You (not I) were actually just data sets to be mometized. Sure. What else? Deal with it! ;) @pino Most of the early "Web 2.0" services made a big deal about being by the people, for the people. Photographers posted their photos on Flickr because they believed Flickr genuinely cared about the photography community. Even now, a commercial service such as YouTube pays lip service to being creator-centric, even if by and large they're almost as enshittified as anything else. Now with Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc., crapping all over their own communities…that's a newer phenomenon. @jaredwhite The phenomenon, i.e. the current actions, yes, that's new. But that Reddit/Facebook/YouTube/... are walled gardens, with all the inherent dangers, are not new. Fortunately you are now just pushed a bit more to understand it. (Not only) I was never at these platforms, and this is neither due to browser incompatibilitiea, nor because I disliked their logo. It's because those walled gardens should not exist at all. And you all knew people that always warned you and you have just ignored @pino I don't think "the corporate internet always sucked lol" is super helpful because I believe there has been a huge tone/vibe shift just in the last few years. Take the Tesla situation. People used to buy Teslas because they thought Tesla was actually great for the environment, highly innovative, a progressive cause! Now it's increasingly looking like a bait-and-switch by an increasingly nuts Elon. When folks get swindled, don't blame the folks. Blame the swindlers. @jaredwhite Both. The folk could be much more interested and less vulnerable to that. But instead, they consume. They consume what blinks. Many are explicitly proud of being a complete failure in that sense. They see an asset in that lifestyle. To some degree, it's explicit part of US culture even, I guess, but I'm not really sure about that one. It's a bit like smoking the whole life, then saying "That's a new phenomenon" when health issues pop up. @jaredwhite ... and, I would be interested whether you disagree with me - maybe in US it was different from here: People bought Tesla as a shiny expensive new toy that they can present to their peers and all the others. Environmental aspects were just very indirectly involved in that.  here in UK EV's are bought by richer, older people in suburbs who previously owned a car with automatic transmission and have space to charge it at home (avoiding the flawed ecosystem of profit driven charging points). Their previous cars are then sold on the used market, and many younger people in busy towns now no longer dirve stick as they can now get affordable cars with auto 'boxes, the media claim this is due to "green" thinking but its also only a secondary factor >> as for the USA (and other) corporates becoming more adversarial, I agree that is happening, but I think its across the board (not just in tech) and is due to economic conditions and declining growth, they were never "friendly" in the first place.... @jaredwhite Reminds me of @jerthorp ‘s idea of calling it “capta” instead of “data” @jaredwhite every time I see this boosted, I think about Elvis impersonator and Trump pardonee Rod Blagojevich saying "I've got this thing and it's fucking golden and I'm not just giving it away for fucking free" @jaredwhite I don’t know how to be nice about this. … Duh? Reddit never, not ever, belonged to anyone but the people who own and operate Reddit. It’s not a concrete wall on a public works underpass created for the people abd by the people which the people should feel free to produce art upon. It’s a wholly owned private enterprise and y’all have been donating your expertise to it for … what … 20 years? @jaredwhite Words matter, folks. First up, CEO Dickhead didn’t say “Reddit users are nothing more than a dataset.” He said “Reddit is a dataset” and what that means is that y’all been building Reddit’s dataset in exchange for having access to that dataset. That’s the exchange; that’s the economics of Reddit so far. Now, I ask you : Is another company operating for profit, giving nothing to the dataset and taking literally all of the dataset not radically different? I think it is. @sparkplugtacklehump "y’all been building Reddit’s dataset in exchange for having access to that dataset" is how literally nobody actually using Reddit imagines is what we've been doing. When the community of people contributing to a social network is sidelined by the needs of "the dataset", you know something's really gone off the rails. @jaredwhite He's also deeply fallen into the Zero-Sum trap, where someone else's gain is automatically a loss for him. Third party apps probably grew the Reddit pie, but all he can see is less pie for him. I did block the crawler from one AI company from my site recently, but that was because it was a badly behaved piece of junk. @jaredwhite It really sucks for marginalized communities that relied on Twitter and Reddit that these two platforms are being destroyed by their owners. @jaredwhite note how he makes humans fungible? And how he wants to own the external stimuli of humans as that stimuli is non-fungible, and thus valuable? This just makes him a plantation owner and slaver. @jaredwhite if Reddit really doesn't want people harvesting text from the site, why don't they block webcrawlers? APIs are frequently an attempt to take away as opposed to give as they are often less functional than the web and often harder to implement; when you're lucky you can add a new site to a web crawler in 15 seconds. Every API implementation is a one-off and usually leaves you gasping for air through a rate-limited straw. @jaredwhite I can only sincerely hope, along with Twitter and any other that wants to be unreasonable, that people can muster up just enough courage and care to leave these platforms to rot. Beautifly explained. That's the main issue with any #proprietary platform. The biggest resource of our time - data is being abused, and most of people just don't care. Edit: ""Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things," Huffman said. "We are not in the business of creating any of that ourselves.""  @jaredwhite Seems like they were fine with being in the business of getting it for free from the people who created it... 🙄 He really wants to monetize Reddit and get bought out, so he can become the next VC angel forcing tech bros like him to monetize and get bought out... Yes, typically when a service is "free" then the people using the service are technically "the product" in terms of data capture on their habits. To then take a "free" service and charge for it, and yet keep the user's data habits (to sell to interested corporations) is double billing, in a way. Reddit's move will cause it to implode, as users realize they're being used.  |
Gregory's Server
"We're 18 years old," Huffman said. "I think it's time we grow up and behave like an adult company."
Says the guy who's behaving like a petulant 5-year old.