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[The Guardian] There is no moral high ground for Reddit as it seeks to capitalise on user data (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 year ago by dimspace@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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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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[-] witten@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think you're right about the ease of spinning up a cloud server, but I respectfully disagree on the rest of it—and it's for one simple reason: IP address reputation management. Spinning up a server such that the Big Guys will actually trust it and willingly receive mail from it is not a trivial thing to do in 2023. I've been running mail servers for years and I think there are still blacklists I'm on.

[-] mrspaz@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

This is why I gave up trying to run my own email server. It became clear it was turning into a racket quite a while ago. I would hear from someone that they didn't receive an email, so I'd check with their provider and sure enough I'd been blackholed.

I'd go through all the steps to clear everything, re-send the message and it would go. Send a second message and my server was instantly blackholed again for "spamming" or "suspected open relay" or some other reason. All the "Big Guys" as you call them of course carved out exceptions for each other, but no matter how many security signatures or other measures I implemented it was basically an instant lockout.

It got to the point where I was forced to sign on with a "Big" provider for routing.

[-] witten@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

It's really a sad state of affairs, and it just goes to show how important true federation is. Maybe someday something federated will come in to replace email, and we'll get another shot. I haven't given up on email though.. I'm just super cynical about it.

[-] minimar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I don't think we need to replace email, we need to not have astronomically big corporations being able to control it.

[-] witten@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think we necessarily need to replace email (even though it's largely built on a mishmash of ancient tech held together by twine and bailing wire). I just think that in order to not have astronomically big corporations control it, we might have to building something new. The corporations aren't going to willingly relinquish control of email, but they won't (at the outset) control something that's designed to replace it.

If you have a better suggestion, I'm all ears!

[-] minimar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I agree corporations won't willingly reliquish their control, but that's why the government steps in! I'm a socialist, so you can imagine how I want that done.

[-] witten@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

That'll happen just as soon as the corporations don't also pull the strings of the government. :D

[-] TheInsane42@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

The main reason for this is that most mailservers 1st check centralised blacklist providers, then and only then look at spf and dmarc record. When dmarc would be the 1st check and only on it's absence blacklisting (or greylisting) would be applied it would be so much easier. (And I still have to figure out how to do that in postfix)