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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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[-] zalack@kbin.social 75 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's nice to see an older author on a more traditional platform have such a clear and informed opinion on something deeply steeped in internet culture.

I recognize this is agism on my part, but I was surprised when I saw his picture.

[-] arkhan@kbin.social 46 points 1 year ago

Why would that surprise you? It was people his age who created the Internet and the World Wide Web. (Of course they weren’t that age back then, but you get the idea. :-)

There are fewer Internet-savvy old people, for sure, but when you do find one, they are more likely to be pre-web or web 1.0 “information wants to be free“ types. Younger users may have grown up in a more corporate space with a very different philosophy towards the Internet.

[-] Finkler@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Defiantly a pre-web here I recall running two BBS on a couple of Compaq 286's. Being here on the fediverse reminds me a lot of those fun times and certainly looking forward to the future here.

[-] arkhan@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I’m probably a little younger than you, as I was on those BBSes throughout my childhood, but definitely not running them!

I did not get access to the Internet until I went to college. I guess I was right at the cusp of the changeover, as during my undergrad, I learned command line telnet, ftp, mail/elm, Usenet news/rn/ten, gopher, and all of the other early protocols. But then, right in the middle of my undergrad, the NCSA Mosaic beta was released, and I spent an entire night following an early HTML tutorial so I could make a webpage to host under my campus profile.

The Internet and web are very, very different from what I thought they would be back then. I hope the fediverse might be closer to our original plan for the Internet as a place for curious individuals to exchange ideas and learn from each other.

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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023

1092 points (98.8% liked)