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) (15 children)

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 (12 children)

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.

[–] Archer@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There was a very strong libertarian "The Internet will set us free from the tyranny of nation-states" 90s techno-optimism for awhile, but it seems to have died out as any kind of mainstream philosophy

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

You know, I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. I remember unironically saying things like “I am a citizen of the Internet“. I probably even used the term “netizen “. It did seem like we would form a global community of tech-minded people that transcended borders, and that it would be the future!

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