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
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!