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
For sure. Like I said, it’s totally my bias showing. Maybe it’s seeing too many congressmen fundamentally misunderstand the tech. I’ve also run into a lot of older programmers that are highly technical, but still kind of out-of-touch when it comes to the Internet culture that sits on top of the technical layer.
100% with you. Watching any kind of congressional hearing that relates to technology is so incredibly frustrating. I was also really happy to see mainstream journalism specifically acknowledge that Reddit is really just a web-enabled version of old newsgroups or discussion boards, and that all the value is provided by users. If only everyone thought that way!