The Reddit Protest Is a Battle for the Soul of the Human Internet
The Reddit Protest Is a Battle for the Soul of the Human Internet
An esoteric battle over API fees and access is highlighting a power struggle between corporate overlords and unpaid moderators. It's worth understanding, and it's worth fighting for.
Just looking at Redditor's reaction to this is telling me the battle is already lost. Most seem to be completely done and just want their cat videos back. It's clear that the normies who invaded the site and proceeded to make it worse are completely content with what is happening so long as their addiction is fed. As far as I'm concerned, they can have the site.
HOWEVER. Maybe its a sign that all of the people who were in favor of the protest actually did leave and the only ones who are left are those who don't give a shit about it or don't support it.
Yeah you can't exactly take the subset of redditors still using the site during the blackout as representative of how redditors feel about it - anybody with any concern about it is not crossing the picket line.
I like those normies. It makes reddit feel a little more representative of the real world instead of the exclusive domain of cloistered nerds (I say that as a cloistered nerd). I’m here because federation is a better long term option for social media. I hope we can lure the normies over here too one day.
Well, there are also apparently some alt-right goons who want Reddit to burn for shutting down their old favorite hate forums, and they're stirring up shit too.
They have twitter now.
Seems like any liberal/left forum or community is a target.
They support the changes because it will drive away mods, letting them post their shit unfettered. They can have it.
The way you put it reminds me of Digg. When the "normies" came along with Digg v2, the OGs (the cloistered nerds see below) left.
Bye reddit.
Regarding the "real" issue being the use of the API by AI developers: It’s been evident for at least the last few years that this was going on, and I had seen it as a positive thing—that we were helping to create a training corpus that would be freely accessible to everyone, not just a handful of corporations with their own proprietary data.
It's worth noting that any company that operates a search engine probably has a copy of the whole web anyway and does not need to do API calls to get it. They just scrape it for search indexing. This includes, e.g., Microsoft and Google.