Didn't even notice the brief AI disclaimer at the end until @Jiberish remarked about it! The piece is about 200% longer than it needs to be.

TL;DR: guy willfully violates copyright commercially for years, moves to Dominican Republic in the hopes the government won't follow him there... They do. The end.

This isn't likely to stop Reddit themselves from monetizing the data for AI training purposes. Deletion is typically "logical" in these types of systems, meaning that it's "marked as deleted" but not actually deleted.

What it does affect is the ability for others to see the posts, which might be companies accessing the API for AI training purposes. At this point, we don't know whether this is a meaningful path that Reddit wants to go down. If it is, they could allow the API to return deleted posts and comments (theoretically).

I'm going to date myself here, but when I was in high school in the late '90s, a friend of mine introduced me to Linux and helped me get it set up. He gave me the distro he used at the time: Debian. He explained to me how Debian, unlike other distros, compiles everything it installs, which is why it takes so long. I recall him explaining that this would make things run better in some way (but I was a teenager and don't remember too clearly). The install took hours. Many hours. I don't remember what kind of computer I had, it was a Pentium something.

There was such a sort of romance and intrigue to Linux back then. It was so challenging to get working, the desktop environments were janky AF, getting some drivers working was like a day's work. I miss it, though.

Sure, but it doesn't mean it won't cause problems for our kind admin, Ernest. Eventually, someone will probably make it troublesome enough for him to reconsider.

I always look at my seeds and just remove the ones with insanely high ratios when I need space or capacity back. I always try to leave the ones that aren't wildly popular and have only a few other peers. That way, I feel like I'm helping someone get that odd thing I wanted.

The example I give again, and again, and again is Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Craigslist remains private (which shields it from being gutted by Wall Street vultures, for sure) so we don't know for sure, but Craig is believed to retain a controlling stake alongside current CEO Jim Buckmaster and eBay (which purchased a large stake from an exiting employee).

Craigslist makes about $600 million annually, and I'm sure provides a nice living for the executives and employees there, but has remained true to its core function of providing transparent and easy classifieds posting to everyone (mostly for free, even!)

Notice what happens when an organization becomes a vehicle for profit, beyond simply "self-sustaining profit." Notice how taking on investors practically guarantees that outcome.

I thought Reddit was dead the day Conde Nast bought it. They've survived quite a bit longer! This day had to come. Let's move on.

We can build something that primarily exists to create a community.

If they force a reopen, we should all get ready to post Never Gonna Give You Up music videos all day long.