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
The way I like to explain it is with World of Warcraft. You sign up on a server and go out and mine some copper ore. Your player and that copper ore are only on that one single server. If you wanted to trade it with a friend, they would have to be on that server. However, if you went and posted that copper ore on the auction house, people from dozens of servers can see it and buy it. Those servers are in the ‘‘lemmy’’ sense federated with one another, but instead of virtual copper ore, it is cute pictures of cats.
I think of it as internet cafe’s.
You can choose which cafe you want to use, but once you then connect, you all can view and share the same information.
I can talk one on one with the other people sitting in my cafe, and each cafe may have its own set of rules and regulations over what you can do, how much the coffee is etc, but once logged in we can still share information with people in other cafes…