Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
I’m not gonna bother looking it up cuz I’m at work but usually sites hosting user generated content don’t claim ownership, merely a non-exclusive royalty free license. If they did claim ownership, they’d be on the hook for a looooot of copyright violations. Which is why they don’t do it.
The stack exchange network does claim ownership. Their whole business model is to have a site where users post technical answers to questions, then sue business where an employee copy pasted code blurbs from one of their sites.
I avoid those sites when searching for technical answers for code I’m writing, though I’ll sometimes use them for more meta questions (like how to get some tool to do some specific thing).
But it is interesting in that someone could post a code blurb that they didn’t own in the first place and now stack exchange will go forward acting as if they do own it. I wonder if that will eventually be their downfall because it seems like a situation that could even be baited deliberately. Hell, they could even already have fraudulent cases tried and/or settled.