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
There are millions of people out there who just accept all this crap as normal. I just don’t know how people can feel so comfortable about being constantly bought and sold online.
Ads in general skeeve me out. In the early days (2005-ish?), while visiting a video game forum I used to frequent, my computer was infected with malware delivered by a malicious ad. I didn’t even interact with it—the page just loaded, acted erratically, and before I knew it, my system was completely locked down. My only recourse was a full wipe of that PC.
Since then, I’ve never trusted ads. And even now that some ads have gotten more “legitimate” (thanks to these five secrets advertisers don’t want you to know!), they still seem sketchy just knowing how much money goes into them. Do banner ads on a website even result in more sales? I don’t know, but obviously they must be conning someone out of their money because they pay so much out.