Reddit: Centralized Control Mentality Versus Rebelling Community

I became aware there was some sort of protest going on on Reddit after the company decided to charge for the previously free APIs, but I didn't know the details until today.

I learned a little bit about the peaks at which the protest has reached by listening to the recording of the latest episode of the Crypto Maniacs podcast.

That sounded like a vivid community rebelling, and going in some cases to extreme measures of protest. I say community and not moderators, because when we are talking about many thousands of them, it sounds like more than a limited number of people keeping the subreddits they moderate hostage.

Source

Anyway, how did this all start?

Reddit, the company, decided to charge a fee for large users of their APIs. In my opinion, they felt used as rich companies (Microsoft, Google) use the information posted on Reddit to train their large language models (i.e. ChatGPT or Bard, the most prominent examples), and wanted to gain some profit from that.

But there are collateral victims to this fee, as you can read here. And probably why the controversy started.

In fact, this quote from the Reddit CEO Steve Huffman from these days says it all:

The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, but we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.

Here's the problem. This is a classic case of users being the product. The information posted on Reddit is not published by Reddit employees (in general), it is posted by the users.

Of course, I assume like every other centralized social media, Reddit made sure to own everything that is posted on their platform. So legally, they can charge a fee for accessing the "corpus of data", for their own profit, not their users'.

That didn't stop many Reddit moderators to rebel and find ingenious ways to protest. Regardless of the outcome of this protest, the end result will still be that the users of Reddit (including moderators), and what they create on the platform, is at the disposal of the company. Right now, some moderators were removed. But the company also has the capability to ban accounts, and do what they want with the content.

Of course, if communities leave... they can't grow new communities. I'm not saying it will happen, but I am saying united communities still have a lot of power.

Reddit might be a unique case in the centralized social media world, with more than one protest throughout its history (or "blackouts" as they are called because usually subreddits are turned private and not accessible except for members during such protests, from what I read).

But in the end, it's still centralized social media, users are still the product and don't see a penny for their time spent on the platform or the knowledge they share.

Where Reddit, the company, is right is that their users are screwed twice (of course, the company didn't think about the users, as we have seen from the words of the CEO). Once because the ad revenue goes to the company and not shared with the users in any way. And the second time when ChatGPT and Bard are trained using their content, and they are again, paid nothing for that.

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