Though Reddit’s leadership claims to be ‘leaning into its humanity,’ it seems the company is more committed to leaving humanity in the dark.
Reddit promised that it would maintain a free-tier API, but researchers and moderators repeatedly stressed that the new access was too limited and would cut off many tools, projects, and archives that their work depended on. Finally, Reddit’s olive branch came in the form of an online application for moderators and researchers to request increased access to the API and (for moderators only) access to Reddit archives that the updates took offline.
The mistake seemed to have taught Huffman that ignoring the needs of communities that the platform had long relied on posed a greater risk than benefit to the profitability of the company in the long run. Yet six months later, many of us working in public interest research fields have heard nothing back from Reddit in response to our applications, and key archives of historical data remain inaccessible to researchers.
I still don’t see how reddit can claim the data they hold (which they don’t actually own, in spite of what Huffman says, they merely claim a license to) has value that they’re entitled to be paid for by AI trainers, when they don’t actually pay the people who create that data.
It’s probably because the U.S. legal system typically favors big business.
Also, this:
noun
wealthy people who own land
In this case, the “land” is the platform.
(and spez himself is “the landed gentry”)
Social media tech bros sell “humanity” the same way cigarette companies sold glamorous lifestyles.
They both use celebrities to portray fashionable a lifestyle. They both know the net negative health effects and ignore it because it’s directly tied to their bottom line. They’re both are at odds with researchers. I’m sure if one were to dig deeper there would be a lot more parallels.
The Facebook whistleblower was huge news in mainstream media. Then they rebranded to Meta and successfully buried the story. The aggressively anti-humanity.
Smoking rots your body. Social media rots your mind.
Social media tech bros sell “humanity” the same way cigarette companies sold glamorous lifestyles.
It’s every bit as vacuous as Google’s former motto, “Don’t be evil”.
They’re leaning into profits and bots. Their content has been reposts for years now. Good luck making people dumber and more obedient (or braindead).
for humanity
That’s a nice hyperbole. The faster reddit drives everyone away and dies, the better.
What could researchers possibly want with Reddit posts and comments?
