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
I have heard conflicting versions. Some people are saying it seems that the locked-down subs are the ones where the new comments aren’t sticking. Which makes sense, but who knows what the truth is. None of us can trust anything Reddit or /u/spez says ever again, so it could be malicious or it could be technical.