snarfback

I feel bad for this laughter…

Unlike the Great Library at Alexandria, the information contained in many reddit threads is actually available in other places and can be recreated - often by the same person if necessary and relevant.

I understand people not wanting to have that information deleted, but I think the analogy is a bit heavy. For many, it’s a balancing act where the fundamental disagreement with reddit’s cultural evolution outweighs the desire to participate in the knowledge repository.

I think many people were comfortable with their ideas belonging to the communities that spawned on reddit, and they viewed reddit’s ownership as a necessary technicality for the platform to exist. Once reddit clarified that they intended to act on that ownership, many people no longer wanted to participate.

I think they have that right.

More importantly, who owns our thoughts in this space?

I think one of the most valuable things about this situation is that it lays bare the relationship between users/mods and admins/employees/owners of reddit. I think most users and mods lived in willful delusion that they kind of owned their own data and communities, and admins/employees/owners just sort of maintained infrastructure and me money from ads and unspecified backend data stuff…

It’s now forced that ownership question into the open in stark terms: users and mods don’t own their data or thir communities and their sweat equity, as it were, is not valued by the admin/employee/owner group when it really comes down to it.

That’s something I miss about my old bulletin board home; I could never imagine the admin team strong arming users over shit like this. It’s antithetical to the very ethos of the place - hell, I still send them $5 / month for old times sake to keep the servers up.

Reddit sold out years ago and it’s really just now hitting the fan.