Reddit doesn't own that data. The community owns it.
Maybe there's something in the terms of service but that shouldn't hold water because nobody has ever read that document.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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These are totally the signs of a stable and profitable company.
In other news, spez's compensation from reddit last year was $193 million, and it's COO got a cool $93 million.
C'mon, spez, tell us again how horrible it's been that reddit's never made a profit.
Just saw this on yours truly. Fucking hilarious considering they had the balls to IPO with that sack of rocks weighing down the entire company.
"its data".
Ah yes... of course.
Literally the only way they could become profitable.
I'm honestly more upset at this deal (I think it was google?) than the CEO pay thing, which is all stock options and mostly ragebait.
I expect to see them last 3-5 years and get bought out by some bit tech firm, all current execs take their payouts, sell their shares and retire.
So Reddit charges users to create content (paid premium or by showing ads). And then it sells that content.
Making money both going and coming.
And it also asks reddit users to invest in reddit
loool
Where's my cut?
Good thing they monetized their API.
A good reminder to go back and edit all your comments to [removed] if you didn't do so when you first left.
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So just enough to cover what it payed the CEO last year? ($192 million)
Lmao the ratfuck CEO is making his money alright. What a little weaseling coward. He spend so long jealous of his co-founders who got paid and left early, that he probably sees this as his gold parachute.
I wonder if there is any legal standing for users to sue Reddit for a fair share of those profits. That’d be nice if it could happen. But i suspect, probably not.
There is legal standing, IMO. You can't take something without consideration, and access to the website was granted free of charge while the data collection was squirrelled away in the fine print. That isn't a lawful contract, the fine print is for technicalities about the main transaction of X in exchange for Y. You can't say "we'll give you X for free!!!” then sneak into the fine print "(((you also give us Y for free)))". The structure is clearly deceptive in a manner that is designed to prevent a fair assessment of the value being exchanged.
Insurers have to provide a "key facts page" where they summarise in plain English what you're paying for. The fine print gives the detail, but the front page is still "we give you X in exchange for Y".
You can't build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts. Tech companies have placed themselves amongst the wealthiest businesses in the world without paying for the nuts and bolts we provide.
Hell, even Microsoft is in on it now, even though you pay for Windows and Office 365!
Next question then: how do we mobilize into a class action against Reddit and google and Microsoft and whomever else?
Yeah, probably not. When you sign up and agreed to their ToS, they don't "own" your content, but you grant them a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use it without compensation.
From their ToS:
Any ideas, suggestions, and feedback about Reddit or our Services that you provide to us are entirely voluntary, and you agree that Reddit may use such ideas, suggestions, and feedback without compensation or obligation to you
Source: A pretty good post on r/HFY, though it is on Reddit, so don't click it if you don't want to :P
But how many TOS have been shot down because they over reach? I don’t know. You’re probably right. It it’s still fun to imagine.
Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.
I’d say Reddit would win.
Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.
Their ToS could say they own you and your children and grandchildren, but that doesn't make it enforceable.
If I post a frame from the movie Akira on Reddit would any reasonable person suggest that they own not only that frame, but also the entire movie that it came from as a derivative work? There is a glut of second-hand data just like that all over Reddit, Twitter, and every other social media network, and I'm willing to bet that's also part of what's being sold.
But hey... I'm not saying you're wrong, just that the idea that they automatically "own" the things that people post on their website is ridiculous. It's a bit like UPS or FedEx saying they own the contents of your package while delivering it.
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The TOS shouldn't hold up in court. A contract must be an exchange of two things, eg money for a product or service. You can't say "Our service is free of charge!!!" And then in the fine print "(((But also you agree to give us everything we can take free of charge)))".
The issue is how everyone does it. Facebook and Google started when data had no value, now they're amongst the wealthiest businesses in the world. Now, Microsoft have joined in, *even though you already pay for their products and services anyway!"
However, the other aspect is that everyone is a victim. Lawmakers are the victim. They still haven't quite yet realised how much is being taken from them (at least $50 per year, probably more like $1,000 per year if not more for prominent figures) but they are still being abused.
It's like that form of bank fraud, where the criminal takes pennies from accounts, hoping the user won't notice and the bank will write it off. Do it to enough people and enough times and you can make millions. They do this to everyone and they make billions.
Either the data is public domain and they don't have to pay for it, but also cannot charge others for it, or the data is private and they must pay the author a fair share.
Our data, you mean?
Correct, our data.
- Spez
Our data
well, not mine. i used a script to replace all of my comments with gibberish before i deleted them and then my account. if they went back and restored my comments, then all they'll get is comments full of gibberish, especially since i overwrote them 3 times before deleting them, just in case they tried to roll back to the previous version.
have fun with that!
Yeah.....all that comment data isn't really that large. They'll have backups captured for likely several years back. All you can view is the info on the current live servers. You might have kept them from getting like 3 months worth of your comments at best.
I did the same, but we're both fools if we think reddit didn't keep every character we typed (yet alone submitted) in a private, proprietary database.
We weren't paid for our data. We were given access to a website free of charge. The consent we gave was supposed to be for the operation of the website, not for training AI.
They should fucking pay us.
I like your style, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if they keep every single version.
Reddit used to be open source and the source is still on github as a read only archive.
AFAIK back then edit history was only kept briefly. Enough to roll back an accidental edit (if you have admin privileges anyway) but not far enough back to view old versions of posts.
Of course, they would have backups, and maybe the code has changed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't changed and those backups are impractical (slow/expensive) to access.
Keeping old revisions is a common practice but it's also expensive and in reddit's case totally unnecessary.
Here’s the thing: Nothing in Reddit’s history indicates that they are that competent.
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i bet they do now, but i've checked back now and then, and all of my comments and posts are most assuredly gone.
edit: i've gone back to check some old haunts, place i know i've commented, and i did some seaching with google using my old usernames, as google uses its cache to match to the posts\comments, even though they're not there any more.
i see old posts that are graveyards of deleted comments, some with simply deleted accounts, and many others where both the account and comment are deleted. i don't see any gibberish comments. the ones i know are mine (because replies quote the comment above, which i recognize as mine), are all just deleted in their entirety, so it seems they didn't do comment versioning, at least not past the first edit. i see no posts under any former username of mine.
the efforts to scrub my content from reddit last May appears to have worked. sadly, since the API lockdown, those tools no longer work.
Just because it shows [deleted] doesn't mean the data were deleted. That is most likely just a flag for the comment.
They most likely keep every save since they decided to do the sell the data thing. Why would google pay them for what google could easily scrape other than having the full history?
As I mentioned, I overwrote the comments several times before deleting them. I seriously doubt that they saved multiple versions of the comments. I know that, towards the end of May, they made some backend changes to try to circumvent users attempt to delete their accounts, but I did all of this to my account a couple of weeks before that.
That literally means nothing at all on their server backup from the year before. You could delete and rewrite your comments a thousand times and it would do you the same amount as good as one time, and barely any better than doing it no times at all. Your entire 15 year comment history would take up probably 10MB of space at best. They'll have several back ups taken over the last decade. They aren't just going to be selling off the live servers info.
I imagine that they would. Text is trivially easy to store, and storing multiple versions would let them catch users who might edit away rule breaking they posted to avoid bans, but it's probably one of those internal tools.
From a data handling perspective, it'd be more efficient to handle edits by having a common id field, and an additional version/edit counter that increments --adding the edit like its a normal post-- , than it would be to edit data the usual way, since you don't have to go back over the whole database to find the comment, or worry about it falling out of sync if one copy of the database has the edit, and the other has the original.
You'd just need to fetch the comment by id, and the database entry with the highest version count to display it, which would be fairly easy to do.
if you request your data from them under CCPA, and it shows the edited comments as gibberish, you're good. I did the same thing but I left the comments to simmer for a long time like months.
No, I think the other commenter is right. They definitely store every version of every comment on their backend. Just because it's not displayed publicly doesn't mean they don't have the data.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Earlier this week, Bloomberg and Reuters reported that a “large unnamed AI company” — possibly Google — had entered into a licensing agreement worth about $60 million on an annualized basis.
“[Our] data APIs are able to provide real-time access to evolving and dynamic topics such as sports, movies, news, fashion, and the latest trends,” the prospectus continues.
“We believe that Reddit’s massive corpus of conversational data and knowledge will continue to play a role in training and improving large language models.
Content producers, from stock media libraries to news publishers, are increasingly turning to data licensing agreements with AI vendors as chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini threaten to sap traffic.
Vendors, in turn, have been spurred to pursue licensing agreements as they face a deluge of lawsuits alleging that they have no legal justification for training their models on data without permission or payment.
OpenAI, for one, has agreements in place with image gallery Shutterstock as well as publishers including Axel Springer, the owner of Politico and Business Insider.
The original article contains 564 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!