To be fair, much of the modern news cycle comes from Reddit. When I worked as a tech journalist years ago, we had half a dozen bots watching relevant subs and alerting us to breaking news. We'd clean it up, fact-check, call sources for comment, and do all the "journalistic" stuff you'd expect, just like with any other story, but Reddit was absolutely part of our workflow. You've got to look for news wherever the news is happening, be that a press release, a leak on twitter, or a convo on Reddit, and frequently it happened to be Reddit.
These days you even have tictokers cutting out the middleman and straight-up reading r/AmITheAsshole posts over Minecraft footage for views. Is it any surprise that news sites are commenting on their content firehose being turned off?
There is nothing special about Reddit except its community and the content the community created. Its software is trivial. Unless Reddit reverses course, Reddit will join Digg, MySpace, and LiveJournal in the dustbin of social network history, and a new site, such as the user-funded Beehaw, or an old one, such as Digg, will take its place.
I would actually revise that to "Its software is trivial, and in some respects notably lacking."
Why not post the whole sub-section:
5. Your Content
The Services may contain information, text, links, graphics, photos, videos, audio, streams, or other materials (“Content”), including Content created with or submitted to the Services by you or through your Account (“Your Content”). We take no responsibility for and we do not expressly or implicitly endorse, support, or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of Your Content.
By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.
You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
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.
Although we have no obligation to screen, edit, or monitor Your Content, we may, in our sole discretion, delete or remove Your Content at any time and for any reason, including for violating these Terms, violating our Content Policy, or if you otherwise create or are likely to create liability for us.
They really should be paying, all of these data companies should. No other business gets away with not paying for the materials they use to make their product. You can't build and sell a car without paying for the nuts and bolts.
Data companies like Facebook and Google keep telling us the data we give them has no value, yet they use that data they collect for free and sell for pure profit to become some of the wealthiest businesses in the world.
Facebook was "in a death spiral" when their stock hit 80 bucks, it's tripled since and just had their highest DAU. I don't think Reddit is going anywhere any time soon.
Let’s understand that Reddit has spent over a decade enjoying its status as a world-leading platform while kicking the ‘we’ll figure out how to monetize later’ can down the road. Along the way, some important social questions have arrived and Reddit is still failing to show leadership in this matter. Let me explain:
So that’s what Reddit is supposed to do as a ‘platform.’ What about Reddit as a ‘company?’ Sadly, boardroom shenanigans have pursued Reddit throughout its entire lifecycle. Reddit lost the public-spirited people like Aaron Swartz, and gained trolls, hate groups, and the soap opera that was the Ellen Pao debacle. As Will Durant said: ‘A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.’
Actions this year by Reddit have pushed it much farther down the path of ‘less user-oriented.’ Worse, public statements and private actions by the company leave nothing to doubt when it comes to their intentions. “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,” Steve Huffman the CEO of Reddit, wrote in a recent AMA.
Spez' decisions have ripped the guts out of Reddit's understood social identity and community intent. Those public statements and private actions by the company I mentioned earlier? They aren’t there to make Reddit a more human-centered place. Monetizing API use won’t increase Reddit’s stature as a ‘a safe space for all viewpoints.’ Like when managers decided to launch the Challenger space shuttle, “the concerns about the O-rings that ultimately led to the explosion were buried in a vast sea of thousands of other decisions … leading up to the ill-fated launch.”
Risks don’t rely on your perspective for existence. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” as Philip K. Dick famously said. This recent Reddit move to monetize APIs creates major cracks in its foundations of digital altruism and human-centered behavior. As I said last year with Twitter: “Twitter has every chance to prove to us that it can be a safe, responsible place for us to interact with our readers if they want to. In the meantime, it’s getting too weird around here. I’m mustering at the life boat station now, in case we must abandon ship.”
Creators have worked to create Reddit. Those creativities are actually important rather than the survival of Reddit as a platform. Another platforms would been created any time if they enjoy creating.
I second this. The subs I'm subscribed to are losing a lot of quality, and human interaction is degrading. Doesn't feel like a comfortable place anymore.
Agree--I'm seeing a lot of what I called 'quiet quitting' lately. The regulars are posting a lot less, or not at all. I'm not ready to burn-it-all-down, because I want to be able to lure people over later when this is a bit more mature. But it already feels different there.
Yup. I just popped over there and even r/politics feels "thinner"--not as many posts, nor as many comments replying to posts as I would have seen a month ago.
I nuked all my posts on r/vans yesterday because I got the random thought to Google image search "reddit vans [keyword/model]" and my images/posts were all over Google images. Half the time they were the 1st result, most of the time they'd be in 2rd and 3rd.
I was a big contributor on r/vans for years (different username) and there's no question that my posts must've generated a lot of traffic for reddit. Not anymore! I don't feel good about all my photos being on reddit any longer. No plans to go back there either.
I want to rebuild here, with blackjack, and hookers! It's still very new, but I made lemmy.world/c/vans. The r/vans community and mods are great, but there's just no going back to reddit for me. But I can now see the argument that one user doesn't make a difference is bullshit, when it's my posts all over search engines' top results. Fuck you reddit!
I hate articles like this, so let's go through it.
1: Fair, but it undermines how much you can tune Windows and MacOS, they are not nearly as set in stone as people think.
2: Completely true and based.
3: There is a Linux way of doing things, and there are many things that follow from that, like not being able to do advanced admin task without a command line, unlike on Windows. Lock-in also refers more to stuff like hardware lock in for MacOS not just the OS not having an option to change something.
4: Kinda fair, if you use the right distro with the right settings, but in my experience you still have to reboot semi-often.
5: I don't get this one, Wine is on MacOS and Windows has WSL(g), so I don't see how you are ahead on Linux at all.
6: This is kinda dumb kinda not dumb, Ignores the AppStore, WinStore, winget and other tools common on these OSs.
7: Ok, I'm good on this. People have some pretty sick Wallpaper engine and raindrop setups on Windows as well.
8: Nah, I don't know what you are talking about there mate. based on my last few install sessions for laptops there are plenty of stuff that is glitchy as all hell.
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