I’m not the most intensive Reddit user, but I do post my fair share of content there. Or I used to, up until a few days ago.
For the most part, my participation was taking the form of comments and answers to other questions but Reddit’s recent decision to grant an exclusive deal to Google made me wonder what it meant to post on Reddit — what it meant in regard to the ownership of our content.
Recent discussions on Reddit are no longer showing up in non-Google search engine results. The absence is the result of updates to Reddit’s Content Policy that ban crawling its site without agreeing to Reddit’s rules, which bar using Reddit content for AI training without Reddit’s explicit consent. (source: arstechnica article)
Reddit in itself is a complex and sophisticated but empty shelf. It’s a collection of shelves, all empty if it was for what we chose to post on it. Us, Reddit’s users. The ones making Reddit that amazing source of information — and, yes, that frightening shithole it also is. We are making Reddit what it is. Our content is the real value of Reddit. That’s why people search on Reddit, for what we post.
That deal I mentioned as the idea to favor Google’s own AI learning process by granting it privileged access to our content don’t fit the way I see the Internet. The way I consider what I share online.
I share stuff for everyone to be able to read it. Including anyone I may disagree with and even people I may not like, even AI — I despise AI.
If I don’t mind Reddit trying to make money out of what I post there, I certainly do not want my content to favor one AI against the others and I also think we can all agree that Google needs no help to take hold of the Web more than it already has.
Also, I certainly don’t want Reddit to act like it owns what I posts. Reddit is not my publisher, if I’m fine with them trying to monetize what I post, I granted them no right to decide who will and will not be able to read it.
What will they do next? Put all our content behind paywalls? Oh, wait…
So, I decided I would not post on Reddit anymore. At least for as long as that deal would be active.
If for some reason you would miss discussing with me on Reddit, I’m active on a less… rapacious platform called [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/.
Lemmy is an open source project and is part of the fediverse, meaning you can freely join from Lemmy — from any of its many ‘instances’ (an instance being the place where you create your account, I’m a member of the French jlailu instance) — or from any other service that is part of the fediverse like mastodon (the alternative to Twiter/X). Once you joined from your instance, you can read content from any other Lemmy community and from any user, no matter the instance they joined themselves.
It’s free, it’s ads-free, there is no-tracking and there is no gamification of the participation either, aka no karma and other nonsense. Which is something I appreciate a lot since those tend to favor low effort content posting.
Lemmy is far from offering as many communities as there are Reddit’s subs and it is far from being as active as Reddit is but it is also a lot younger and, who knows, if enough people decide it’s worth starting sharing there too and not just on Reddit…
Whatever. It is up to every one of us to make their own mind and act accordingly. I’ve explained the reasoning behind my decision, and a suggested a place we can use that should never be able to play us that same poor trick Reddit just did.
Read you there?
Published: 2024/08/07