[yowzadave]

> We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to contribute just for reddit to reap the rewards.

This is the thought I kept having when Steve Huffman was going on about the "valuable corpus of data" that Reddit owns and won't give away for free via the API.

The content may "belong" to Reddit, but Reddit certainly didn't create it--they convinced the rest of us to create it by building a website. They seem to have forgotten this, and by violating the unspoken contract with the actual creators, they are at risk of losing them entirely. Social media platforms are useless without creators.

[jfengel]

That unspoken contract is interesting. As I understand it, from Reddit's point of view, the contract was "We give you a place to a thing that you want to do, and will provide you storage space and bandwidth. In return, you give us the content you produce."

I imagine that this was, in fact, spoken -- in the terms of service. Not that anybody reads the terms of service (and I'm doubtful that any of them are really legally airtight).

It sounds as if users expected more, though I'm not sure what. Even as an unspoken contract, "free access forever" is a lot to ask. Those users can ditch Reddit, but I don't know if they'll find a (spoken) deal that's any better.

(Though I'm not sure why. Servers and bandwidth cost money, but not that much money.)

[alarm_hz]

The facade of platform capitalism continues to deteriorate(?)

Unfortunately Reddit is probably right that this will simply blow over eventually. Most people are entirely captured by platforms nowadays, used to the slurry of the algorithm and without much ability or drive to really leave the lazy river to either find content outside of that or create content outside of that.