[blindriver]

This is exactly my point for many years now. Reddit exists because of the free work of the various subreddit communities and their moderators. And in return they get nothing. But the company, the investors and employees will all become rich off of it. It’s weird how no one cares that Reddit isn’t trickling down anything to the people that make the site a success.

[chollida1]

Every year, I pay to play hockey. I pay for new equipment, jerseys, referees and ice time.

And the arena gets paid by selling food to people who come to my games, sell advertising on the boards, beer to fans.

What do I get and why is none of this money trickling down to me?

Clearly I get the enjoyment of being Canadian and playing hockey.

Reditors are no different. None of them were tricked, they participate on the site by writing comments or submitting articles because the get enjoyment out of it.

I don't expect to see a dime from the arena when I play hockey and they make money from it and no redditor expects to see a dime when they participate on the site and the site makes money form it.

If you think its weird that a for profit company is making money and no one is complaining, its because everyone went into the deal knowing exactly what's what. No one was tricked or deceived.

[mandmandam]

> None of them were tricked

They were tricked from day one, when the founders pretended to be different people to make the site look busier than it really was.

They are tricked every day by bots, troll farms, spammers, astroturfers, bought-out moderators, corrupt admins, etc.

Go look at the founders page, where Aaron Swartz used to be.

Look into who maxwellhill probably was (first Redditor to a million karma and mod of some huge and deranged subs like worldnews).

Look into how certain keywords get shadowbanned.

Look into the mod and admin cabals with their private agendas.

Look into the way many national subs were taken over in quiet coups.

There are nice things about Reddit, even today, but the idea that users know what they're getting into is deeply naive.

[chollida1]

I mean, those are all things that happened on reddit but that has nothing to do with what I said.

I was very specifically talking about users not being tricked into thinking they were going to be paid for posting content on reddit.

Your comment, as far as I can tell, has nothing at all to do with that.

Did you mean to reply to a different comment?

[FireBeyond]

Agreeing to write content for free to participate in a community is one thing.

How many Reddit users knew they were agreeing in the future for Reddit to sell the content they wrote to make money for Reddit, not them?

> no redditor expects to see a dime when they participate on the site and the site makes money form it.

Plenty of Redditors would disagree with you, and I'm not sure why you're acting like this is obvious. If I hadn't already deleted all my content and left because of the last debacle, I would be doing so for this.

[yanderekko]

>How many Reddit users knew they were agreeing in the future for Reddit to sell the content they wrote to make money for Reddit, not them?

Despite my low opinion of Redditors, I believe that on some level they are aware of the principle that if the product is free, then you are the product.

If you presented the regular users with the choice between "pay a subscription fee and opt out or let us use your data in these ways", the vast majority will end up choosing the latter and we all know it.

[chollida1]

>> no redditor expects to see a dime when they participate on the site and the site makes money form it.

> Plenty of Redditors would disagree with you, and I'm not sure why you're acting like this is obvious. If I hadn't already deleted all my content and left because of the last debacle, I would be doing so for this.

Really?

Ok, let's say reddit only sold adds for revenue.

What percentage of redditors do you think would feel justified to a percentage of reddit's ad revenue? Because the only reason the ads have value is because of the redditors themselves?

[FireBeyond]

The only similarity there is revenue.

Ads are for consumption by Reddit users, and is an expected, if not liked, mechanism. That you can pay to opt out of.

People wrote content that they expected to be content on Reddit. Not to be later able to pick up a book (after buying it) and read their own words, that Reddit sold and made additional money off of (because they're still doing the ads, of course).

[chollida1]

Appreciate the response, its clear you've given it a bit of though.

I guess we simply disagree. Given that there is no right or wrong and only opinions, then I guess we're at the end of the line.

[rglullis]

> If you think its weird that a for profit company is making money and no one is complaining, its because everyone went into the deal knowing exactly what's what. No one was tricked or deceived.

The deal never included that they would appropriating the community content and selling it as their own, but that could try to make money from user-generated content, and in turn they would keep it as open as possible: an easy to use API, third-party clients, RSS feeds for every subreddit and even posts and comments, etc.

They changed the deal. People are right to be upset with the new terms.

[stainablesteel]

the social ostracization is particularly strong on reddit, any revenue sharing would immediately come into a conflict with the intelligence agencies that run their psyops there

and its even worse because its basically the best formatted social media with the worst demographics now, aka most potential and worst execution, so its a dataset of decreasing size compared to other social media now

when it comes to training its hypothetically a particularly great dataset because you can choose to include or exclude text topics as input based on subreddit or thread, its so well organized

[nutate]

And to celebrate the free for free internet of the past, google is finally finishing its acquisition of dejanews by shutting down their usenet indexing. https://support.google.com/groups/answer/11036538?visit_id=6...

[awb]

Mods/users get access to a massive user base and a world-class platform at no acquisition or operational cost to them.

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

I don't see how that is weird at all. Were you paid by ycombinator for your message? People often do things they enjoy doing without receiving a payment for it.

[collingreen]

I think this analogy is flawed - the hn equivalent of posting is the same as Reddit and then it changes and gets weird if hn starts selling your writing.

I'm not sure why folks are trying to say that going to Reddit and doing activity where the price of admission is ads is the same as doing activity where the price of admission is they own your writing and sell it. You may be fine with it but they seem clearly distinct to me -- enough to be worth talking about instead of dismissing.

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

What is stopping Hackernews from selling the content people post here?

[s1k3s]

You're saying it as if someone from Reddit came into your house and forced you to become a moderator or user who submits content. Is that true? Of course not, people are willingly creating communities and willingly submit content to the site.

Reddit exists because millions of people like it. Reddit also exists because hundreds of developers created it while other people are paying for its infrastructure.