💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 2-23.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:21:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Reddit has a new AI training deal to sell user content
Maybe it wasn't best to collapse every individual forum into a section of a single website.
In the steady parade of depressing news, it's come to light that Reddit is planning to sell access to its user content for, what else, AI training. At least getting rid of my Reddit account will be easy: I used it heavily for a few years in the mid '10s, but it never had any kind of shine for me, any lustre. It was just where my community was, after people migrated away from the small collection of individual forums that served as a discussion place before.
A few days ago, driving across the province with my partner, we got talking about the differences how we use the internet. I'm more active, more of a creator; she's a lurker, never posting, never making an account unless absolutely forced to (the old online gf/extremely offline bf meme in reverse). And we got talking about Reddit, and how different I find it from the forums I used to post on. The example I gave her was a forum for the sci-fi show Andromeda. Back in university, one of my offline friends had invited me there. Sure, why not? I didn't watch Andromeda, have never even really been into sci-fi, but who cares?
I joined. I got to know people, and vice versa. We posted there for a couple of years. He fell for one of the posters, a girl from New Jersey. It didn't work out (she didn't want to come visit him; in retrospect, yeah, that'll kill it), as these things often don't, but at the same time, there was always that sense of a person behind each post. PHP boards in those days were pretty similar: the name in large type, to the left, or above, then the post. Often a small avatar. A short per-post signature.
Now look at any subreddit. Pick a thread. The names are still there, right? But they're smaller than the text of the post. That's by design; that's to draw your eye downward, to what's being posted, rather than who's posting it.
Also, though I can't prove it, I suspect that having everything in one site, having one's entire posting history be public and easily browsed, has an unintended, stifling effect. Sure, you could make a different username for each subreddit. But nobody does that. By contrast, you could, and often did, make a different username for every forum you posted on.
People are also lazy. People reuse usernames. It's me, I'm people! So I assume that exes from my past and randos from highschool have already checked out u/[redacted].
Probably confirming their suspicions about me. Anyway.
On our drive, we also talked about what comes next. Social media seems inevitable, enduring, but so did websites before that. Right now, things feel uncomfortable. Unloved. I'm not going to log off; I'm never going to log off; but I can't help feel that if I'm feeling disgusted with the state of things online, there's got to be a lot of other people feeling the same.
What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney? (Tumblr)
Sites have pivoted. They're no longer content with selling reams of metadata, they're just straight-up selling your actual data too. The mask's off. Everything you do online in common spaces is in service of capital. Didn't consent to this? They don't care.
Facebook's trash. Twitter's a dumpster fire. Reddit's broken. Tumblr's a piece of shit (or, the owner is). The online commons is collapsing. Does it break, or do we mend it?
What comes next? Honestly, I don't know.