In what appears to be an escalating incursion into a user’s digital privacy, a collective of film companies continue to implore the court to compel Reddit to surrender its users’ personal details. This move is part of an ongoing piracy liability case against Internet Service Providers. Reddit, however, steadfastly resists, staunchly defending its users’ rights to anonymous speech.
Reddit understands it’s value is in content to sell. If reddit starts ratting out it’s free content creators, they lose value. Their actions are a profit calculation, not some noble stand to protect privacy.
You’d think they’d have considered that these past few months in relation to, …other user concerns.
You are the product, not the paying customer. That means you are cattle.
The farmer will build a fence to protect the cattle from predators, because it is in the interest of the farmer to preserve the cattle. But come payday, the farmer will gladly butcher the cattle for profit.
Social media users in the you-are-the-product buisness model are no different. Your user experience will be catered to you to cultivate the user base. But your experience will be actively ruined the instant it benefits the paying customer, I.e. if that means the paying customer, advertisers, will get what they want (promotion).
The difference is people generally don’t care about a change if it doesn’t inconvenience them beyond their tolerance threshold. Losing access to 3rd party apps? Bad to some, but probably the profit of the move will exceed the cost. (their hope) But get a rep for ratting out your posters to authorities and it suddenly becomes very personal for more people.
Based on zero data and just my impression, it seems like only a minority of us were actually willing to leave over it. They might make more money money from addicts using the ad app or buying gold than they lose from reduced content creation.
They said the quiet part out loud during the API fiasco. They are planning on selling the data to AI companies, it’s why old.reddit has to die.
Calling it all now (although in fairness it’s basically already public information, even if everyone doesn’t seem to believe it).