• Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    … and thats why Wikipedia is non-profit.

    Seeing human (even shitpost) achievements get monetized (in the most sucky manner) one by one is sad af.

  • athos77@kbin.social
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    6 months ago

    In other news, spez’s compensation from reddit last year was $193 million, and it’s COO got a cool $93 million.

    C’mon, spez, tell us again how horrible it’s been that reddit’s never made a profit.

    • nyandere@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      Just saw this on yours truly. Fucking hilarious considering they had the balls to IPO with that sack of rocks weighing down the entire company.

    • gregorum@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      well, not mine. i used a script to replace all of my comments with gibberish before i deleted them and then my account. if they went back and restored my comments, then all they’ll get is comments full of gibberish, especially since i overwrote them 3 times before deleting them, just in case they tried to roll back to the previous version.

      have fun with that!

        • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Here’s the thing: Nothing in Reddit’s history indicates that they are that competent.

          • FoxBJK@midwest.social
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            6 months ago

            I put my account’s comment through a mass-delete app around the time of the big protest, and a couple weeks later I found every single one was restored.

            People can be incompetent for years and then suddenly start figuring things out.

        • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          you can request your reddit data, and they provide every comment along with edits as far as I remember, it was uncomfortable but i’d never posted anything regrettable at least

          imagine getting your hands on u/spez’s reddit data

        • gregorum@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          i bet they do now, but i’ve checked back now and then, and all of my comments and posts are most assuredly gone.

          edit: i’ve gone back to check some old haunts, place i know i’ve commented, and i did some seaching with google using my old usernames, as google uses its cache to match to the posts\comments, even though they’re not there any more.

          i see old posts that are graveyards of deleted comments, some with simply deleted accounts, and many others where both the account and comment are deleted. i don’t see any gibberish comments. the ones i know are mine (because replies quote the comment above, which i recognize as mine), are all just deleted in their entirety, so it seems they didn’t do comment versioning, at least not past the first edit. i see no posts under any former username of mine.

          the efforts to scrub my content from reddit last May appears to have worked. sadly, since the API lockdown, those tools no longer work.

          • snooggums@midwest.social
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            6 months ago

            Just because it shows [deleted] doesn’t mean the data were deleted. That is most likely just a flag for the comment.

            They most likely keep every save since they decided to do the sell the data thing. Why would google pay them for what google could easily scrape other than having the full history?

            • gregorum@lemm.ee
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              6 months ago

              As I mentioned, I overwrote the comments several times before deleting them. I seriously doubt that they saved multiple versions of the comments. I know that, towards the end of May, they made some backend changes to try to circumvent users attempt to delete their accounts, but I did all of this to my account a couple of weeks before that.

              • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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                6 months ago

                That literally means nothing at all on their server backup from the year before. You could delete and rewrite your comments a thousand times and it would do you the same amount as good as one time, and barely any better than doing it no times at all. Your entire 15 year comment history would take up probably 10MB of space at best. They’ll have several back ups taken over the last decade. They aren’t just going to be selling off the live servers info.

              • SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                No, I think the other commenter is right. They definitely store every version of every comment on their backend. Just because it’s not displayed publicly doesn’t mean they don’t have the data.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 months ago

        Yeah…all that comment data isn’t really that large. They’ll have backups captured for likely several years back. All you can view is the info on the current live servers. You might have kept them from getting like 3 months worth of your comments at best.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        I did the same, but we’re both fools if we think reddit didn’t keep every character we typed (yet alone submitted) in a private, proprietary database.

        We weren’t paid for our data. We were given access to a website free of charge. The consent we gave was supposed to be for the operation of the website, not for training AI.

        They should fucking pay us.

      • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        LOL. I did the same. And I confirmed many months later that the comments were not restored.

        Now I hear that Google wants to train their AI on reddit content. Haha. Good luck with that, Lorem Ipsum! 😁

        • DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz
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          6 months ago

          If you actually replaced with “Lorem ipsum” texts, it would probably be easy to filter the garbage from the dataset.

          Also, they probably have copies of the comments before the edits that are just not presented in the frontend.

      • z00s@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Me too. Feelin’ mighty fine about that decision now. Long Live Lemmy

    • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      Now AIs will fuck Spez for all eternity.

      Millennia from now Fuckspez! will be the standard greeting between all sentient species in the galactic federation. It will be even used in machine code as a handshake for establishing initial contact between two subspace relays.

  • BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    So Reddit charges users to create content (paid premium or by showing ads). And then it sells that content.

    Making money both going and coming.

  • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    This is helpful of them, once the EU court fines them, we can quickly calculate how much that will be.

  • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 months ago

    How? They’re under heavy scrutiny from the FTC over the $60M/month Google deal. Where did the extra $140M come from?

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      With google being the partner i bet the deal wont mention they cant use older backups of reddit that they most certainly have.

      • NegativeInf@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        This is why we need better data laws in the US. If I want everything I’ve ever said on your site to disappear both instantly and forever, I should have that option.

  • masquenox@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Reddit says it’s made $203M so far licensing its our data

    Fixed that for them.

    There’s your “tragedy of the commons” fallacy on a stick, folks - the proles where managing reddit so well that huffman had to break it in order to make it more vulnerable to the parasites.

  • Tak@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    So just enough to cover what it payed the CEO last year? ($192 million)

    • InfiniteStruggle@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Lmao the ratfuck CEO is making his money alright. What a little weaseling coward. He spend so long jealous of his co-founders who got paid and left early, that he probably sees this as his gold parachute.

  • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I wonder if there is any legal standing for users to sue Reddit for a fair share of those profits. That’d be nice if it could happen. But i suspect, probably not.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      There is legal standing, IMO. You can’t take something without consideration, and access to the website was granted free of charge while the data collection was squirrelled away in the fine print. That isn’t a lawful contract, the fine print is for technicalities about the main transaction of X in exchange for Y. You can’t say "we’ll give you X for free!!!” then sneak into the fine print “(((you also give us Y for free)))”. The structure is clearly deceptive in a manner that is designed to prevent a fair assessment of the value being exchanged.

      Insurers have to provide a “key facts page” where they summarise in plain English what you’re paying for. The fine print gives the detail, but the front page is still “we give you X in exchange for Y”.

      You can’t build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts. Tech companies have placed themselves amongst the wealthiest businesses in the world without paying for the nuts and bolts we provide.

      Hell, even Microsoft is in on it now, even though you pay for Windows and Office 365!

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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      6 months ago

      Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.

      I’d say Reddit would win.

      • donuts@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.

        Their ToS could say they own you and your children and grandchildren, but that doesn’t make it enforceable.

        If I post a frame from the movie Akira on Reddit would any reasonable person suggest that they own not only that frame, but also the entire movie that it came from as a derivative work? There is a glut of second-hand data just like that all over Reddit, Twitter, and every other social media network, and I’m willing to bet that’s also part of what’s being sold.

        But hey… I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that the idea that they automatically “own” the things that people post on their website is ridiculous. It’s a bit like UPS or FedEx saying they own the contents of your package while delivering it.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        The TOS shouldn’t hold up in court. A contract must be an exchange of two things, eg money for a product or service. You can’t say “Our service is free of charge!!!” And then in the fine print “(((But also you agree to give us everything we can take free of charge)))”.

        The issue is how everyone does it. Facebook and Google started when data had no value, now they’re amongst the wealthiest businesses in the world. Now, Microsoft have joined in, *even though you already pay for their products and services anyway!"

        However, the other aspect is that everyone is a victim. Lawmakers are the victim. They still haven’t quite yet realised how much is being taken from them (at least $50 per year, probably more like $1,000 per year if not more for prominent figures) but they are still being abused.

        It’s like that form of bank fraud, where the criminal takes pennies from accounts, hoping the user won’t notice and the bank will write it off. Do it to enough people and enough times and you can make millions. They do this to everyone and they make billions.

        Either the data is public domain and they don’t have to pay for it, but also cannot charge others for it, or the data is private and they must pay the author a fair share.

          • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            No, it isn’t. The website is offered free of charge, regardless of whether you provide them data or content. The exchange for data/content is a second transaction tucked away in the terms and conditions, and the website offers nothing in return for that.

            The reason the 2nd exchange is hidden in the terms and conditions is to intentionally hide what the user is giving away, such that the user cannot make a fair value assessment. It is fraudulent and deceptive.

  • Pixelemme@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    I wonder if they will ever consider paying the users for the content they provide that constitutes “its” data. 🤔