CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company
That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service.
Ouch
It’s unclear to me to what extent this actually happens, but some people say reddit mods get offers to promote or allow certain posts for thousands a month. It would make sense on subs that have a seriously large audience.
I think what happens more is a “public outreach” company outright buys accounts that mod a lot of communities, then they offer “services”.
Like, they’d buy an account that low level mods a bunch of gaming subs, then the same company sells “consulting” to a developer to “improve the conversation”. Which would be subjective moderation that favors that developer.
If you’re a shady mod, you just don’t sell your main, and make lower alt mods then sell them.