Deleting or using an overwrite script, and the reasoning was because in addition to pushing out 3rd party apps, douchecanoe Huffman was opening up reddit's post history to LLM training, so that was us giving him the finger on the way out. While I agree it sucks for people looking at it from an internet archival perspective, at the time it seemed more imperative to jab the crap out of him and reddit as a business.
What's so bad about that? Even on Lemmy I'm posting things in public, intended to be read by the public, and if somebody wants to train AI on what I've given to the public then good for them. I refuse to use a walled garden. Being proprietorial about online posts is probably not the most effective response to online surveillance. I agree that Huffman is a douchecanoe though.
Fediverse stuff is essentially not commercialized by nature.
We should hold commercial actors to entirely different standards than non-commercial ones. There's no hypocrisy in doing so.
It wasn't that Reddit was going to do so. It is that they were going to do so in a fundamentally proprietary way -- they were treating the content as THEIR property to monetize and sell.
We should hold commercial actors to entirely different standards than non-commercial ones. There’s no hypocrisy in doing so.
This should also be noted: you're free to keep your content available on these for profit corporate websites, I'm by no means telling anyone what to do, but just know that they will ABSOLUTELY not extend the same courtesy to you. Reddit bans people and communities alike all the time for no apparent reason (or stupid ones like speaking out against their terrible business practices, many or even most of whom are quite technical users who created a lot of helpful resources on the platform), deleting their content without a second thought. Worse, we live in a world where corpororations will outright kill and make it impossible to access content that we've directly purchased because the platform is no longer profitable to them and expect us to be okay with it. Not to mention when social media platforms shut down, Vine for example, did they ever think about the amount of content that they are taking away from the public? If it wasn't for the GDPR and similar privacy laws they wouldn't even have been obligated to let the creators themselves download their own content.
You could argue that the attitudes toward the fediverse vs corporate web is a double standard, and I guess it is. But the double standard between the corporate web and its users is even worse.
I view it like open source where commercial and non-commercial are on an even playing-field, what matters is their contribution. The freedom afforded by a healthy open-source ecosystem should mitigate negative commercial interests, it doesn't always work out like that but that's the kind of thing I would hope for.
There are actually extremely valuable contributions to open source from commercial entities.
I think many people just did it because Reddit still benefits from the Google traffic. I wanted results from Reddit to be less useful and I want people to be frustrated when they go to find an answer on Reddit and see it no longer exists.
Oh boy time is flying. I can't believe I've been on Lemmy over 3 months, and have barely used reddit in that time (only for finding answers to my technology questions, like OP lol). I used reddit daily for mant years and quit cold turkey (except the occasional puff).