… 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.
Our data, you mean?
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!
I like your style, but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep every single version.
Here’s the thing: Nothing in Reddit’s history indicates that they are that competent.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Me too. Feelin’ mighty fine about that decision now. Long Live Lemmy
Correct, our data.
- Spez
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.
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.
This is helpful of them, once the EU court fines them, we can quickly calculate how much that will be.
I hope my fuck Spez comments are useful.
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.
Reddit says it’s made $203M so far licensing
itsour dataFixed 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.
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.
And it also asks reddit users to invest in reddit
loool
It’s data?! You mean our data
Probably doesn’t matter, but this is why I deleted my account instead of just locking it up.
With google being the partner i bet the deal wont mention they cant use older backups of reddit that they most certainly have.
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.
I’m sure you’re right about that. All parties involved are scumbags, after all.
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.
Their TOS says they own your content in any current or future formats or derivative works.
I’d say Reddit would win.
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.
It is true that Reddit does not hold a valid license to content that is
- Sufficiently long-form, unique etc. to be copyrightable, and
- posted by someone other than the copyright holder or someone with a sufficient license.
However, as far as I understand it, the extent to which Reddit—a content provider and social network—is legally required to remedy this is to comply with DMCA requests and review reported content. Perhaps there is a higher standard that I am not aware of?
And yet that exact kind of data is all over reddit in ways that are impractical to enforce by case by case DMCA. How many memes are there using footage from popular shows? How much fanart?
More importantly, is that stuff not included as part of the data that reddit “owns” when they sell their data to tech companies? Because whether a DMCA takedown has been requested on that kind of data or not, doesn’t change the fact that they don’t hold the copyright in the first place. How can they sell things that they don’t even own?
Something smells. The logic of this entire industry doesn’t add up.
The answer is that it’s more practical than any alternative.
Copyright holders can’t sue Reddit for selling access to copyrighted content (before Reddit receives a copyright claim) because there is no way Reddit could reasonably distinguish between original and copyrighted content. Reddit users violate copyright law and the ToS in submitting copyrighted content, and Reddit is only required to take action as they are made aware of the content’s copyright status.
It would be trivially easy to to circumvent Reddit’s ToS otherwise: I could create some original content, sell my copyright to a friend for $1, and immediately put Reddit in violation of copyright law by submitting the content to Reddit. My friend could go after Reddit, and Reddit could go after me, but my friend would likely get more out of Reddit than Reddit could successfully get out of me.
It’s the same reason publishers can’t sue Cloudflare for hosting a piracy website unless they refuse to take it down, nor can they sue Facebook for ad revenue earned from banners placed next to a copy+paste of a New York Times article. The content providers do not knowingly/intentionally violate copyright law, and they make reasonable attempts to prevent/rectify it. Without such limitations on legal standing, the internet becomes a way bigger mess than it already is.
I think you’re conflating two very different things here.
- Reddit _hosting/dissemination user-submitted copyrighted data.
- Reddit licensing/selling copyrighted data to other parties.
The DMCA covers hosting and dissemination. If a user submits copyrighted data to Reddit that they do not own and Reddit unknowingly (because, to be fair, they can’t know what is or isn’t owned or by who), then Reddit is not liable for copyright infringement as long as they comply with DMCA takedown requests from people who claim to own the original IP.
But again, none of that implies that Reddit themselves (or Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) can realistically claim ownership over all of the data that is on their website. The reason they are subject to DMCA at all is because there is a globally shared assumption that data that users submit may or may not be owned by some other party, and while the DMCA protects them from being held liable for simply hosting and disseminating that data, it does not magically make them the owner of all data that hasn’t had a DMCA claim made against it.
In other words, if I post a picture of Homer Simpson on Reddit (and there are many), it is ridiculous for anyone to suggest that they have any intellectual property rights over that picture, that character, any trademarks, etc., whether someone has made a formal DMCA take down request or not. And if they don’t own the picture, the character, the trademark, etc., when what exactly are they selling (licensing) and where did they get the right to sell it?
They might not be liable for just hosting/distributing it, but just like you can’t sell someone else’s car, you can’t license out someone else’s IP.
How? They’re under heavy scrutiny from the FTC over the $60M/month Google deal. Where did the extra $140M come from?
I wonder if they will ever consider paying the users for the content they provide that constitutes “its” data. 🤔
Pay? They are trying to “stonk” Reddit users by asking them to buy stock for the IPO which screams “We want your data and your money!”.
The users get a service that costs hundreds of millions to maintain for free.
And no one is forcing them to post valuable content without compensation.Well there’s apparently more than 400 million active users every month, so they could charge users a few cent per month and pay for the infrastructure entirely. But they choose to be massive privacy invading assholes.
A good reminder to go back and edit all your comments to [removed] if you didn’t do so when you first left.
So just enough to cover what it payed the CEO last year? ($192 million)
They need to pay the users with that money
Delusional comment
Or genius. New company idea. Sell data from the start and share revenue with contributors.
