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
I am trying out the Kagi search tool for that very reason, and their Orion browser. Have not yet signed up to pay them $5/month but am leaning towards it.
But when I mentioned it here I had someone immediately saying they couldn’t see spending $60/year on something they are used to getting for “free.”
I’ve been using Kagi for the past two months. Honestly, I’m pretty happy with it and I can’t think of any major misses in terms of search accuracy. I think it’s very difficult to get out of the mindset that search should be free, but I’m trying to put my money where my mouth is as it were, to try to support adtech free services.
Honestly, I think it’s really good to do. I’ve been telling people the freemium internet isn’t sustainable, and if we want ads to be unnecessary and not have our data scraped, then we need to start paying websites for usage.