Comment by nashashmi
2 years ago
This is lame. The poster made a good point. If it’s not your platform, then you don’t own it.
so if I started a new sub Reddit that was part of a particular company initiative and connected people with it, I would not own that sub Reddit because it is not my platform.
this is a problem.
Yeah, the fundamental problem here is social medias ought to be a protocol, not a platform.
Something where ownership of the content and the virtual space is democratized or at least actually owned by someone in particular while still maintaining the capability to CDN the content.
This way you can still curate and you can still scale, but you also aren't held to the whims of whatever person or parent corporation owns the whole space behind the scenes.
Reddit is the only platform that makes sense as a protocol.
The problem is not the protocol. But the user network. And the server network. And the ad network. They need to be made into protocols too.
Imagine git. Now imagine github. Now imagine gitlab. Github owns the entire social networking on its platform. It is not distributed at all. So does gitlab.
Git isn't a particularly great example because it wasn't distributed to begin with, it was standalone.
Github et. al added the connectivity and social aspects layered on top of what is fundamentally a version control tool.
Torrenting or cryptocurrencies are better examples, where fundamentally they are social in nature and in the case of torrenting it's ridiculously easy to jump from provider to provider.
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You are correct. Any content created on someone else's site isn't yours - Youtube, Facebook, HN, etc. Even Gmail. We are making a tradeoff for reach, access, performance, etc.
Is that true? I don't know about the other services, but YouTube has this to say in their terms of service:
> You retain ownership rights in your Content.
https://www.youtube.com/t/terms
This is completely, utterly incorrect. From Reddit's own terms:
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: ...
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement/
This just isn't true. The content is legally yours, Reddit only has a license to it so they can display it on their site. Just like a record label though, Reddit has economies of scale and can do more with your content than you can, creating a power imbalance.
> this is a problem.
How so? Reddit pays for the infrastructure and software, why would anyone expect they own their own subreddit? Are people really expecting Reddit to operate at a loss? If you want to own it, pay for it.
The kind of unpleasant moderation jobs they expect people to do requires those people to feel some kind of ownership over the space they are creating.
If they want the job done a particular way, they need to pay for it.
To be fair, isn't that a two-way street? The argument of course is that mods are paying by creating content that Reddit can profit from, but the flip side is that those mods are similarly extracting value. (Many subreddits have an income incentive for the mods and/or users, such as the crypto ones or the NSFW ones that point to sites like Only Fans, etc)
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They own the ad network running on those communities. They own the traffic. But why in the world are they interested in owning the community itself?