I just found out reddit sold everything we wrote to AI companies… and honestly I don’t know how to feel
I just found out reddit sold everything we wrote to AI companies… and honestly I don’t know how to feel
So I was reading about Reddit’s API controversy from 2023 and fell down a rabbit hole.
Turns out every post, every comment, every opinion you’ve shared here - reddit licensed it to openai and google. No opt-out. No warning. Just. - done.
And that’s just reddit. Meanwhile Google, Meta, and basically every major platform are quietly building a profile on you — your interests, your political leanings, your daily routine, your insecurities. All from things you said or clicked on “anonymously.”
The wild part? We already knew this was happening. It’s not new. Yet here we all are, still posting.
So I’m genuinely curious — why do you still use reddit (or big tech in general) knowing this?
Is it because:
- The alternatives (Lemmy- kbin- etc…) just aren’t there yet?
- You’ve accepted it as the price of the internet
- You actually don’t think it’s that big a deal?
- Or you simply never thought about it until now?
Not judging anyone — I’m still here too. Just want to hear honest answers.
Well, until you hit flood limits and reddit keeps giving you ‘prove you’re not a robot’ screens or just timegates you from loading new pages at all.
Plus, it would be a lot more convenient to have API access to automatically provide your AI with only the text of posts and not have to scrape/strip entire pages.
You could scrape reddit without paying for it, but it would probably be a much slower and more annoying process.
You can use proxies to bypass rate limits of access, so it wouldn’t be slower just expensive. But the only ones doing it are bigger companies anyway, they’ve money to do it.
Yeah… Compared to the expense of buying literally all the computer hardware in the world, paying reddit for API access is nothing.
Not a problem for fediverse though.