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> Why would I, as someone who’s made tens of thousands of comments, care if someone scrapes and reuses my comments. I don’t want them to pay up

Why would I, as someone who's made tens of thousands of comments, be happy with a corporation scraping my content to create a service that they'll turn around and charge me for? I want them to pay up, so that Reddit, this wonderful service that has given me thousands of hours of entertainment and education, can be sustainable and grow.

> This is a really rich comment from a company that relies entirely on user submitted content and has never “paid up.”

Most redditors will agree that they get much more from Reddit than they give. I for one am very happy with the arrangement I have with Reddit.

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Because reddit is a terrible company and you don't want to subsidize their transition into a shitty ad service.

If companies pay reddit for "public" data the incentive to poision the platform with too much ads decreases, and there's always adblock.

Having more ads and monetizing the API aren't mutually exclusive. Look at the avatar/award system for example, which evolved in tandem with dark patterns that push the user to the app where they can serve unblockable ads.

There's a lot of people in this thread defending Reddit and they don't seem to have ever had the pleasure of dealing with an actual Reddit employee. They have a culture of unchecked cronyism. Reddit doesn't care about anyone, some people will eventually figure it out the hard way.

> they don't seem to have ever had the pleasure of dealing with an actual Reddit employee.

99.999% of redditors will never ever have to deal with a Reddit employee. Cronyism? What the hell has that got to do with my consumption of and participation on Reddit?

Most users don't interact with Reddit employees, but the moderators that maintain most of the communities you enjoy do. That's how I ended up interacting with them. Shortly after the IPO rumors, my community started being harassed by an admin through modmail.

That's an odd way to put it. The admins are basically god. God doesn't harass you, he tells you how to live. If an admin tells you to jump, you beg to know how high.

I've been a mod for a decade and never had a problem with admins.

I was new to it though, and an admin picked on me because I was parodying another subreddit (my home city subreddit). You've been modding for a decade, great. That basically backs up my original point that it's a party of tenure and closed-mindedness (cronyism). My situation was different, and it's pointless to argue, but if you trust any company (especially in a changing economic environment), keep your eyes open for poorly motivated incentives.

Regardless, the attitude that they're "god" is a weird way to put it. They randomly IP banned me for calling out an admin's publicity issue during an April fools event. That's cronyism. I've used Reddit for 12 years and engaged in conversations in good faith for years. Paid for subscriptions most of that time. All relationships, business or otherwise should be mutual in some form.

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