There is no moral high ground for Reddit as it seeks to capitalise on user data | John Naughton
www.theguardian.com
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

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

    • whitehatbofh@lemmy.world
      212·
      3 years ago

      There’s no more barrier to spinning up one’s own email server than there has ever been. One simply needs, at a minimum, a server in the internet, a DNS domain, and know how.

      A server on the internet has never been easier, thanks to cloud providers. In fact, many cloud providers will give you a working email server, so that you don’t need to do all the sysadmin things to get software like Bind or Postfix up and running. These hosting providers make it pretty simple run your own personal email server and domain.

      The big providers are successful because most folks don’t want to stand up their own email server, they just want to use email. But anyone can go it, if they have the time and interest.

        • mrspaz@lemmy.world
          16·
          3 years ago

          This is why I gave up trying to run my own email server. It became clear it was turning into a racket quite a while ago. I would hear from someone that they didn’t receive an email, so I’d check with their provider and sure enough I’d been blackholed.

          I’d go through all the steps to clear everything, re-send the message and it would go. Send a second message and my server was instantly blackholed again for “spamming” or “suspected open relay” or some other reason. All the “Big Guys” as you call them of course carved out exceptions for each other, but no matter how many security signatures or other measures I implemented it was basically an instant lockout.

          It got to the point where I was forced to sign on with a “Big” provider for routing.

        • TheInsane42@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 years ago

          The main reason for this is that most mailservers 1st check centralised blacklist providers, then and only then look at spf and dmarc record. When dmarc would be the 1st check and only on it’s absence blacklisting (or greylisting) would be applied it would be so much easier. (And I still have to figure out how to do that in postfix)

      • Sparking@lemm.ee
        1·
        3 years ago

        It’s not that simple with mail. Most centralized mail servers have strict requirements for domains that they will not sort into spam, and if you are sending a lot of mail from your personal server, you will probably end up on a spam list. I don’t do it, so I am not an expert, but hosting your own email server to do anything useful is pretty complicated.

        Still, I guess you could argue that this is as it should be, as it prevents people from making spam servers, while still theoretically not being impacted that much for personal use servers. But I don’t personally know anyone who seriously hosts their own email server anymore.