this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Why Reddit's decision to cut off researchers is bad for its business -- and humanity (web.archive.org)
submitted 10 months ago by spider@lemmy.nz to c/reddit@lemmy.ml
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Though Reddit's leadership claims to be 'leaning into its humanity,' it seems the company is more committed to leaving humanity in the dark.

Reddit promised that it would maintain a free-tier API, but researchers and moderators repeatedly stressed that the new access was too limited and would cut off many tools, projects, and archives that their work depended on. Finally, Reddit’s olive branch came in the form of an online application for moderators and researchers to request increased access to the API and (for moderators only) access to Reddit archives that the updates took offline.

The mistake seemed to have taught Huffman that ignoring the needs of communities that the platform had long relied on posed a greater risk than benefit to the profitability of the company in the long run. Yet six months later, many of us working in public interest research fields have heard nothing back from Reddit in response to our applications, and key archives of historical data remain inaccessible to researchers.

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[–] forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Social media tech bros sell "humanity" the same way cigarette companies sold glamorous lifestyles.

They both use celebrities to portray fashionable a lifestyle. They both know the net negative health effects and ignore it because it's directly tied to their bottom line. They're both are at odds with researchers. I'm sure if one were to dig deeper there would be a lot more parallels.

The Facebook whistleblower was huge news in mainstream media. Then they rebranded to Meta and successfully buried the story. The aggressively anti-humanity.

Smoking rots your body. Social media rots your mind.

[–] spider@lemmy.nz 4 points 9 months ago

Social media tech bros sell "humanity" the same way cigarette companies sold glamorous lifestyles.

It's every bit as vacuous as Google's former motto, "Don't be evil".