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.
The reason I still use Reddit is that, as a polyglot, there is barely any content in most languages I speak in the Fediverse. It’s already difficult enough to find content in Galician or Catalan/Valencian on mainstream social media such as Reddit or Instagram. I did delete my Reddit account, stopped using the site for weeks but… I found no alternative? The closest was Mastodon, but I never really liked Twitter’s format which is basically what Mastodon is, so it is not for me. And, of course, there is absolutely NOTHING here on Lemmy in those languages. So, between feeding them with free data or not being able to use my languages at all (because I live in a place where none of them are spoken) I had to choose the lesser evil.
Have you tried starting a community here? Even a catch all for many languages combined?
Do you know Language Jones at all? He has some good ideas on this very thing. Eg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQXiSGDXknA
Yes, the irony of using an LLM to learn a language is not lost on me, but the combination he suggests (including italki) and the other tools he recommends make it seem like a great use case.
You say “lesser evil”, so is not using a language evil?
Not OP, but depending on how many languages they’ve learned, I’d guess it’s about practice. You need constant exposure or the language fades, and losing a language you’ve invested years into genuinely is a kind of loss. So yeah, ‘lesser evil’ tracks.
I don’t understand how losing an investment into something is “evil”… Unfortunate maybe, yes, but evil?
I apologize. I assumed English as your primary language and understood the phrase is an idiom. The idiom “lesser of two evils” implies that neither option is good, but one is clearly better than the other. It doesn’t have to be “evil” literally.
I see, makes sense!
It will make it dead
So a language being dead is evil?
When a language dies, a piece of hunan culture dies with it. Letting a language die is allowing erosion of human culture. Forcing or encouraging a language to die (so everyone can use the best language that I understand) is colonialism.
Apart from the “evil” thing, which is why I’m making this separate comment: why is it a bad thing if a language is not spoken anymore? As far as I understand, speaking languages is about understanding one another, and in that case, wouldn’t it be much better if we only had one language? That way, everyone could understand each other. I don’t care about the “colonialism” thing, for all I care that one language could be Esperanto. If no one speaks a language anymore, then it’s not useful for communication anymore.
There’s an argument to have about conservation of culture, which is a thing in itself. (Why do people want to preserve antiquities?) There must have been some awesome poems in Sanskrit that we’ll never know.
Mostly apeaking, for me the simple fact of wanting other languages to die is a huge red flag of attempt at cultural erasure, like when the english tried to eradicate Scottish culture. Language erasure is a tool to marginalise those speaking it, and history shows that it never really end well…
Yep. Besides, in the case of Galician and Catalan (especially the former) they are endangered languages; there is nowhere where onmy Galician is the official languages, and bad policies are pushing it to the brink of extinction. Most Galician you hear today is heavily influenced by Spanish, so having spaces where the language is protected, in this context, online spaces, is critical to its salvation.
But I still don’t understand how that is evil, yes it’s maybe unfortunate, but how are you choosing between two evils? You’re choosing between something evil and idk, something unfortunate.