Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit

2026-07-28 03:40 UTC

When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you’re giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that’s the only reason why they have value at all.) So what’s the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these: when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don’t allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for “security reasons”, meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more. I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it’s our data. That’s exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to “communicate with other people”: your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.

Replies (6)

@db2@lemmy.world 2026-07-28 04:02

Half of what I post anywhere is horseshit, but you won’t know which half or even whether this reply is included in it. Good luck.

Open ##4370795
@eicker@lemmy.world 2026-07-28 04:16

The irony is that this argument will probably get more attention on Reddit than on any open forum: Centralised platforms are great for discovery and awful for preservation. Use them as the billboard, not the library. Keep the valuable stuff where you control the rules, the backups and the future.

Open ##4372132
@FaceDeer@fedia.io 2026-07-28 04:29

You can download archives of Reddit comment and submissions from Academic Torrents. I'm not aware of any similar public archives of Fediverse content.

Open ##4373640
@Mikina@programming.dev 2026-07-28 04:35

I’ve been slowly replacing, by hand so it doesn’t trigger their detection alerts, all of my 15 years of comments on Reddit, a lot of it valuable answers to tech questions or programming problems, with a randomly prompted unrelated paragraph of ChatGPT whatever. When one of the first exodi(?) came, a lot people replaced their comments with random words through scripts, back then it was not as detected and prevented (which Reddit promptly scrambled to prevent), and thanks to people doing that I’ve eventually blocked Reddit from my Kagi altogether, simply because 90% of what I found was either questions with scrambled answers, comments that are just ads from bots, or just unrelated bullshit. So, it does have an actual impact. Have fun selling that to AI companies.

Open ##4374417
@Chozo@fedia.io 2026-07-28 05:16

The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I'm not joking. Look at these: Those aren't paywalls. meanwhile i'm using VPNs in browser's incognito mode to not be tracked That's not what a VPN or incognito modes do. Reddit sucks for a number of reasons, but your internet literacy also kinda sucks.

Open ##4379810
@betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 2026-07-28 06:09

Way ahead of you, brother.

Open ##4384154