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.

    • foodandart@lemmy.zip
      4·
      5 days ago

      Weird - I use them all the time - and no one’s accused me of being anything other than an old fart, (“…Okay 'boomer…” - which I now wear as a badge of online longevity honor…) or at best, a nuisance best kept from polite society.

      • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        I see what you did there, lol.

        I’ve been accused multiple times of “being AI” on Lemmy alone, and it always amazes me. Usually, as far as I can tell, it’s just for being long winded and having complex sentence structure. Every time, I look back at the post they are accusing of having come out of an LLM, with all its grammatical imperfections and missed punctuation, lacking all of the polish and shine and smooth-to-the-point-of-fawning language LLMs produce, and think what are these people reading???

        But strangely they never accuse me of being an old fart or call me a boomer, which would actually be true.

        • foodandart@lemmy.zip
          2·
          4 days ago

          …and think what are these people reading???

          You said it in the post… “long-winded, complex sentence structure…” By and large the bulk of users here are two, maybe three decades younger than we are, and as such, they came of age and were educated in the post-Reagan era. You can really throw some of them for a loop and use colons and semi-colons in a few nice independent clauses.

          Not to digress too much, have you seen the videos on youtube by Elle Cordova? Her “Grammarian” videos are a riot.

          I do so love clever use of language…

          • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            4 days ago

            No, I hadn’t seen those before now, thanks for the recommendation. The one you linked was great; I’ll have to look at the rest of them. I haven’t seen a physically bound copy of the Chicago Manual of Style since the 80s, but even so the Errorist caused me to physically cringe a couple times, lol.

            Maybe I should get another copy. I write as I think and then try to clean it up afterward, which means that in reality I only have enough grammar to be able to look back and see what is still wrong after I’ve already posted something. I could use the polish!