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
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.