What this recent disruption has shown, if anything, is that they were destined to be cogs too. It’s easy to see why watching their content get turned into a commodity might cause what Intelligencer called an “ existential dilemma.” Online life has always been a hustle (it’s me, hi), but for those who didn’t necessarily want to be influencers, it’s also been a labor of love. Its mods are volunteers, its users just generally enjoy the things they’re there to read and post about. Reddit, for all of its flaws, is still one of the last true communities on the internet. If this truly is the end of Reddit as the world has known it, that would be tragic. No, TV and film writers don’t write for the internet, but so much of what they create ends up online anyway, ready to be plucked. Hollywood screenwriters are currently on strike to make sure AI systems aren’t enlisted to do their work for them. Fan fiction writers who shared their work freely to entertain fellow fans now find their niche sex tropes on AI-assisted writing tools. Artists who feel their work was scraped by AI without credit or compensation are seeking recourse. AI’s rise has caused a revaluation of what people put on the internet. If all of this is starting to sound like a labor movement, that’s because it is. “Like with Twitter, it's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course,” Mir said. Hoffman said in a leaked memo to employees that the dustup would “pass,” but as Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told my colleague Boone Ashworth, it’s the kind of thing that can wreck a platform. To protest Reddit’s decision, mods of nearly 9,000 subreddits switched the groups to private earlier this month, depleting the vibrancy of conversation on the site, and even impacting Google search results. After the company announced the change, popular Reddit apps like Apollo and Reddit Is Fun announced that they’d shutter rather than pay the fees, which Apollo developer Christian Selig estimated would cost some $20 million annually. But charging for the API doesn’t affect just companies like OpenAI, Google, and others that are using Reddit discussions to train artificial intelligence systems.
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