Technology

How much is reddit paying its users? Frankly, the users have a strong case to say that their value has been taken from them unfairly and without consideration.

Yes, Reddit has terms and conditions where they claim full rights to anything you post. However that's not an exchange of data for access to the website, the access to the website is completely free - the fine print is where they claim these rights. These are in fact two transactions, they provide access to the site free of charge, and they sneak in a second transaction where you provide data free of charge. Using this deceptive methodology they obscure the value being exchanged, and today it is very apparent that the user is giving up far more value.

I really think a class action needs to be made to sort all this out. It's obscene that companies (not just reddit, but Google, Facebook and everyone else) can steal value from people and use it to become amongst the wealthiest businesses in the world, without fairly compensating the users that provide all the value they claim for themselves.

The data brokerage industry is already a $400 bn industry - and that's just people buying and selling data. Yet, there are only 8 bn people in the world. If we assume that everyone is on the internet and their data has equal value (both of which are not true, US data is far more valuable) then that would mean that on average a person's data is worth at least $50 a year on the market. This figure also doesn't include companies like Facebook or Google, who keep proprietary data about people and sell advertising, and it doesn't include the value that reddit is selling here - it's just the trading of personal data.

We are all being robbed. It's like that classic case of bank fraud where the criminal takes pennies out of peoples' accounts, hoping they won't notice and the bank will think it's an error. Do it to enough people and enough times and you can make millions. They take data from everyone and they make billions.