This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Olympics posting, Reddit wildness, and "hacktivism."
EMANUEL: I’ve been thinking a lot about Reddit this week because of a couple of stories I wrote about it blocking search engine crawlers and arguing with Microsoft in public about why. I’ve had two thoughts about Reddit during that time that I didn’t get into in-depth in either of those stories so I’ll do that now.
1: I alluded to it in the first story and Jason made the point more clearly on the podcast this week, but Reddit’s value to search engines, AI products, and society broadly comes almost entirely from user-generated content. Reddit has done some very good UI and product design more than 20 years ago—the fact that this design has barely changed since is a testament to that—and that shouldn’t be overlooked because that’s what every social media company tries to do. But the reason people visit search it is that individual human beings took the time to type out what their favorite maple syrup is, upload tentacle porn, give financial advice, argue about politics, etc.
You know this, I know this, but it’s a fact that is so obvious I sometimes lose track of it because the current controversy about Reddit stems from the fact that various companies are fighting about who gets to extract all the value from that user-generated content. After I published my article about the Microsoft/Reddit beef, a reader reached out to me to say that just calling it “data” does a huge disservice to people, which I think it’s totally fair. It’s not survey data or temperature readings from the bottom of the ocean or a poll of registered voters. It’s the work of millions of users who are trying to help people, troll them, make them laugh, make them cum, etc.