So after my little kerfuffle with Reddit, my account was reinstated and there was a (somewhat rowdy) discussion on the topic on Reddit. During that discussion, I learnt that:
- The actual rules you have to agree to when posting on Reddit are, to say the least, a bit murky. The User Agreement says that Reddiquette actually are rules; the community thinks not. Since the User Agreement contradicts Reddiquette (and prohibits the majority of the published comments, a large portion of the subreddits and a hard-to-estimate fraction of all the posts on the site), but also says that Reddiquette are rules with the same legal weight as the User Agreement, it’s a confused situation.
- The community are of the opinion that submitting your own content is spamming; but submitting the content of others is good behaviour. I am not of that opinion. I am opposed to that viewpoint, in fact, for two reasons:
- If the submitter is financially benefitting from the submission, then to my mind it’s spam. That’s not the case with this blog. There are no advertisements, and no products or services for sale here. Never have been. I have no plans to introduce them. I cannot agree that original, real content, submitted without financial gain being sought or realised, is spam. It’s a daft position for Reddit to support.
- If I write something here, the sole reward I get is knowing others thought something I wrote was worth reading. As such, I want to be the one who gets to post the link to it on sites like Reddit. I don’t want someone else to draft the headlines to my work. The idea that Reddit believes they have a de facto right to do so is abhorrent to me. And the idea that my submission of my work is frowned on, but others submitting my work sees them rewarded, that is deeply abhorrent.
I’m not saying “Reddit Sucks” or anything so silly. Reddit own their own site, they can do as they wish and they do very well for themselves and they seem quite happy. That’s cool. But my work is mine and I don’t agree with how they use it for the above reasons.
So I’m withdrawing my work from Reddit. If you navigate from there to here, you are redirected to this page. Redditors are still very welcome here. They can use the sidebar links to look through anything and everything I’ve posted, or come to the site directly; and I hope they find it of interest or worth a laugh, or that they find something in it they needed. But I’m no longer allowing links from Reddit to here, at least not until the above two notes no longer hold true.
