this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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We badly need laws defining digital property rights, especially as it relates to accounts.
Regardless of whether you think it's "stupid" or not, some people do collect reddit avatars, and have paid lot of money in pursuit of doing so. I don't think that reddit should be able to just yank the rug out from under them unless they go out of business as a company.
Especially not when reddit has deliberately marketed these avatars to the kind of people who would start collecting them, then deliberately encouraged those people to contue spending money.
It's like a casino letting you gamble all night, then selling you you're not allowed to cash any of it out at the end of the night because the floor manager decided they don't like your tie. You didn't break any rules, but now you're out a bunch of money. And in the case of reddit, there's no recourse, unlike the casino. Because companies are allowed to create terms of service agreements which specifically prohibit you from suing them in real court or forming class action lawsuits they can financially exploit you however they want with no repercussions
I mean, fuck NFTs, but this is the kind of thing they were supposed to solve. The real issue is maybe it's not a problem we should be trying to solve.
These avatars forever live on reddit's servers. Much like an old video game which hosted servers for online games, ten years down the road, maintaining these servers for fewer and fewer people playing an old game that isn't providing any new income becomes a real difficult cost to justify.
It's why people, when it comes to gaming, prefer the option where the code to run servers is released in an open source fashion, so individuals can keep running servers for the game if they wish.
I'm not really sure how to keep running servers for avatars.... Avatars that really you could "save" by fucking taking a screenshot and saving it to your hard drive. The whole thing seems a little superfluous to complain about when digital artifacts are so easily copied.
People who pay for digital content that can be sunsetted someday are fucking rubes and that's all there is to it, frankly. I mean, seriously, an avatar is just a picture. Screenshot that shit and you can use it anywhere you want. I'm confused as to why people would pay for it to begin with.
I'm further confused as to why people argue we need stuff like NFT's to break how computers already work fundamentally, to try to make it so people "own" digital artifacts instead of using the fact that everything can be copied so easily as a reason to leave that kind of selfish bullshit behind us in favor of a real sharing economy. We don't need digital ownership, we need a digital commons.
Gentle reminder that property rights are part and parcel to why a huge part of the world is experiencing a housing crisis. Maybe acting like property ownership is the be-all, end-all of the world is the problem, not the solution.
Copy that floppy!
https://commission.europa.eu/business-economy-euro/doing-business-eu/contract-rules/digital-contracts/digital-contract-rules_en