I started this piece as a snarky linked piece (under the headline Reddit to Anthropic: Don’t Steal the Valuable Content Our Users Created for Free) to Hayden Field’s piece in The Verge. I’d planned to quote the following…

Reddit sued Anthropic on Wednesday in San Francisco superior court, claiming that the OpenAI rival had accessed its platform more than 100,000 times since July 2024, after Anthropic allegedly said it had blocked its bots from doing so. […]

Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, said in an emailed statement to The Verge that Anthropic’s “commercial exploitation” of Reddit content could be worth billions of dollars.

… drop a zinger—This is rich, considering Reddit exists only because of the work of its millions of (mostly) uncompensated content creators—then move on.

But then I started thinking about it more. And that’s never good.

Reddit accumulated “nearly 20 years of rich, human discussion” for free—and now thinks it deserves to get paid for that content. Monetization for me, not for thee.

Should Anthropic get access to that content for free? No, of course not. Reddit controls the rights to all user-generated content on its site. If Anthropic wants access to that data, it needs to enter into a deal and stop being (allegedly) shitty internet citizens.

What’s frustrating is that Reddit—which, again, is valuable only because of freely created content it monetizes—acts like it’s never engaged in shitty behavior.

He who sins in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones.

Or something.

I support Reddit’s goal of preventing Anthropic and others from exploiting the Reddit community’s content. I just urge the company to remember that it exists because of the generosity of its community—and the community should reap the rewards, not the company.

Redditors should be able to decide how they want their content to be used beyond reddit.com: search engines, AI training, marketing purposes, etc. That may be technically challenging, and it may result in a lot of Redditors opting out, but the rule should be: you write it, you control it.

Any revenue from monetization efforts should go to the Redditors—it’s their content that makes the site crawl-worthy. Reddit can handle payments and keep a small cut to manage the platform—basically, something akin to the app stores. (Maybe they share the revenue on a more generous split—say 95–5 or 90–10 instead of the app stores’ usual 70–30.)

Reddit is in a position to resolve the three-way tension of content creators on one side, AI and other content consumers on the other, and Reddit jostling between them. If Reddit can solve this for itself, it could become a model for other aggregators and intermediaries. It may even launch a whole new business: managing rights for content creators across the internet. I’d happily give Reddit a 5% cut of any revenue I derived from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google crawling this site.

Whadda ya say, Reddit? How about you stop suing Anthropic for getting rich off other people’s content, and start giving your community control of its content. There’s money in it!