Ben Thompson has been writing about the Reddit strike in his daily updates. I like this excerpt from the one he wrote yesterday:

Reddit is miffed that Google and OpenAI are taking its data, but Huffman and team didn’t create that data: Reddit’s users did, under the watchful eyes of Reddit’s unpaid mod workforce. In other words, my strong suspicion is that what undergirds everything that is happening this week is widespread angst and irritation that everything that was supposed to be special about the web, particularly the bit where it gives everyone a voice, has turned out to be nothing more than grist to be fought over by millionaires and billionaires.

That, though, takes me back to Bier’s tweet; the crazy thing about the Internet is that said grist is in fact worth fighting over.

It’s easy for me to say this, as I’m not a user of Reddit, but I have full sympathy for the striking moderators.

You spend much of your free time volunteering to keep a community on a site, producing value for it’s users and owner, with the expectation that the site would recognise your efforts and reciprocate by serving your needs with, say, an API. I can understand how enraging that would feel when they turn around and “alter the deal” while expecting the mods to continue as if nothing has changed.

So good on the moderators showing that they too have leverage.

And as to OpenAI using the API to train its model: well yeah I can understand the CEO of Reddit feeling shitty about that, but I would’ve hope he would have the ingenuity to solve that while maintaining the needs of those that actually provide value to the site. Either he doesn’t which, given that he’s one of the founders, I find hard to believe; or he just doesn’t want to.

It’s time to be honest: I think overseas travel is wasted on me.

We were driving down from Antibes to Genova today. It was a nice trip, complete with picturesque towns passing us by as we drove along the motorway. My friend was oohing and ahhing at each one: remaking about how nice it would be to see them, stay in them for a while. He was also remarking on what we would do when we arrived at our destination. There was just this air of enthusiasm about the whole thing.

I didn’t feel that enthausiasm. We heard some news that another friend of ours had their luggage stolen, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I spent a fair bit of last night going through possible ways on how I could avoid it happening to me, and how I would handle it if it did, and just the whole hassle of dealing with that possibility.

This, mixed with the inevitable task of finding my barring in an unfamiliar place, stressing about how I would interact with the locals in their non-native language, the ongoing recovery from Covid-19, and a bit of home-sickness, and you can probably guess that I’m just not feeling the vibe of adventure at the moment.

And yeah, I might have done this to myself, particularly since I haven’t had much to do with this part of the trip.Happy to “go with the flow” of what others are doing. And people might ask me “oh, wouldn’t it be good to see this?” or “wouldn’t it be fun to experience that?” Yeah, maybe? I might get some enjoyment out of it, but I’m not sure if it’ll offset the stress I feel with the logistics of it all.

So that’s where I am at the moment. It’s got to the point where I’m contemplating coming home early. It would actually simplify my itinerary quite a bit, and I won’t be leaving my friends in the lurch: it would be a portion of the trip where I would be travelling by myself. Even with a week less, that’s still about 4 weeks in total, which I think it’s plenty, or at least plenty for me.

Update 30 June: Apart from taking a slightly earlier flight home, I ended up staying the the full 5 weeks. And in retrospect, I’m really glad I did. I figured that I would regret not visiting the places I’ve would’ve cut out if I were to go home early; and after visiting them, I know now that I would’ve missed out on some of the most memorable parts of the trip.

I think what sparked this post was a mixture of anxiety of travelling alone and little bit of home sickness. But nothing beats anxiety like working through the problem (if you can call travelling solo a “problem”). And as for home sickness: well, I’m not sure there’s much I can do about that apart from remembering that home will always be there.