They’re “complaining” about unique qualities of their art being used, without consent, to create new things which ultimately de-value their original art.
It’s a debate to be had, I’m not clearly in favour of either argument here, but it’s quite obvious what they’re upset with.
Obviously, this isn’t ideal. But this isn’t as damning as some of the other commenters believe.
The way reddit operates, is that they are “trusted” with all our data. They can (and do), sell any data they like, to whomever they like. They store much more information than simply who upvoted what. They can’t simply allow upvotes with no claimant, they’d have no way of stopping or identifying bots or illegitimate upvotes.
This system is not ideal, but it’s also not necessarily worse. We’re still operating under that system, the only real difference is, we get to choose who that trusted party is. We get to move instances if the hosters interests become misaligned with our own.
Ultimately, there needs to be a smart solution to this problem to ensure it’s not abused. We can’t completely remove collection of the data, otherwise upvotes will be meaningless and hijacked by agendas. We can’t simply encrypt the data, if there’s a genuine use for it (which we’ve discussed), who SHOULD be allowed to decrypt it?
I completely understand the concern, and I share it. But this isn’t an issue so much with Lemmy, it’s an issue with upvotes on distributed social media.
Edit: Okay, ANY instance admin is where the issue lies. That much I agree with.
Oh and .clone()