The title of this post is kind of clickbait-y, the author immediately puts an asterisk in the first sentence and notes that they think charging based on the cost of running the API is justified. The title should really be "APIs for content sites should cost a reasonable amount".
Good luck lobbying YouTube to make their API free. I'd love to have a version of the YouTube app that didn't cost me any money and also didn't have ads.
I use ReVanced and it does exactly what you ask for, including even more features like SponsorBlock. I can't imagine using the regular YouTube app anymore.
Funnily enough there is also Reddit ReVanced, but with enough effort Reddit or YouTube could stop them working, so their existence doesn't change the argument about free/open APIs.
What’s interesting is that when you charge for api access calls suddenly you have an incentive to make each api call as inefficient as possible. Everyone has always complained about how terrible reddit’s api is, now they have no incentive to improve it as each call is generating profit.
Isn't that effectively what they are doing? The HTML-based API is apparently going to remain free, but makes no guarantees about structure consistency. If you want an API with certain structure stability guarantees then you have to pay up.
The most accurate/charitable interpretation of the content, despite the abysmal title, would be:
If users provide content for free, then a platform must allow users to consume that content freely, as in "as they wish", not "for free".
The author supposes that this is a fundamental social contract between users and platforms that needs to exist for platforms to work well. The author does not cite any evidence or examples or really even provide any explanation as to why this must be the case, they simply state it as a fact. Personally I find that, while thought provoking, this thesis is not obvious and needs to be defended. And so I don't find much utility in this short essay other than to state the thesis itself.
> If users provide content for free, then a platform must allow users to consume that content freely, as in "as they wish", not "for free".
The platform is paying me with distribution and letting me take advantage of network effect. Anyone can setup a free blog and post all they want, and make everything available via RSS, but instead people choose to post on Reddit (and on HN!) because Reddit has built a platform that provides additional value vs posting on one's own blog.
Platforms need to make $ to stay alive, Reddit's problem is they took VC money for a product that, it turns out, doesn't generate VC returns.
Without the need to pay off VCs, Reddit could likely easily become profitable (as they reportedly were in 2019) and everyone involved could become comfortably-but-not-filthy-rich.
The user does not provide content or participate on the platform for free. They get a free account in exchange for doing so, along with allowing their own data to be datamined.
What's the distinction between the two? If the site is monetized via ads then providing the content ad-free (via an API or otherwise) automatically makes it "for free".
The implication here is that, "...or else users won't participate."
Which I agree, needs to be justified. You see this kind of talk a lot when power imbalances exist; the person with no power tries to speak on behalf of everyone involved who they think believes as they do, in order to try and stand against the existing power structure.
Sometimes it's highly effective (actually appointed or even de-facto leaders of movements/groups), other times it's kind of laughable and presumptuous.
Without justification, this is the latter. That said, I bet there probably is justification, if the author bothered to look for it or provide it!
I would suspect it's true that users will not make use of a site like Reddit nearly as much if the content isn't then made available for use "as they wish".
I like vehement arguments even when I disagree with them.
Based on this man's logic, if I were to run a web forum then I must provide an API or data dump to download the posts created by the users? How about a comment section on my blog? How about a community Discord server? Why not Facebook posts? Or Instagram stories?
I often get the feeling that in these circumstances people derive first principles from specific desired outcomes. Some people strongly desire that the content that has been aggregated on Reddit should be available to them. They then attempt to invent moral axioms that they believe will lead to that outcome. They also seem to reinvent history such that there was some "implicit" agreement between Reddit and the users of Reddit.
IMO, just because I wrote some shitposts on Reddit does not mean that I am entitled access to every single shitpost that has ever been written on Reddit.
Most of the time you dont just expose your internal api routes to the world. You need to write curated public facing routes that dont include certain schema or records. Takes time to write and maintain that different set of endpoints
These are already written and fully functional, and Reddit has essentially been a non-moving target in terms of features since ~2016, when they added first-party image hosting.
Reddit actually has added a couple of features since then (e.g. polls), but they just didn't update the API to deal with those, so the API still remained completely stable.
Not really. Your HTML is, quite literally, a degenerate form of an API. The simplest way to offer a content API is to offer an alternative endpoint that serves the same stuff as your normal one, except without all the bullshit (er, beautifully design, interactive frontend).
Any issue with Reddit offering a API only to not maintain it, or uphold any sort of SLA uptime, or not worry about releasing breaking changes every week?
Having a public facing API is not trivial or cost free.
If they were to offer an API that's just HTML of the website (old.reddit.com specifically, not the new one) but without the cruft that makes for 90% of the markup of a human-facing page, and which exists only to hang styles and scripts off... why wouldn't they maintain it? It's literally the same as what the browser gets, but without the bullshit.
> or uphold any sort of SLA uptime
Do they uphold any sort of SLA uptime for the webpage itself?
The simplest API would be just the meat of the website, so it couldn't possibly be less reliable than the site itself.
> not worry about releasing breaking changes every week?
Reddit is a stable site. Like most social media platforms, they don't release breaking changes often (they do screw with DOM element ids and CSS classes all the time, but that is to make life harder for ad blockers, which is another topic). Sure, some things may move around, be added or removed - but this is webshit we're talking about. You can't truly rely on any API to have a stable, or well-defined structure[0] - so people are already used to treating schemas as open-ended[1] and keeping up with their changes.
> Having a public facing API is not trivial or cost free.
Sure. But I'm trying to establish a lower bound here, and it's clear that this is much lower costs and effort than maintaining the human-facing website itself. And I mean, remember the whole "semantic HTML" and "microformats" trends of yore? Or how HTML5 came to be, with all those tags like <em> and <section> and <article>? The whole point of that was to make HTML work as both rendering markup and machine-readable API.
Consider also that the alternative isn't no public API - it's scraping. So if your public API is somehow more expensive to serve or maintain than either the website itself, or a decluttered version of it, then you're doing something wrong.
--
[0] - Don't get me started on the disaster that is Swagger/OpenAPI.
[1] - Something Clojure coding philosophy makes explicit: you pass around maps and arrays, you read and write the keys you know about, and stuff you don't recognize you ignore and pass without changing.
Look, if you have a webpage, you're already providing it. If your webpage is of any use to anybody, someone is likely consuming it by scrapping. So if your dedicated API is harder and/or more expensive to provide and maintain than the degenerate API of your webpage's HTML, you're doing something wrong.
I'm not trying to win an argument. I'm trying to point to an obvious reference point for cost/effort behind an API that's handling the same data and interactions the webpage does.
Don't mind the other commentor, spirited discussion is always welcome! I was thinking about this and even hacker news is a good example of how an html view can differ from data model. Hacker news doesn't show you the vote count of every comment despite having that data available. They chose to not even render it into the template so no scraper will ever have access to that information.
You could, but with EU and other legislations you'd have to make it clear it's an ad, so in API-speak, there'd be a "is_sponsored=true".
That makes it too easy for API consumers to ignore. (Compared to human eyeballs browsing a webpage)
But you could make it part of the ToS: if you're using the API to present posts to users, you MUST show all the posts in the list, including the is_sponsored=true ones.
> if I were to run a web forum then I must provide an API
Realistically you're using Open source forum software like discourse that itself could provide an API interface at an amortized cost.
Expecting individuals to code it themselves (and follow standards etc) is a big ask. I don't think its a hard sticking point and the majority of the encouragement is for large providers.
> I often get the feeling that in these circumstances people derive first principles from specific desired outcomes.
But that's exactly how laws are made. E.g. why do we have consumer protection? Because it helps us! It's democracy in action.
It's not like nobody would ever build another forum if there were laws like the ones proposed by GP.
And if you're worried that every little forum should comply to complicated laws: we could make it so that the laws only apply to large players, e.g. >1M users.
You don't have to. You can self report and if you incorrectly report it is a crime. As simple as that. This is also exactly how the definition of very large online platforms (which is a site from 45+million montly active Users) in the EUs new Digital Services Act works [1].
Some companies (primarily porn) are believed to have misreported, and are being investigated for that[2]. If they are found guilty they will have to adhere to the regulation for vlops, and pay a fine of up to 6% of their annual EU revenue... (Obviously not the full sum for a first time offence)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Online_Platform
[2]https://www.politico.eu/article/online-porn-websites-europe-...
Couldn't the government claim you are lying about how many users you have, and then demand you show them how many you have? How will they prove how many users they have without handing over the list of users?
I’ve seen a lot of arguments that users are the folks who provide the value/ content of Reddit and so somehow Reddit must respond to their wishes.
And I like that idea, a great deal.
Although I have to note that users have given Reddit that content to use, for FREE, and continue to do so. They do this elsewhere too, including sites where they say don’t like the site administration, Twitter, etc…
What I think he meant by "specific desired outcomes" is arbitrary rules that cater to special interest groups rather than universal moral principles. And yes, that _is_ democracy in action, where the only rule is that the majority wins, at the expense of the minority who just lost. Your ">1M users" rule is an example of such arbitrary rule that proves his point.
I don't think your arguments accurately cover the OP's argument at all. The key distinction is literally the first sentence: "Social media businesses should not charge* for APIs."
If you have a community [whatever] service that would not be a business. If you have a blog, that's could potentially be a very business-adjacent, but I'd argue it doesn't cover the "social media" qualification, so that also doesn't apply.
If you run a business and much of your content is user-generated (because it's a social media site), the OP is arguing that API access should be free/at cost.
> OP is arguing that API access should be free/at cost.
Implicitly he is also arguing that it must exist at all.
But let's consider further your own commercial clause. Apple has a discussion board for their support community [1] - and now we are mandating that Apple must both have an API for users to access it and must only charge cost. Who gets to determine the cost? Is it hardware costs? Does it include R&D? Is there a fixed margin set by a regulator?
The grey area on this is as wide as an ocean. But I do think it is a little funny that people are arguing about this like it is equivalent to a universal human right.
A server-rendered HTML website is an API. If said HTML website is unauthenticated and freely accessible by any user-agent, then it's a de-facto public API, too. This is the case for the Apple discussion boards. You don't have to authenticate with their backend before scraping anything you'd like off of the site. You can build third-party tools to read or even interact with this site, by scraping the HTML.
This thing with Reddit is only the big deal that it is, because Reddit's backend blocks "app" user-agents from simply scraping pages from the non-authenticated Reddit HTML website. (If this wasn't true, they'd just do that, and none of this would be an issue.) But these third-party UAs are instead forced to go through the authenticated data API — where they can then be API-credit-limited and forced into paid data-API subscription plans.
I think a more reasonable argument could be “If a site provides an API for fetching user-generated content, it should be free”. (But just as a moral argument, not something to be enforced with regulations.) The issue is that if they provide a paid API for users’ content, they acknowledge the value in the content provided by their users (whom they already have to thank for all their ad revenue), so it seems unjust for them to suddenly start selling that content, especially without sharing the API revenue with the content creators or something.
> Based on this man's logic, if I were to run a web forum then I must provide an API or data dump to download the posts created by the users? How about a comment section on my blog? How about a community Discord server? Why not Facebook posts? Or Instagram stories?
Yes? I don't think it's a very radical, unreasonable or difficult thing to provide: this is available as a first class feature on most blogging/forum software (RSS feeds) and wasn't even remotely controversial 10–12 years ago.
> They also seem to reinvent history such that there was some "implicit" agreement between Reddit and the users of Reddit.
There was an _explicit_ agreement: the site's terms of use have allowed free API access with reasonable quotas for 15 years, and are being changed now with very short notice. Of course the terms of service can change, but users are also free to leave, complain, or demand that they don't change. There are also strong cultural factors involved. For example: just like in the US it's customary for tap water to be free at restaurants, and people would be probably angry if you decided to charge for it, on the open web it's customary for some reasonable level of API access to be free.
> IMO, just because I wrote some shitposts on Reddit does not mean that I am entitled access to every single shitpost that has ever been written on Reddit.
There's no such asymmetry in scale: _everyone_ wrote the content, _everyone_ is entitled to access it. If you're referring to incredibly resource intensive, mass-access to download several terabytes for AI training I can see how that should cost a price. But they're blocking reasonable use-cases.
> users are also free to leave, complain, or demand that they don't change
Yes, I have no issue with all of those. I'm poking fun at taking that desire for action from a single company in a single instance and extending it to a universal moral principle.
My own opinion is that Reddit users were getting something valuable for free and it is being taken away from them. In addition to the totally reasonable protests that they are making, some are taking it a bit far and supporting their tantrum by creating axioms of morality that I believe are a bit excessive.
Getting something valuable for free sounds weird in the physical world but it's not weird at all in the information world, where costs can diffuse so thinly that many users never even see them. I see no reason why a non-profit reddit couldn't be free if they didn't try to host video or images (links and comments only). Server costs could absolutely be covered by donations (like "reddit gold") and intra-site advertising (sidebar subreddit ads). Just don't hire many people, don't take VC money, and lean on your community for moderation (which is perfectly morally acceptable for a non-profit entity).
It's not freeloading, it's just a bunch of people dedicating so much time and attention to communicating with each other that the server costs are dwarfed by the value of the platform to its users.
I know of one long-running message board site which is free of advertising and free for users. A number of users make regular donations and occasionally when funds are low they make an announcement and some other users make a one-off donation.
I am very doubtful their model would scale to Reddit's size, and certain they don't have any wish to.
I know it seems like it wouldn't scale merely because we haven't seen it happen, but I don't think it's economically impossible or even economically difficult. I don't think there's any reason to believe that your costs go up more quickly than your income from donations/ads. Instead, I think what happens is you just don't get many users in the first place because all their attention ends up acquired by people willing to operate non-sustainable businesses with the aim of extracting value in the future.
If by some crazy fluke there weren't any highly motivated money-brains in the social media space, I'm absolutely certain a sustainable non-profit open source solution would exist in place of reddit and facebook, and it would eventually accumulate nearly as many users as those sites have. Maybe not as quickly, and maybe while throwing up donations banners at the same rate as Wikipedia, but it would happen. But you need to get impossibly lucky for the entrepreneurs to ignore "the space" when you have 100k users, and by 1 million users the scent of "alpha" has drawn so many of the biggest, meanest, smartest of the bunch that you need to be an absolute juggernaut of momentum and name recognition (like craigslist and Wikipedia) to have any hope of competeing.
The one I have in mind has been going for decades. I don't think they ever wanted to scale up. The place feels like an independent bar that the owner has no interest in turning into a chain, he just likes running that one bar.
> I see no reason why a non-profit reddit couldn't be free
"could be free" and "must be free" are such a moving of the goal posts that it is impossible to argue against. I mean, you didn't even go through "should be free" on your way.
I wasn't really trying to move somebody else's goalpost, but here's an attempt to bridge the gap anyway, at least as far as "should be free" ("must be free" follows if you're sufficiently authoritarian/utilitarian, otherwise it doesn't /shrug):
Network effects tend to pick extreme winners and losers. From most user's perspectives, there isn't much of a choice. I have an iPhone for a totally stupid reason: My family's chat is an iMessage group and they coordinate photo albums with Apple's shared albums thing. I use reddit for literally no reason at all except that other people use it.
I assert that it would be better for me and most to use an equivalent networking facility maintained by a non-profit entity, and that if there were some kind of cross-site replication such that you really could choose which option to use, a very large number of people would pick the option that didn't present inline or otherwise invasive advertisements, and (indirectly) the option that had free API access, via something like Apollo (software that's simply built better than its competitor on its OS).
So not only do I believe non-profit-reddit (hey, that's "NPR", complete with donation drives) could exist, I believe it would be better for its users and so it should exist. But I also believe it can't really exist as long as somebody is throwing a bunch of (indebted) money into winning the network effects war. So I believe that for-maximum-profit-reddit should not exist.
But I admit the belief feels empty since I'm not authoritarian enough to take it all the way to "reddit must not exist". So I'm just sad instead.
>Yes? I don't think it's a very radical, unreasonable or difficult thing to provide: this is available as a first class feature on most blogging/forum software (RSS feeds) and wasn't even remotely controversial 10–12 years ago.
I think demanding someone pay server bills so you can freely access data they have stored on their hardware (to make yourself money) is radical and unreasonable in every way. If it is an education service or something I can see your point and may agree with you. But that is not what is happening. It is people using reddit's resources to make money for themselves.
Reddit has the right to want fair compensation for use of its service in a commercial manner.
We have the right to stop using reddit if we don't like it.
We have the right to run a service that does give free api access if we see it as reasonable.
We do not have the right to force reddit to provide us free access to their resources. That is completely unreasonable and would be no different than me going to you and saying you must give me access to all your credit cards and let me use them because I feel like I should have it.
You've hidden a subtle semantic shift here. This discussion is centered around personal use, yet you're drawing a line outside commercial use as if they were the same thing.
For instance, Askhistorians posts were all intended educationally and many of them were produced via API access, some long before Reddit had an app. Is it not reasonable to expect those to still be accessible to others the same way, even with a nominal fee to cover API maintenance costs?
>You've hidden a subtle semantic shift here. This discussion is centered around personal use, yet you're drawing a line outside commercial use as if they were the same thing.
Claiming this is about personal use is the semantic shift not what I said. You are trying to shift back to that because you know if you have a good faith discussion you have no legs to stand on. The reddit changes target commercial use plain and simple.
If you create an app that loads reddit content from its APIs for only you to use, these changes are going to have very little no effect on you. That app would be personal use and if you incurred charges for your API use they would be very small (or you are abusing or spamming the API which both are against its terms of use).
The most public part of this has probably been the Apollo dev vs reddit. Apollo is commercial. Using Apollo to browse reddit used the Apollo API key not your accounts API key. The crazy charges the Apollo dev listed are due to tens (hundreds) of thousands of reddit users using the Apollo API key to access reddit. That is not personal use. That is a commercial entity using its own API key to access reddit's API.
> If you create an app that loads reddit content from its APIs for only you to use, these changes are going to have very little no effect on you.
This isn't correct. The API restrictions are per client id, so your app must be limited to you specifically. Having different accounts that share a client id is the whole purpose of Oauth. It's entirely orthogonal to commercial use. The changes affect everything from moderation bots to non-commercial clients to archival services and everything else.
>This isn't correct. The API restrictions are per client id, so your app must be limited to you specifically.
It is exactly correct. I said you build an app for ONLY YOU TO USE. You can still use multiple reddit accounts that you control but no one else is using your API key. Or put another way, you register an API key and then grant that API key access to all your reddit accounts (using OAuth most likely). No other persons reddit account would be using your API Key.
Also that is not the whole purpose of OAuth. You have been able to attach multiple accounts to a single clientId for decades. There are still plenty of sites using SAML that have multiple user accounts tied to one clientId. In fact you can very simply do this today without OAuth. Make a table called clients that owns a table called users. Any user that logs in will have a record in the users table you look up using their userId and then look at the clientid or apikey attached to the parent client record. Then use the clientId/apikey to access any resources you need.
OAuth is delegate authorization framework. Its purpose was to give users the ability to give a system limited access to their data without giving that system their password. It allows you to seperate Authentication and Authorization. Here is a good link to learn about OAuth: https://developer.okta.com/blog/2017/06/21/what-the-heck-is-...
Speaking of semantic shifts, "reasonable to expect" has nothing to do with obligation or whether people deserve anything. It's "reasonable to expect" that it will rain tomorrow, based on what I've seen on the weather maps and in the forecast. The rain has no obligation to me to fall.
"Reasonableness" is a decent way to describe the norms of a social contract. They're not legally enforced (reddit clearly has no legal obligations here besides), and 'unethical' feels like the wrong adjective. It's also the word grandparent comment used. What word would you choose instead?
This is a false dichotomy - no one is protesting for a free lunch. The vast majority of app developers and users are okay with incurring a fee (and many solutions have been proposed - for example, users needing to subscribe to reddit's premium tier to use 3rd party apps) - reddit management has shown in their conduct (refusal to listen to users / potential customers, applying changes with a staggeringly short notice) that they are negotiating in bad faith.
So I would agree with about reddit management especially how they treated the Apollo dev but this thread is on a piece about why APIs for content sites should be free. It is not about reddit managements conduct or lack of common sense. There is still a free tier with reddit's API. It is rate limited to 100 request a minute per API key. So if you are using reddit for your own personal use, it is very rare you are going to need more than 100 apis requests a minute.
You have the option to syndicate information from your site at your leisure.
You are not obligated to provide it to whoever wants it,and to cover the cost of providing or insuring it is available.
This is a radical notion.
As for the for everyone wrote it,everyone has access to it. That is daft, the access to the data is at the discretion of the service hosting it, they never made any claims they would make this data available to everyone anyway they wanted it?
If people don't like the terms of a site don't use it, don't think just because you used a service for a period of time you have some right to determine how that service is operated.
I think a lot of the people who contribute to reddit and other sites -- whose content collectively provides a great deal of value to those sites -- want fair access to their content.
I think that's a good first principle.
I also think "APIs for content sites must be free" is a pretty good attempt to derive a rule from the principle of fairness. So hardly an invented moral axiom, as you put it.
Also, claiming a reinvention of history is unfair, since, until now, everyone has been contributing to reddit in a context where API access was free. That's the history. It's not the history that's changed, it's Reddits API access policy.
Anyway, it's 100% fine and good that people decide under what circumstances they ought to be willing to invest their time and effort in a social media site. Setting some common principles, like this one, is just a good way to communicate that to the purveyors of social media sites.
It would be pretty easy for someone to clone your app and just take out the ads.
If you're required to give access to all data with an API for free, it seems it would be hard to run any of these websites without having a massive loss.
The only real reason to be upset about the Reddit API changes is that Reddit’s official clients suck. The formatting sucks, they stuff them way too full of ads. Apparently they are less accessible for blind users, and inefficient for moderation.
It’s weird to be upset about people like the Apollo dev (who could just require payment) or scrapers. They don’t really have any right to API access, and should have to pay for it.
>if I were to run a web forum then I must provide an API or data dump to download the posts created by the users
It's implicitly provided by hosting the forum, blog, etc. at a publicly accessible URL. HTTP is an API, HTML is a data interchange format. There's this weird idea (which I've seen parroted both in this article, and in u/spez's discourse on the topic) that "scraping" is somehow evil and bad, when it's actually an intentional feature of the web. Scraping is quite literally how Google built its search empire. It seems to me, now that the major players are sufficiently centralized and entrenched, they want to turn scraping into a boogeyman so nobody can follow in their wake.
The advantage of providing a "real" API is to (a) limit scope narrower than an account/session, and (b) eliminate the overhead implicit in laying out the content for human eyeballs; reducing processing costs for both the server and client.
I find it somewhat hypocritical for Reddit et al. to provide the former for free, and charge for the latter, when the latter is explicitly designed to optimize their costs.
Ultimately this is about DRM again, or at least on the same spectrum of motives and behavior: The corporate middleman wants to be able to force restrictions on how consumers manage or view the content that is being produced by other users.
Either forcing you to run a proprietary closed-source client--like their official smartphone app--or else making the desktop rendering so gnarled that you pretty much have to view it exactly the way they intent while having their code pierce your privacy.
It's not just about making sure ads are displayed anymore, I'm sure there's some executive who has asked about preventing people from copy-pasting text...
> I often get the feeling that in these circumstances people derive first principles from specific desired outcomes.
That's a pretty normal way derive principles, isn't it? You start with an observation, and then you recursively ask "why?" It's possible that your answers are wrong, or even that your observation itself is flawed, but the concept of deriving principles from outcomes isn't really flawed. Where else are they going to come from? Should people just pick principles at random and hope they're not terrible?
Now that is something I agree with (the principle not the particular law).
If we're opening it up to our own opinions - I believe I should have total control over all of the content I generate in all contexts. That would include removing the content I provably generated from any platform at any time. Note that HN doesn't even allow me to do that ... I can't delete posts after some time frame.
But my understanding of GDPR is it doesn't go that far. It applies to PII (Personally Identifying Information). That would include things like mailing address, email addresses, full names, phone number, government ids, etc. I may be wrong, but I do not believe it would apply to the content of shitposts on Reddit.
Where I disagree with the articles vehement moral stance ... is my right to the publicly generated content of other people.
Also, if we want to get all technical, and I'm surprised no one has, there is some analogy to be made between the philosophy of free access to information provided by public libraries and this debate ...
> They then attempt to invent moral axioms that they believe will lead to that outcome. They also seem to reinvent history such that there was some "implicit" agreement between Reddit and the users of Reddit.
I notice this also when people are talking about "the spirit of open source." No, open source licenses are licenses, not spirits, and you were contributing huge amounts of time and effort to fill a platform with content that you have absolutely no control over. People don't owe it to your OSS project not to fork it or not to become more successful than you at distributing it as a service, and Reddit can do whatever they want with your content that doesn't violate any obligations to you set out in their ToS.
Next time, do AGPL or proprietary, and don't give away any content that you value to someone else's platform for free. If you want them to be obligated to distribute it for free forever, you really should be paying them.
Some people perceive Reddit as a platform build with their tax money. The argument usually goes that Reddit is build with the free labor of participants, but I think they forget that they also receive an experience in return.
I'm honestly shocked by how naive people are about open data/web.
If a platform owner together with a community of enthusiasts produces a valuable set of content/data and then makes it openly available to the world...what exactly do you expect will happen?
We've seen what happens during the last 15 years, an era of massive centralization. And now it's AI saying "thanks for everything!".
But it doesn't even need to be AI. Allow me to use the free and unlimited Reddit API which apparently allows you to make billions of calls at no charge, and then rehost all that content on an ad farm.
This is the real reason the original web3 (semantic web) was dead before it even started and instead of becoming more open, everyone became less open. Because giving away your main assets is suicidal.
I like how he touts Stack Overflow data dumps as an example, even though they also totally sold out and stopped doing the data dumps. They are no better.
Do you have more info on a policy change at Stack Overflow? The latest dump on their own post is from March 2023. In the past dumps have mostly been monthly but it's not entirely consistent. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224873/all-stack-ex...
Is there a reason web scrapers aren't used for public sites with content? It seems like this would avoid the pitfalls of APIs and changing terms and prices?
They were, in a much less constrained way, until companies running platforms started suing people for scraping. And investing heavily in making it difficult technically. The difference is advertising. The vast majority of people do not want to be advertised to, given the choice, nor do they want to have their contract with a platform downgraded (by having to use the UI designed by the company). This situation is some of the users taking a stand about it.
My take is slightly more nuanced - if you're paying a company to access their content, it shouldn't matter how you're accessing that content.
More concretely, as a (former) subscriber to Reddit Premium, I should continue to get access to Reddit via their APIs for free. But that was never an option, since Reddit only wants to charge the application creators and not the actual consumers.
This is a completely flawed argument. You didn't buy Reddit premium to get access to the content, you bought Reddit premium to not see ads and get free coins, which you did get.
Your argument is the same as saying that if I buy a can of Coke I should be allowed to use the CEO's company car for life.
Not seeing ads is always free, just don't use the site, Reddit premium=content-without-ads.
It's easy for them to allow premium users API access, they'll still be developed for third-party apps with an accessibility focus amongst other things.
Reddit doesn't owe us anything. But given how easy this would be, it's unsurprising that taking the current obtuse approach makes some people not want to use the site.
A different version of this argument is: why should it matter if I'm querying the content using the API directly versus by using the HTML web interface? If it's the case that different consumers of the API might put different load on the system than the web page that the provider can't/doesn't want to support, why isn't rate limiting the solution?
This also provides providers a way to fairly monetize their API: we're giving you some basic level of access that matches what you get through the website for free, but if your access pattern is such that you put a load on our system that we can't tolerate, then we'll charge you (by providing a paid tier).
The use of the word "must" (in both the title and the body) is uninformative. What on Earth does it mean? Does it mean there's a law? A moral imperative? A strategic necessity? A technical requirement? Is the author claiming some form of jurisdiction?
"It must provide APIs" isn't an argument. It can't be taken literally because it's clearly false. And it can't be taken in any other form because the author doesn't tell us what those forms might be.
It continues, equally poorly stated: "Millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available. Locking down an API breaks that social contract." Now that IS an argument, but it's not a good one for a surprisingly large number of reasons, the simplest of which is that websites like Reddit are widely available regardless of a free API.
Finally, we get to the only actual statement of merit: "The short sighted thing about these API fees is they will harm the company in the long term." Yes, that's quite likely true. Is that the whole argument? That this is a short sighted plan? Companies are free to make stupid plans. They do it all the time, and you are free to stop doing business with them. "Must" doesn't enter into it.
I fail to follow your chain of reasoning. How can the claim both be "clearly false" and unclear in its statement?
The use of "should" as the very first line of the body text actually makes the argument extremely clear, which is that there is a non-legal, non-technical imperative for API access [leaving only a moral/social imperative, as you determine]. I think you are probably smarter than the very low reading comprehension bar in order to understand what is being said, so I'm not sure what value you are deriving from pretending not to.
"X must do Y," taken literally, would imply that X did Y. But here, X did not do Y. That's the "clearly false" part. and that's fine, because that's how language works. People speak hyperbolically or metaphorically all the time.
But the author must be trying to say something when they say "X must do Y," and it's not clear to me what. Are they just using "must" to mean "should?" Or do they mean something stronger? And what does "should" even mean? Do they mean should like "it would be a tactical mistake not to?" Evidently not because they start talking about social contracts and such, which are more about some sort of community unstated rules or traditions or something.
Put another way, if I say "X must do Y" to you, and you want to disagree, how would you do that? Would "X is not required to do Y" be a rebuttal? Or "Y would not be very nice?" I can't tell if either assertion would contradict the author's assertions. What are they trying to say?
Maybe it's just me being annoyingly pedantic (it's happened before!), but it's the title of the post and even after reading the whole thing I'm no closer to being able to summarize their argument. Is it just "I don't think Reddit should do this because it's a useful tool and it'd be mean," but with the word "must" thrown in randomly for oomph?
> there is a non-legal, non-technical imperative for API access [leaving only a moral/social imperative, as you determine].
There is no more an argument here than if I said there was a moral/social imperative for them to clean my house. An argument derives conclusions from premises.
I agree. The way the article is written is basically just a guy throwing a tantrum because he wants something. That doesn't make it a law of the universe that he must be given what he wants.
This assumes that the API is the reward provided by the website to "buy" the user-generated content, as if the website did not provide value otherwise.
Nobody posts on Reddit just to access the content via an API, it's not a finality of using Reddit, it's a nice to have.
1. It is impossible to use Reddit without an API (a webpage is just another API).
2. No API is ever truly free. There are always tradeoffs that come with a cost.
3. Not all APIs have the same cost.
The question is, at what point does an API become a cost too much?
There is a lot of indication that changes at Reddit will mean that some APIs that were previously considered to be acceptably priced will no longer be acceptably priced. The cost of using the API will exceed the value derived from using the API.
Other APIs are stated to remain unchanged. In theory, users using the APIs in flux could migrate to these price-stable APIs. But, that does not mean that all people find those APIs acceptably priced, even where they did find the previously mentioned APIs in flux to be acceptably priced previously.
An API is not why someone uses Reddit, but it is a necessary precondition in order to use Reddit. If one finds the cost of a Reddit API to be too high, one will not use that API. If one finds the cost of all Reddit APIs to be too high, they will not use Reddit. To retain users, is necessary for an API to be "free enough".
Given that your very first point is arguing semantics, I think it shows how weak any argument that you can bring forward is, so I won't even read the rest.
1. Defining previously nebulous terms to clearly identify how they will be used as follows is not arguing semantics. To frame it as a semantic argument is erroneous.
2. Comments are always written by the author, for the author. If you do not want to read it, great. It wasn't ever for you.
API for the content I write? No thanks. It takes a few seconds for a scammer to copy the content and apply their *** referral links to my content.
Let's remember that OpenAI made part of the profit thanks to the data they acquired from crawling the websites (not directly by OpenAI, but some other parties).
> social media sites don’t produce content. They merely host it. Millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available.
?
But this feels pretty simplistic. Not convinced that people do (or should) upload content expecting they or anyone else can access it however they want.
If you create the content then it's obviously yours forever. If you also decide post it to a platform, why is it the platform's social responsibility to allow access to that content for free.
This cuts both ways -- if I'm not going to allow access to that content for free, why would you give me your content?
The ToS might allow for it, but people are routinely dismayed when companies stick to the letter of what their ToS allows them to do, especially when they start doing things they never did before.
> if I'm not going to allow access to that content for free, why would you give me your content?
A bunch of reasons potentially, wider reach probably being the main one, but maybe also stuff like ways for your audience to interact with you/the content/each other.
> The ToS might allow for it
"It's in the ToS so it's fine" is a bad argument, but I'm not saying that. I guess there's two things:
a) empirically, do users actually expect that content be available "for free" (in general? just to themselves?) from a platform
b) is there a "good reason" that this should be a social expectation?
a)'s a tricky question with multiple parts but I'm not especially convinced. I imagine a lot of users aren't even really thinking about that kind of thing
b) I could imagine being convinced about, but "they didn't make the content" doesn't feel sufficient.
It's been kind of interesting to see this play out in real time: it's clearly a board level reaction at these companies to OpenAI essentially scraping these companies, running a model over their content, and then essentially disintermediating them.
And when you ask ChatGPT you're (marginally) less likely to be chided by someone telling you you're an idiot for asking the question in the first place.
This post just asserts the existence of a right that comes out of nowhere. The rights you have on a website are established by agreement between you and the site's creator. You are free to not post on the site if you disagree with the terms of that agreement. If you choose to post, you have apparently come to the conclusion that the exchange is mutually beneficial.
If you think that APIs for content sites must be free, I think you need to offer more to justify it then this does.
This seems to be a lost author looking at socialist media platforms, not capitalistic social media. Things that actually have a cost should not necessarily be provided for free, even if one does not understand said cost (such as the author of this story). Providing an API is an add-on and not actually required of any social media platform but it does cost money to maintain the storage of the content as well as to not just build said API but also to maintain it (including keeping it secure and scalable). This author seems to be thinking of some kind of socialist media platforms, not the current capitalist social media platforms we have now. Even so, I would definitely welcome the idea of socialistic media platforms although I am not even sure how one could be built and/or managed.
This sounds about the same as "McDonald's should be free" and I don't really see a big difference other than the actual consumption of said good/service.
If you read the article and not just the headline, the author is in favor of charging a cost based fee for API access. A fee that would cover hosting and serving the API, but not generate profit for the parent company benefiting from the 3P users' content.
I have a theory that governments and corporations across the world are pushing hard for free APIs. If they cost anything, even very little, then it makes astroturfing too expensive.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadConfusing Free as in libre and Free as in gratis causes endless turmoil.
If you don't want to pay with money or your attention how are they going to pay for all that traffic end engineering?
App makers will get angry and stop at some point
If users provide content for free, then a platform must allow users to consume that content freely, as in "as they wish", not "for free".
The author supposes that this is a fundamental social contract between users and platforms that needs to exist for platforms to work well. The author does not cite any evidence or examples or really even provide any explanation as to why this must be the case, they simply state it as a fact. Personally I find that, while thought provoking, this thesis is not obvious and needs to be defended. And so I don't find much utility in this short essay other than to state the thesis itself.
The platform is paying me with distribution and letting me take advantage of network effect. Anyone can setup a free blog and post all they want, and make everything available via RSS, but instead people choose to post on Reddit (and on HN!) because Reddit has built a platform that provides additional value vs posting on one's own blog.
Platforms need to make $ to stay alive, Reddit's problem is they took VC money for a product that, it turns out, doesn't generate VC returns.
Without the need to pay off VCs, Reddit could likely easily become profitable (as they reportedly were in 2019) and everyone involved could become comfortably-but-not-filthy-rich.
What's the distinction between the two? If the site is monetized via ads then providing the content ad-free (via an API or otherwise) automatically makes it "for free".
Which I agree, needs to be justified. You see this kind of talk a lot when power imbalances exist; the person with no power tries to speak on behalf of everyone involved who they think believes as they do, in order to try and stand against the existing power structure.
Sometimes it's highly effective (actually appointed or even de-facto leaders of movements/groups), other times it's kind of laughable and presumptuous.
Without justification, this is the latter. That said, I bet there probably is justification, if the author bothered to look for it or provide it!
I would suspect it's true that users will not make use of a site like Reddit nearly as much if the content isn't then made available for use "as they wish".
Based on this man's logic, if I were to run a web forum then I must provide an API or data dump to download the posts created by the users? How about a comment section on my blog? How about a community Discord server? Why not Facebook posts? Or Instagram stories?
I often get the feeling that in these circumstances people derive first principles from specific desired outcomes. Some people strongly desire that the content that has been aggregated on Reddit should be available to them. They then attempt to invent moral axioms that they believe will lead to that outcome. They also seem to reinvent history such that there was some "implicit" agreement between Reddit and the users of Reddit.
IMO, just because I wrote some shitposts on Reddit does not mean that I am entitled access to every single shitpost that has ever been written on Reddit.
Having a public facing API is not trivial or cost free.
If they were to offer an API that's just HTML of the website (old.reddit.com specifically, not the new one) but without the cruft that makes for 90% of the markup of a human-facing page, and which exists only to hang styles and scripts off... why wouldn't they maintain it? It's literally the same as what the browser gets, but without the bullshit.
> or uphold any sort of SLA uptime
Do they uphold any sort of SLA uptime for the webpage itself?
The simplest API would be just the meat of the website, so it couldn't possibly be less reliable than the site itself.
> not worry about releasing breaking changes every week?
Reddit is a stable site. Like most social media platforms, they don't release breaking changes often (they do screw with DOM element ids and CSS classes all the time, but that is to make life harder for ad blockers, which is another topic). Sure, some things may move around, be added or removed - but this is webshit we're talking about. You can't truly rely on any API to have a stable, or well-defined structure[0] - so people are already used to treating schemas as open-ended[1] and keeping up with their changes.
> Having a public facing API is not trivial or cost free.
Sure. But I'm trying to establish a lower bound here, and it's clear that this is much lower costs and effort than maintaining the human-facing website itself. And I mean, remember the whole "semantic HTML" and "microformats" trends of yore? Or how HTML5 came to be, with all those tags like <em> and <section> and <article>? The whole point of that was to make HTML work as both rendering markup and machine-readable API.
Consider also that the alternative isn't no public API - it's scraping. So if your public API is somehow more expensive to serve or maintain than either the website itself, or a decluttered version of it, then you're doing something wrong.
--
[0] - Don't get me started on the disaster that is Swagger/OpenAPI.
[1] - Something Clojure coding philosophy makes explicit: you pass around maps and arrays, you read and write the keys you know about, and stuff you don't recognize you ignore and pass without changing.
i look forward to the folks making this argument telling their boss “it’s ok the HTML is an API that’s all we need to provide”
come on, nobody believes this when they’re not trying to win an argument on the internet
I'm not trying to win an argument. I'm trying to point to an obvious reference point for cost/effort behind an API that's handling the same data and interactions the webpage does.
“Sent from my iPhone.”
That makes it too easy for API consumers to ignore. (Compared to human eyeballs browsing a webpage)
But you could make it part of the ToS: if you're using the API to present posts to users, you MUST show all the posts in the list, including the is_sponsored=true ones.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/social-media-endo...
Realistically you're using Open source forum software like discourse that itself could provide an API interface at an amortized cost.
Expecting individuals to code it themselves (and follow standards etc) is a big ask. I don't think its a hard sticking point and the majority of the encouragement is for large providers.
But that's exactly how laws are made. E.g. why do we have consumer protection? Because it helps us! It's democracy in action.
It's not like nobody would ever build another forum if there were laws like the ones proposed by GP.
And if you're worried that every little forum should comply to complicated laws: we could make it so that the laws only apply to large players, e.g. >1M users.
What if I don't want to share my user list with the government?
But I'm sure there are other ways.
Won't they just build the forums in other jurisdictions then? How many European forums do you frequent? I barely visit any.
And I like that idea, a great deal.
Although I have to note that users have given Reddit that content to use, for FREE, and continue to do so. They do this elsewhere too, including sites where they say don’t like the site administration, Twitter, etc…
So I’m not really sure how this plays out.
If you have a community [whatever] service that would not be a business. If you have a blog, that's could potentially be a very business-adjacent, but I'd argue it doesn't cover the "social media" qualification, so that also doesn't apply.
If you run a business and much of your content is user-generated (because it's a social media site), the OP is arguing that API access should be free/at cost.
Implicitly he is also arguing that it must exist at all.
But let's consider further your own commercial clause. Apple has a discussion board for their support community [1] - and now we are mandating that Apple must both have an API for users to access it and must only charge cost. Who gets to determine the cost? Is it hardware costs? Does it include R&D? Is there a fixed margin set by a regulator?
The grey area on this is as wide as an ocean. But I do think it is a little funny that people are arguing about this like it is equivalent to a universal human right.
1. https://discussions.apple.com/
This thing with Reddit is only the big deal that it is, because Reddit's backend blocks "app" user-agents from simply scraping pages from the non-authenticated Reddit HTML website. (If this wasn't true, they'd just do that, and none of this would be an issue.) But these third-party UAs are instead forced to go through the authenticated data API — where they can then be API-credit-limited and forced into paid data-API subscription plans.
Yes? I don't think it's a very radical, unreasonable or difficult thing to provide: this is available as a first class feature on most blogging/forum software (RSS feeds) and wasn't even remotely controversial 10–12 years ago.
> They also seem to reinvent history such that there was some "implicit" agreement between Reddit and the users of Reddit.
There was an _explicit_ agreement: the site's terms of use have allowed free API access with reasonable quotas for 15 years, and are being changed now with very short notice. Of course the terms of service can change, but users are also free to leave, complain, or demand that they don't change. There are also strong cultural factors involved. For example: just like in the US it's customary for tap water to be free at restaurants, and people would be probably angry if you decided to charge for it, on the open web it's customary for some reasonable level of API access to be free.
> IMO, just because I wrote some shitposts on Reddit does not mean that I am entitled access to every single shitpost that has ever been written on Reddit.
There's no such asymmetry in scale: _everyone_ wrote the content, _everyone_ is entitled to access it. If you're referring to incredibly resource intensive, mass-access to download several terabytes for AI training I can see how that should cost a price. But they're blocking reasonable use-cases.
Yes, I have no issue with all of those. I'm poking fun at taking that desire for action from a single company in a single instance and extending it to a universal moral principle.
My own opinion is that Reddit users were getting something valuable for free and it is being taken away from them. In addition to the totally reasonable protests that they are making, some are taking it a bit far and supporting their tantrum by creating axioms of morality that I believe are a bit excessive.
It's not freeloading, it's just a bunch of people dedicating so much time and attention to communicating with each other that the server costs are dwarfed by the value of the platform to its users.
I am very doubtful their model would scale to Reddit's size, and certain they don't have any wish to.
If by some crazy fluke there weren't any highly motivated money-brains in the social media space, I'm absolutely certain a sustainable non-profit open source solution would exist in place of reddit and facebook, and it would eventually accumulate nearly as many users as those sites have. Maybe not as quickly, and maybe while throwing up donations banners at the same rate as Wikipedia, but it would happen. But you need to get impossibly lucky for the entrepreneurs to ignore "the space" when you have 100k users, and by 1 million users the scent of "alpha" has drawn so many of the biggest, meanest, smartest of the bunch that you need to be an absolute juggernaut of momentum and name recognition (like craigslist and Wikipedia) to have any hope of competeing.
"could be free" and "must be free" are such a moving of the goal posts that it is impossible to argue against. I mean, you didn't even go through "should be free" on your way.
Network effects tend to pick extreme winners and losers. From most user's perspectives, there isn't much of a choice. I have an iPhone for a totally stupid reason: My family's chat is an iMessage group and they coordinate photo albums with Apple's shared albums thing. I use reddit for literally no reason at all except that other people use it.
I assert that it would be better for me and most to use an equivalent networking facility maintained by a non-profit entity, and that if there were some kind of cross-site replication such that you really could choose which option to use, a very large number of people would pick the option that didn't present inline or otherwise invasive advertisements, and (indirectly) the option that had free API access, via something like Apollo (software that's simply built better than its competitor on its OS).
So not only do I believe non-profit-reddit (hey, that's "NPR", complete with donation drives) could exist, I believe it would be better for its users and so it should exist. But I also believe it can't really exist as long as somebody is throwing a bunch of (indebted) money into winning the network effects war. So I believe that for-maximum-profit-reddit should not exist.
But I admit the belief feels empty since I'm not authoritarian enough to take it all the way to "reddit must not exist". So I'm just sad instead.
I think demanding someone pay server bills so you can freely access data they have stored on their hardware (to make yourself money) is radical and unreasonable in every way. If it is an education service or something I can see your point and may agree with you. But that is not what is happening. It is people using reddit's resources to make money for themselves.
Reddit has the right to want fair compensation for use of its service in a commercial manner.
We have the right to stop using reddit if we don't like it.
We have the right to run a service that does give free api access if we see it as reasonable.
We do not have the right to force reddit to provide us free access to their resources. That is completely unreasonable and would be no different than me going to you and saying you must give me access to all your credit cards and let me use them because I feel like I should have it.
For instance, Askhistorians posts were all intended educationally and many of them were produced via API access, some long before Reddit had an app. Is it not reasonable to expect those to still be accessible to others the same way, even with a nominal fee to cover API maintenance costs?
Claiming this is about personal use is the semantic shift not what I said. You are trying to shift back to that because you know if you have a good faith discussion you have no legs to stand on. The reddit changes target commercial use plain and simple.
If you create an app that loads reddit content from its APIs for only you to use, these changes are going to have very little no effect on you. That app would be personal use and if you incurred charges for your API use they would be very small (or you are abusing or spamming the API which both are against its terms of use).
The most public part of this has probably been the Apollo dev vs reddit. Apollo is commercial. Using Apollo to browse reddit used the Apollo API key not your accounts API key. The crazy charges the Apollo dev listed are due to tens (hundreds) of thousands of reddit users using the Apollo API key to access reddit. That is not personal use. That is a commercial entity using its own API key to access reddit's API.
This isn't correct. The API restrictions are per client id, so your app must be limited to you specifically. Having different accounts that share a client id is the whole purpose of Oauth. It's entirely orthogonal to commercial use. The changes affect everything from moderation bots to non-commercial clients to archival services and everything else.
It is exactly correct. I said you build an app for ONLY YOU TO USE. You can still use multiple reddit accounts that you control but no one else is using your API key. Or put another way, you register an API key and then grant that API key access to all your reddit accounts (using OAuth most likely). No other persons reddit account would be using your API Key.
Also that is not the whole purpose of OAuth. You have been able to attach multiple accounts to a single clientId for decades. There are still plenty of sites using SAML that have multiple user accounts tied to one clientId. In fact you can very simply do this today without OAuth. Make a table called clients that owns a table called users. Any user that logs in will have a record in the users table you look up using their userId and then look at the clientid or apikey attached to the parent client record. Then use the clientId/apikey to access any resources you need.
OAuth is delegate authorization framework. Its purpose was to give users the ability to give a system limited access to their data without giving that system their password. It allows you to seperate Authentication and Authorization. Here is a good link to learn about OAuth: https://developer.okta.com/blog/2017/06/21/what-the-heck-is-...
You are not obligated to provide it to whoever wants it,and to cover the cost of providing or insuring it is available.
This is a radical notion.
As for the for everyone wrote it,everyone has access to it. That is daft, the access to the data is at the discretion of the service hosting it, they never made any claims they would make this data available to everyone anyway they wanted it?
If people don't like the terms of a site don't use it, don't think just because you used a service for a period of time you have some right to determine how that service is operated.
I think that's a good first principle.
I also think "APIs for content sites must be free" is a pretty good attempt to derive a rule from the principle of fairness. So hardly an invented moral axiom, as you put it.
Also, claiming a reinvention of history is unfair, since, until now, everyone has been contributing to reddit in a context where API access was free. That's the history. It's not the history that's changed, it's Reddits API access policy.
Anyway, it's 100% fine and good that people decide under what circumstances they ought to be willing to invest their time and effort in a social media site. Setting some common principles, like this one, is just a good way to communicate that to the purveyors of social media sites.
Once you learn about motivated reasoning, you start to see it everywhere.
If you're required to give access to all data with an API for free, it seems it would be hard to run any of these websites without having a massive loss.
The only real reason to be upset about the Reddit API changes is that Reddit’s official clients suck. The formatting sucks, they stuff them way too full of ads. Apparently they are less accessible for blind users, and inefficient for moderation.
It’s weird to be upset about people like the Apollo dev (who could just require payment) or scrapers. They don’t really have any right to API access, and should have to pay for it.
It's implicitly provided by hosting the forum, blog, etc. at a publicly accessible URL. HTTP is an API, HTML is a data interchange format. There's this weird idea (which I've seen parroted both in this article, and in u/spez's discourse on the topic) that "scraping" is somehow evil and bad, when it's actually an intentional feature of the web. Scraping is quite literally how Google built its search empire. It seems to me, now that the major players are sufficiently centralized and entrenched, they want to turn scraping into a boogeyman so nobody can follow in their wake.
The advantage of providing a "real" API is to (a) limit scope narrower than an account/session, and (b) eliminate the overhead implicit in laying out the content for human eyeballs; reducing processing costs for both the server and client.
I find it somewhat hypocritical for Reddit et al. to provide the former for free, and charge for the latter, when the latter is explicitly designed to optimize their costs.
Either forcing you to run a proprietary closed-source client--like their official smartphone app--or else making the desktop rendering so gnarled that you pretty much have to view it exactly the way they intent while having their code pierce your privacy.
It's not just about making sure ads are displayed anymore, I'm sure there's some executive who has asked about preventing people from copy-pasting text...
That's a pretty normal way derive principles, isn't it? You start with an observation, and then you recursively ask "why?" It's possible that your answers are wrong, or even that your observation itself is flawed, but the concept of deriving principles from outcomes isn't really flawed. Where else are they going to come from? Should people just pick principles at random and hope they're not terrible?
If we're opening it up to our own opinions - I believe I should have total control over all of the content I generate in all contexts. That would include removing the content I provably generated from any platform at any time. Note that HN doesn't even allow me to do that ... I can't delete posts after some time frame.
But my understanding of GDPR is it doesn't go that far. It applies to PII (Personally Identifying Information). That would include things like mailing address, email addresses, full names, phone number, government ids, etc. I may be wrong, but I do not believe it would apply to the content of shitposts on Reddit.
Where I disagree with the articles vehement moral stance ... is my right to the publicly generated content of other people.
Also, if we want to get all technical, and I'm surprised no one has, there is some analogy to be made between the philosophy of free access to information provided by public libraries and this debate ...
I notice this also when people are talking about "the spirit of open source." No, open source licenses are licenses, not spirits, and you were contributing huge amounts of time and effort to fill a platform with content that you have absolutely no control over. People don't owe it to your OSS project not to fork it or not to become more successful than you at distributing it as a service, and Reddit can do whatever they want with your content that doesn't violate any obligations to you set out in their ToS.
Next time, do AGPL or proprietary, and don't give away any content that you value to someone else's platform for free. If you want them to be obligated to distribute it for free forever, you really should be paying them.
If a platform owner together with a community of enthusiasts produces a valuable set of content/data and then makes it openly available to the world...what exactly do you expect will happen?
We've seen what happens during the last 15 years, an era of massive centralization. And now it's AI saying "thanks for everything!".
But it doesn't even need to be AI. Allow me to use the free and unlimited Reddit API which apparently allows you to make billions of calls at no charge, and then rehost all that content on an ad farm.
This is the real reason the original web3 (semantic web) was dead before it even started and instead of becoming more open, everyone became less open. Because giving away your main assets is suicidal.
More concretely, as a (former) subscriber to Reddit Premium, I should continue to get access to Reddit via their APIs for free. But that was never an option, since Reddit only wants to charge the application creators and not the actual consumers.
Your argument is the same as saying that if I buy a can of Coke I should be allowed to use the CEO's company car for life.
It's easy for them to allow premium users API access, they'll still be developed for third-party apps with an accessibility focus amongst other things.
Reddit doesn't owe us anything. But given how easy this would be, it's unsurprising that taking the current obtuse approach makes some people not want to use the site.
This also provides providers a way to fairly monetize their API: we're giving you some basic level of access that matches what you get through the website for free, but if your access pattern is such that you put a load on our system that we can't tolerate, then we'll charge you (by providing a paid tier).
No LLM required.
"It must provide APIs" isn't an argument. It can't be taken literally because it's clearly false. And it can't be taken in any other form because the author doesn't tell us what those forms might be.
It continues, equally poorly stated: "Millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available. Locking down an API breaks that social contract." Now that IS an argument, but it's not a good one for a surprisingly large number of reasons, the simplest of which is that websites like Reddit are widely available regardless of a free API.
Finally, we get to the only actual statement of merit: "The short sighted thing about these API fees is they will harm the company in the long term." Yes, that's quite likely true. Is that the whole argument? That this is a short sighted plan? Companies are free to make stupid plans. They do it all the time, and you are free to stop doing business with them. "Must" doesn't enter into it.
The use of "should" as the very first line of the body text actually makes the argument extremely clear, which is that there is a non-legal, non-technical imperative for API access [leaving only a moral/social imperative, as you determine]. I think you are probably smarter than the very low reading comprehension bar in order to understand what is being said, so I'm not sure what value you are deriving from pretending not to.
But the author must be trying to say something when they say "X must do Y," and it's not clear to me what. Are they just using "must" to mean "should?" Or do they mean something stronger? And what does "should" even mean? Do they mean should like "it would be a tactical mistake not to?" Evidently not because they start talking about social contracts and such, which are more about some sort of community unstated rules or traditions or something.
Put another way, if I say "X must do Y" to you, and you want to disagree, how would you do that? Would "X is not required to do Y" be a rebuttal? Or "Y would not be very nice?" I can't tell if either assertion would contradict the author's assertions. What are they trying to say?
Maybe it's just me being annoyingly pedantic (it's happened before!), but it's the title of the post and even after reading the whole thing I'm no closer to being able to summarize their argument. Is it just "I don't think Reddit should do this because it's a useful tool and it'd be mean," but with the word "must" thrown in randomly for oomph?
There is no more an argument here than if I said there was a moral/social imperative for them to clean my house. An argument derives conclusions from premises.
Nobody posts on Reddit just to access the content via an API, it's not a finality of using Reddit, it's a nice to have.
2. No API is ever truly free. There are always tradeoffs that come with a cost.
3. Not all APIs have the same cost.
The question is, at what point does an API become a cost too much?
There is a lot of indication that changes at Reddit will mean that some APIs that were previously considered to be acceptably priced will no longer be acceptably priced. The cost of using the API will exceed the value derived from using the API.
Other APIs are stated to remain unchanged. In theory, users using the APIs in flux could migrate to these price-stable APIs. But, that does not mean that all people find those APIs acceptably priced, even where they did find the previously mentioned APIs in flux to be acceptably priced previously.
An API is not why someone uses Reddit, but it is a necessary precondition in order to use Reddit. If one finds the cost of a Reddit API to be too high, one will not use that API. If one finds the cost of all Reddit APIs to be too high, they will not use Reddit. To retain users, is necessary for an API to be "free enough".
2. Comments are always written by the author, for the author. If you do not want to read it, great. It wasn't ever for you.
Let's remember that OpenAI made part of the profit thanks to the data they acquired from crawling the websites (not directly by OpenAI, but some other parties).
> social media sites don’t produce content. They merely host it. Millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available.
?
But this feels pretty simplistic. Not convinced that people do (or should) upload content expecting they or anyone else can access it however they want.
If you create the content then it's obviously yours forever. If you also decide post it to a platform, why is it the platform's social responsibility to allow access to that content for free.
The ToS might allow for it, but people are routinely dismayed when companies stick to the letter of what their ToS allows them to do, especially when they start doing things they never did before.
A bunch of reasons potentially, wider reach probably being the main one, but maybe also stuff like ways for your audience to interact with you/the content/each other.
> The ToS might allow for it
"It's in the ToS so it's fine" is a bad argument, but I'm not saying that. I guess there's two things:
a) empirically, do users actually expect that content be available "for free" (in general? just to themselves?) from a platform
b) is there a "good reason" that this should be a social expectation?
a)'s a tricky question with multiple parts but I'm not especially convinced. I imagine a lot of users aren't even really thinking about that kind of thing
b) I could imagine being convinced about, but "they didn't make the content" doesn't feel sufficient.
And when you ask ChatGPT you're (marginally) less likely to be chided by someone telling you you're an idiot for asking the question in the first place.
If you think that APIs for content sites must be free, I think you need to offer more to justify it then this does.
Why not stop building public pools and just force people to make their private pools available for anyone to swim?
Is it because we have seemingly lost faith in the very notion of a republic?
Nothing is free, including providing and maintaining APIs.
Someone's gotta pay for the ramen, especially if you can't run ads.
It shouldn't be difficult to look to second- and third-order benefits, though, such as increasing your user base and the amount of generated content.