I've found myself resisting posting comments on Reddit recently - things like answers to simple questions people have about SQLite - partly because I don't want to cross the picket line but also because I realize that I was relying on a very light social contract that was in place there: I would share my knowledge for free, in exchange for which I knew that I was contributing to a larger dataset that myself and others could get back out again.
If Reddit are cutting off free API access, that social contract no longer holds. Why should I work to benefit their service if they're hoarding the resulting data and not making it available to me or people like me in the future?
I thought I was vanishingly rare in caring about this kind of thing, but given the mass Reddit blackout over the changes to the API apparently I'm not!
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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…
> 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.
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.
> 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'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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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".
I would frame it as "messaging applications should interoperate".
People understand that a T-Mobile customer can send a text to an AT&T customer. They understand that a Samsung owner can call an iPhone owner.
Why do they accept that a Slack user can't send a message to a Discord user? Why do they accept that Google has made 11+ different messaging applications that aren't compatible with each other? Why do they accept that you can't call a Skype for business customer with Skype?
We've had 30 years of stagnation because messaging applications don't interoperate. That's why the story is always "Hey, remember back when ICQ used to work? You should try Skype, it really works..." Once Skype becomes successful at the two-sided market game the honeymoon is over and the vendor has no incentive to keep it working and they figure you'll keep trying to use it anyway.
If there were competition for both the server and the client there would be continuous pressure to keep the products working, and to improve them. So instead of Facebook Messenger being the same as AOL Instant Messenger except for Facebook, we'd have had 30 years of progress and would have apps that look like something out of The Jetsons.
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 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.
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.
Faceboook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram whatever exist to make
money, or whatever those who own it or run it wants.
It is your choice.
You wish to spend your time adding value to a website
someone else runs great.
Does that give you rights? Nope.
Normally in extremely obfuscated ways, the contract you do enter into
by using a site will tell you exactly that you have no rights at all
and they own everything you do.
I agree that it can be unfair.
But you actively decide to provide content.
You cant make up the rules for the sites you do use.
You can stop whenever you want.
You can start your own site.
I did so a few years ago when I got sick of this shit.
On the other hand, I have few visitors.
I can howl in the wilderness.
For me it is preferable.
If you do engage in one of the big social sites, you are
given access to an enormous audience.
You can post something that "goes viral".
You get fame, site gets $$$$, maybe you get $$$.
News can easily quote you from some of the big social sites.
How often do you:
Thinkbeat today said on his blog thinkbeat.blog that ""
"If a company like Reddit or Twitter derives most of its value from content that users write for free then it must provide APIs for anyone to download and manipulate that content."
I disagree that Reddit or Twitter derive value from content. They derive value from eyeballs and showing ads to those eyeballs. If people use APIs as a way to feed their eyeballs without looking at the ads, then Reddit or Twitter gain nothing in exchange for their massive expense of the hardware and staff required to run these services.
The other option is that people would pay to use Reddit or Twitter. But they would lose 90% of their users if they took that route, because what they do does not provide enough value that a typical user would pay for it. For most people, Reddit and Twitter are time sinks: mindless entertainment to consume to pass the time. In a prior generation they would be watching TV game shows or soap operas. They wouldn't pay $10 a month to use it, or even $10/year. They would just jump to the next best free platform and continue there.
> The other option is that people would pay to use Reddit or Twitter. But they would lose 90% of their users if they took that route, because what they do does not provide enough value that a typical user would pay for it.
I see this repeated all the time but I've never seen any evidence cited to support it.
Also, 90% of the users leaving when the site switches to a paid model doesn't necessarily mean the quality of the site or their profitability will go down. I'd pay a pretty hefty monthly fee for most of the social media sites that I've now stopped using as a result of their heavy handed strategies to maximize ad revenue.
Also, since when did we start deciding how much value a thing could potentially provide to an individual? Isn't that what "the free market" is supposed to sort out?
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.
> 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.
Such arguments are always just different forms of "everything on the internet must be free, always", which is a valid ideological position to hold, sure, but one should also realize that it is not going to work in the real world.
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 just consider anything I post on Internet like this comment to be donation to who ever hosts it... They can do anything they want with it, and take all the responsibility of things like hosting or safe keeping...
>Then there'd actually be a reason to get gilded up ...
I have to imagine reddit has already thought of this and come up with some justification for why it won't work - because the proposed strategy is just so incredibly lazy. Ultimately I suspect the data somehow suggests (a) the network provider has to provide free access in order to sustain the criticality of the social network, and (b) charging for something that other people are getting for free (a la twitter's 8$ checkmarks, reddit gold, etc.) is just not a very viable product strategy.
So Reddit has decided to stick 3rd party devs with the thorny problem of direct-monetization of users, wherein their cost to the developer is usage-billed while the revenue to the developer is presumably fixed; meanwhile Reddit can cash the checks from their mobile ads.
The trouble with a free API is that someone can write a $1 client that hides all the ads (the number one requested feature), and now your website has no income.
An ad-supported website has to get paid. On the web there is at least some stuff they can do to detect ad blockers, or show ads in sneaky ways that change over time and are hard to block.
That's a good argument against ads, because ads introduce a fundamental misalignment of incentives between the platform and the user. There are many ways reddit could build a collaborative business from their current situation. Advertising is very clearly not going to work, so they just need to look outside that box.
The context is a for-profit company. If a third-party using the API is doing so as a substitute for someone using the ad-supported site, the API will be priced to equal the revenue lost from using the site. If the people switching from UI to API are more valuable than usual, the API will cost more than usual.
If the API is being used to support something new -- i.e., not a replacement for a user on the site, but as a new revenue source -- it will be priced to maximize overall API revenue, or overall revenue as an indirect result of growth supported by the API. (Maybe it's one massive customer using it or 100,000 freemium developers.)
The idea that a company "must" do something doesn't make any sense. And the assertion that the company is harming itself is ultimately something the Board, acting on behalf of shareholders, is responsible for.
(FWIW, I agree Reddit is shooting itself in the foot.)
In my opinion, the author doesn't really think things through, it's just dropping some confident one-dimensional opinions without looking at multiple perspectives.
"The key thing here is social media sites don’t produce content. They merely host it. Millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available. Locking down an API breaks that social contract."
"Merely host it" is framed here like it's no big deal. It's a huge fucking deal. Giant social networks are incredibly complicated to run, and it's not only technical aspects that make it so. You can hate these companies all you want, but let's not be ridiculous in suggesting that they offer little to no value.
Second, the idea that content producers produce all the real value on the network is incomplete. First because of the reason mentioned above: the network itself (the plumbing and operation) has tremendous value and there would be no content without it. Second, because freely provided content in itself offers no financial value, in fact it starts out as a cost (hosting and moderation). Only when monetized does this content provide financial value. I know that users don't give a shit about that or are hostile to monetization but that doesn't change the fact that a large social network needs to cover costs.
Third, the idea that any user of a social network has the right to download/access the entirety of all content ever produced on it, and this being some right or social contract...is made up bullshit. Most people have no idea what an API even is, have no weird need to do data digging, it's not a common need or expectation at all.
Fourth, the AI problem is conveniently dodged. At Stackoverflow, moderators angrily demand their data dumps back, completely ignoring the reason why they were shut down in the first place: AI. Yet nobody engages with the point that the entirety of Stackoverflow might cease to exist and become obsolete because of it. That includes all the content those moderators put so much work in to curate.
In both cases, you're on a sinking ship and protest to actively sink it faster.
[+] [-] simonw|2 years ago|reply
If Reddit are cutting off free API access, that social contract no longer holds. Why should I work to benefit their service if they're hoarding the resulting data and not making it available to me or people like me in the future?
I thought I was vanishingly rare in caring about this kind of thing, but given the mass Reddit blackout over the changes to the API apparently I'm not!
[+] [-] zoogeny|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TheCoreh|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drbawb|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ineedtosleep|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amelius|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] duxup|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jmull|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tmpz22|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dahwolf|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 11235813213455|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agilecobol|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chc|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] opportune|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] senko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ambicapter|2 years ago|reply
Once you learn about motivated reasoning, you start to see it everywhere.
[+] [-] MagicMoonlight|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johannes1234321|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcow|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wbobeirne|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
People understand that a T-Mobile customer can send a text to an AT&T customer. They understand that a Samsung owner can call an iPhone owner.
Why do they accept that a Slack user can't send a message to a Discord user? Why do they accept that Google has made 11+ different messaging applications that aren't compatible with each other? Why do they accept that you can't call a Skype for business customer with Skype?
We've had 30 years of stagnation because messaging applications don't interoperate. That's why the story is always "Hey, remember back when ICQ used to work? You should try Skype, it really works..." Once Skype becomes successful at the two-sided market game the honeymoon is over and the vendor has no incentive to keep it working and they figure you'll keep trying to use it anyway.
If there were competition for both the server and the client there would be continuous pressure to keep the products working, and to improve them. So instead of Facebook Messenger being the same as AOL Instant Messenger except for Facebook, we'd have had 30 years of progress and would have apps that look like something out of The Jetsons.
[+] [-] CobrastanJorji|2 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] chihuahua|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnday|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ThinkBeat|2 years ago|reply
There is no such thing.
Faceboook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram whatever exist to make money, or whatever those who own it or run it wants.
It is your choice. You wish to spend your time adding value to a website someone else runs great. Does that give you rights? Nope.
Normally in extremely obfuscated ways, the contract you do enter into by using a site will tell you exactly that you have no rights at all and they own everything you do.
I agree that it can be unfair. But you actively decide to provide content. You cant make up the rules for the sites you do use. You can stop whenever you want. You can start your own site.
I did so a few years ago when I got sick of this shit. On the other hand, I have few visitors. I can howl in the wilderness. For me it is preferable.
If you do engage in one of the big social sites, you are given access to an enormous audience. You can post something that "goes viral". You get fame, site gets $$$$, maybe you get $$$. News can easily quote you from some of the big social sites.
How often do you: Thinkbeat today said on his blog thinkbeat.blog that ""
Compared to Such and Someone posted on Twitter...
[+] [-] SoftTalker|2 years ago|reply
I disagree that Reddit or Twitter derive value from content. They derive value from eyeballs and showing ads to those eyeballs. If people use APIs as a way to feed their eyeballs without looking at the ads, then Reddit or Twitter gain nothing in exchange for their massive expense of the hardware and staff required to run these services.
The other option is that people would pay to use Reddit or Twitter. But they would lose 90% of their users if they took that route, because what they do does not provide enough value that a typical user would pay for it. For most people, Reddit and Twitter are time sinks: mindless entertainment to consume to pass the time. In a prior generation they would be watching TV game shows or soap operas. They wouldn't pay $10 a month to use it, or even $10/year. They would just jump to the next best free platform and continue there.
[+] [-] uncletammy|2 years ago|reply
I see this repeated all the time but I've never seen any evidence cited to support it.
Also, 90% of the users leaving when the site switches to a paid model doesn't necessarily mean the quality of the site or their profitability will go down. I'd pay a pretty hefty monthly fee for most of the social media sites that I've now stopped using as a result of their heavy handed strategies to maximize ad revenue.
Also, since when did we start deciding how much value a thing could potentially provide to an individual? Isn't that what "the free market" is supposed to sort out?
[+] [-] beders|2 years ago|reply
Nothing is free, including providing and maintaining APIs.
Someone's gotta pay for the ramen, especially if you can't run ads.
[+] [-] malfist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thulesgold|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oth001|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alecbz|2 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] andrewaylett|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lacker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] williamcotton|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ProllyInfamous|2 years ago|reply
Then there'd actually be a reason to get gilded up, and 3rd-Party Apps would still work for those paying members.
[+] [-] drbawb|2 years ago|reply
I have to imagine reddit has already thought of this and come up with some justification for why it won't work - because the proposed strategy is just so incredibly lazy. Ultimately I suspect the data somehow suggests (a) the network provider has to provide free access in order to sustain the criticality of the social network, and (b) charging for something that other people are getting for free (a la twitter's 8$ checkmarks, reddit gold, etc.) is just not a very viable product strategy.
So Reddit has decided to stick 3rd party devs with the thorny problem of direct-monetization of users, wherein their cost to the developer is usage-billed while the revenue to the developer is presumably fixed; meanwhile Reddit can cash the checks from their mobile ads.
[+] [-] erulabs|2 years ago|reply
Confusing Free as in libre and Free as in gratis causes endless turmoil.
[+] [-] w0mbat|2 years ago|reply
An ad-supported website has to get paid. On the web there is at least some stuff they can do to detect ad blockers, or show ads in sneaky ways that change over time and are hard to block.
[+] [-] Blahah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbiemitchell|2 years ago|reply
If the API is being used to support something new -- i.e., not a replacement for a user on the site, but as a new revenue source -- it will be priced to maximize overall API revenue, or overall revenue as an indirect result of growth supported by the API. (Maybe it's one massive customer using it or 100,000 freemium developers.)
The idea that a company "must" do something doesn't make any sense. And the assertion that the company is harming itself is ultimately something the Board, acting on behalf of shareholders, is responsible for.
(FWIW, I agree Reddit is shooting itself in the foot.)
[+] [-] 88913527|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boolemancer|2 years ago|reply
No LLM required.
[+] [-] alecbz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahwolf|2 years ago|reply
"The key thing here is social media sites don’t produce content. They merely host it. Millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available. Locking down an API breaks that social contract."
"Merely host it" is framed here like it's no big deal. It's a huge fucking deal. Giant social networks are incredibly complicated to run, and it's not only technical aspects that make it so. You can hate these companies all you want, but let's not be ridiculous in suggesting that they offer little to no value.
Second, the idea that content producers produce all the real value on the network is incomplete. First because of the reason mentioned above: the network itself (the plumbing and operation) has tremendous value and there would be no content without it. Second, because freely provided content in itself offers no financial value, in fact it starts out as a cost (hosting and moderation). Only when monetized does this content provide financial value. I know that users don't give a shit about that or are hostile to monetization but that doesn't change the fact that a large social network needs to cover costs.
Third, the idea that any user of a social network has the right to download/access the entirety of all content ever produced on it, and this being some right or social contract...is made up bullshit. Most people have no idea what an API even is, have no weird need to do data digging, it's not a common need or expectation at all.
Fourth, the AI problem is conveniently dodged. At Stackoverflow, moderators angrily demand their data dumps back, completely ignoring the reason why they were shut down in the first place: AI. Yet nobody engages with the point that the entirety of Stackoverflow might cease to exist and become obsolete because of it. That includes all the content those moderators put so much work in to curate.
In both cases, you're on a sinking ship and protest to actively sink it faster.