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!

There was quite a lot of pushback since the consensus was many comments aren't just for the benefit of the OP but everyone (in fact sometimes the OP doesn't even appreciate the comments they receive but are nevertheless useful to others).

So Reddit walked it back but it does show many of the site's users are conscious of the broader utility of comments outside of just the smaller contextual interactions.

This I believe is generally called "digital sharecropping" https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634

> What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative.

General reply to other comments: y'all are right, the post is short and doesn't flesh out all the arguments necessary. But I think I captured the spirit of something about how we, the creators on the Internet, feel about the bargain we strike when we invest in sites like Reddit or Twitter or indeed, Hacker News here.

An example of something is someone posting that their AKG headphones will only charge on the USB-C plug if the other end is USB-A. I couldn't get mine to charge, and that was the answer. That answer existed only on Reddit, until recently when someone had that same problem on another forum.

One such project has been modding an old video game console. On multiple occasions when running into issues, search results are pointing me to reddit posts which I've tried to avoid in favour of alternative results but I find myself still needing more information only to discover the links are to blacked out subreddits - it has been brutal!

I've done this for a few coding things that I needed an answer fast. It does show how much will be lost if things don't improve, but like you I didn't want to fuel Reddit in any way (assuming the sub is even open anyway).

I don't understand why they don't just support OAuth and then the api usage would be by user, not by the app itself.

Otherwise apps like apollo technically would be some of the biggest "users" of the api.

What's wild to me isn't just the amount, it's the lack of time. In theory APollo might have enough users will to pay enough for them to profit (albiet with a fraction of the users). But because there's no time, and because people bought year long subscriptions, he's stuck with his subscribers paying less then their operating cost.

My take when Reddit said that Apollo cost them $20M a year, they weren't talking running costs but revenue potential because Apollo doesn't feed ads to its users.

Elon, Zuck, Bezos, Trump, Gates, Putin and now Reddit, all in the last 5-7 years have been doing things that are user or human hostile while holding some segment of our society hostage in the process.

Elon throwing a 42 billion dollar Twitter hissyfit, Bezos using Amazon's money and connections to lock sellers into their platform and then undercut them with cheap knockoffs, plus underpaying their front line employees as if they don't have enough money already, Trump with turning seemingly normal Republicans into walking cesspools of hate, Gates with the Windows 10/11 privacy and user right shitstorm, and now Reddit redlining their greed and attacking the users and apps that actually makes their site function while not offering any equivalent alternative, Putin tanking the entire country's human reserves and financial strengths to try to vaingloriously steal back a few hundred square miles of land.

All of these things happening in the same bundle of years makes me want to believe in Aliens or Armageddon or the Illuminati or something, because I can't bring myself to believe that the most powerful people in the world would be so selfishly stupid.

Selfish, yes, stupid, yes, but selfishly stupid? When they are surrounded by so many people whose life and lineage and future history depends on the glamorous and glowing successes of these people? And they all ignore all of them and do stupid things with no one checking their ego even the slightest?

How is that possible without an unseen third hand pulling the strings?

I don't know, and I don't think I believe there is something like that, but I suspect there is, and I can't shake that suspicion either.

OAuth breaks peoples brains and I can only imagine the tech / political debt reddit has

In fact heres the post where Apollo switched to OAuth some years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/44rd9g/apollo_be...

I'd like to a P2P-backed service to exist, where people can own all the data. I guess that abuse would be a challenge, but there's probably enough good ideas around bittorrent and cryptocurrency to make sharing and trust/voting possible.

My dream is that people could have a ~raspberry at home helping host the internet in a sparse way. Would it be more inefficient than a centralized service? sure, but decentralization is inherently more expensive, yet better thanks to true shared ownership.

$ curl https://www.reddit.com > /dev/null

    % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                   Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  100  970k    0  970k    0     0   840k      0 --:--:--  0:00:01 --:--:--  840k

The biggest problem is actually funding. The centralized site puts ads on it or tells VCs they could, and then has money to pay for developers or other things that increase the user base.

It's the same reason Linux is used by programmers and not graphic designers. If there is anything deficient about it in the programmer's workflow they fix it for everybody. If there is anything deficient about it in the graphic designer's workflow, they don't know how to fix it so they get a Mac and run Adobe. Social media sites work more like the latter than the former until someone finds a way around that.

Also, with enough data, having to get only what you care about is probably faster.

Reddit had 17 years of track record of providing access, which had eventually bought my trust. They're setting that trust on fire right now.

(I actually did run a startup on top of Twitter's API between 2010-2013 - I'm VERY glad not to have to worry about that any more!)

I'm not talking about this in terms of being an app developer: I'm talking about it in terms of being a regular user posting content on the site.

If you rug-pull my expectations on access to that data in the future, don't be surprised if I find somewhere else to spend my time.

What reddit is doing is horrible for the users. Reddit benefitted massively from 3rd party apps making it easier for users to contribute, comment, moderate, etc. Without those users' efforts the platform is worthless. That is the issue here.

As far as refusing to contribute, I don't see the practical difference between that and refusing to help someone in trouble out in the street. You get even less for your trouble in the latter case, but I'm sure you wouldn't demand some value back for answering a question in real life even to a stranger you'll never meet again. Sure, a middleman is profiting off of your answer here, but getting hung up on the share of value is how so much of the web shifted from free collaborative passion projects to for-profit Patreon paywalls and the like.

What about just to answer the guy who had the question?

Looking at what Reddit has done, it makes things obvious to me that the APIs that are free to use are only a gimmick and companies can pull the plug on you as a consumer at any moment. I mean, I can easily imagine that Reddit originally published its API to look "cool" but look at what money has done today.

Why could you not make an offer to buy out Apollo or other 3rd party clients before you closed out your API Reddit? Fuck your leadership and the so called idiots on your management team that pulled ideas straight from a dumpyard.

It's worked the couple times I instinctively sought reddit advice.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390106/moderation-s...

Actually, I'm not even sure the AI companies don't do this already. If I'd start such a company, I'd invest in a generic crawler once, instead of building countless integrations for all the different, proprietary APIs or dump formats.

It's the subreddit mods who are making the data inaccessible to you, NOT Reddit.

Got it, thanks.

reddit is doing this because their investors want them to be a multi-billion dollar company, not because they already are.

Tons of them are basically just protesting since they won't be able to exert said petty power as efficiently as they used to.

I can't imagine getting to a point where I'd defend Reddit powermods, even over spez himself. But even in your very shaky analogy, the mods are at worse the petty bourgeois, not some sort of proletariat of Reddit wtf.

Yes, yes, Reddit is no where near as bad as a coal mine, that's why it's an analogy.

> I can't imagine getting to a point where I'd defend Reddit powermods, even over spez himself.

Why not? Workers vs. Capital, if you can't side with the workers, then you are siding with the moneyed interests, and I can't figure why an average person would do such a thing.

But I also think that powermods are a net negative for the website and have turned moderation on Reddit into a joke.

At the end of the day I think users are the "proles" here. And most of them just want to use Reddit for things like tech support or purchasing advice or discussing video games.

That a few mods are able to take ownership of communities that aren't theirs (the community is the users, not the mods imo) and close them down is pretty meh.

I personally would never use Reddit once RiF stops working (and I mean it, I can't even get myself to use the old Reddit interface).

But this is a weird temper tantrum imo that is typical of Reddit; a very tiny minority of third party apps users and even commercial third party app devs shutting down stuff that isn't theirs because they dont have it their way. Again, basically 90% of users just use the new Reddit app and website sadly enough.

A ceasefire during a battle is an example of a social contract. Neither side shoots until the other does. Once someone shoots, the other side responds with everything they have, to make an example of the side that shot first.

Not eating your coworkers' food in the office fridge is another example of a social contract. Once someone violates it, people either stop putting food in the fridge, or start petty games of bringing random leftovers dosed with ex-lax to work and leaving them in the fridge.

A social contract isn't "superseded by a legal contract"; a social contract is relied upon in preference to a legal contract. The legal system only applies when a given social contract is broken and dissolved by one party breaching it, thus leaving no recourse other than the underlying legal reality.

The social contract for Reddit, that did exist until it was breached, was "Reddit lets people consume its data for free; and in exchange, users act to curate and maintain and grow the data, rather than actively polluting/destroying/lessening the data." Now that that social contract is dissolved, users are doing everything they can to make Reddit a shithole.

This is absolutely false. A ceasefire is not a social contract. It's just bizarre to even claim this, as ceasefires are most often enacted in the context of ceasefire.. uh, treaties.

> Not eating your coworkers' food in the office fridge is another example of a social contract.

This is a better example (though still a very poor one, as we have laws against theft), and the key here is that a social contract is implied or implicit. Why would free API access be an implication of using reddit's service? Almost no other social media website does that.

Because they offered free API access for 17 years.

Same way Heroku breached a social contract when they got rid of their free tier: if you offer something like that for more than a decade, people will reasonably expect it to continue and will be angry with you if you pull the rug on them.

That's not a social contract, it's the definition of entitlement. By no interpretation is it reasonable to expect anybody to offer a free service indefinitely. Thinking otherwise is just a form of social parasitism that strips the host of its own agency, because they were dumb enough to make a handshake agreement decades ago.

Like decrying your favorite band for "selling out" and evolving with the times. You'd rather they only make music a diminishing fanbase wants, until they starve?

Even child support agreements can be renegotiated every 3 years and last up to 21 years at most if your ex's attorney is particularly conniving. You likely renegotiate your own salary every 1-3 years as well. Reddit stuck to their end of the agreement for 17 years (already impressive for anything in tech!), it's now untenable, but fuck them for not going insolvent.

Only the generations raised with the internet seem to have the expectation that if you offer anything for free, you're expected to continue doing so forever even if it kills you.

I’m guessing that was what they were referring to.

Also known as "armistice treaties." (Where "armistice" is preferred, because otherwise "ceasefire" would have two very different meanings.)

Yes, an armistice usually causes a ceasing... of fire... at the site of any battles that happen to be going on at the time. But you wouldn't usually call what happens on the front lines as a result "a ceasefire." You'd call it "the battle being quit by both sides." During an armistice, both sides usually pack up and go back to their respective bases to be held for redeployment.

"A ceasefire", when the term actually comes up in practice in relation to "phenomena you can experience during a battle", does not usually refer to the ceasing-of-fire that exists as part of the enactment of an armistice. Rather, a ceasefire is used mostly to refer to a temporary, tactical Nash-equilibrium state that lasts a few hours or days; is local to a particular battleground; and is enacted bottom-up by the boots on the ground just not shooting anybody for a while.

(A ceasefire is usually considered an example of a principal-agent problem — during a battle, the known Commander's Intent is to drive your opponent to surrender. A ceasefire does not accomplish this; in fact, it gives both sides time to replenish materiel, and thereby "gives ground" on a war of attrition. But a ceasefire is a state that's better for everyone who's actually there at the site of the battle — so it can be held to by social contract of the people who are actually there.)

Mind you, the phenomena of "a ceasefire" doesn't exist much any more in its original usage (land wars), as land wars have evolved past the point where ceasefires are feasible, due to the introduction of over-the-top raids, guerilla warfare, precision drone strikes, and other approaches designed to punish stillness and allow top-down enforcement of bottom-level participation. Ceasefires still come up pretty often in naval combat, though! (And they can also still come up in land wars in edge-case situations when a particular land-war battle has the properties of a naval battle — e.g. if two strike forces of armored vehicles meet.)

---

I should mention, as well, that there can be ceasing-of-fire during an armistice, where both sides continue to just sit there guarding the lines they had established for the whole armistice period. This is the case mostly for wars of conquest being fought to claim scraps of land inch by inch. (There's a well-known one of those going on right now, in fact.)

During an armistice in this kind of war, the zone between the previous front lines of each side will stay watched, to make sure neither side "slips" the lines forward a bit in the other's absence. This creates a No Man's Land [or eventually a Demilitarized Zone], where both sides agree that no one from either side may enter as long as the armistice holds. (A good example of such a No Man's Land / DZ exists between North and South Korea, which have maintained such an armistice for decades now.)

The soldiers posted to guard a No Man's Land / DZ aren't usually the same soldiers used for combat — so for the soldiers who were on the front, they do still experience the armistice as "and then we were picked up and taken back home." The ceasing-of-fire is just one step in that higher-level "clocking out" process.

(The only time you'll have the same soldiers sitting there during an armistice that were originally delivered there to fight the battle, is if the armistice period isn't expected to last very long. And even then, only if both sides are willing to "tip their hand" to reveal their lack-of-confidence in how long the armistice will last.)

Legally sure, it is also legal to be a jerk but in most circles/societies there is social contract to not be. Social contracts are often built on top of legal contracts where you live by the social contract and fall back on the legal protections of the legal contract where that fails. Most ToSs and contracts with social media companies are one sided though so for the average user there is not much to fall back on.

I think why people use social contracts on top of legal ones is because it is hard to get all of the details right in a legal document while in a social contract is normally more flexible and can change through time with iterative back and forth and therefore can make both sides better off compared to if they just stuck with the legal framework.

It remains to be seen who is thinking wishfully. If Reddit dies because their users all go away, there really may have been a social contract which Reddit breached. Reddit has a ToS which may attempt to supersede such a social contract but it doesn't necessarily.

Reddit: We could sell API access to your answers, per our TOS

reddit poster: k

Reddit: We're gonna sell API access to your answers, per our TOS

reddit poster: then nevermind

Both have a superseding TOS but the social contract is still appreciable

The social contract states (allegedly, at least; we shall see) that producers agree to produce content in perpetuity so long as Reddit plays nice with the data. With that contract broken, production may cease.

Yes, Reddit can (try, at least) get away with anything they claim in the ToS — but community members have every right to step away and render Reddit valueless because they have been told that they are not valued.

Pretending that a legal contract supersedes a social contract is wishful thinking. They are orthogonal.

The above legal concept is distinct from the term “social contract” that is a sociological term and has a wider definition that a mere legal meaning. Most of our laws are intended to capture concepts that have wider social and cultural relevance to the society to which they apply.

“Marriage” by example is a term with both a distinct legal meaning in many legal jurisdictions as well as a wider sociological conception that can vary from culture to culture.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

"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 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.

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...

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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...

“Sent from my iPhone.”

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.

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.

Once you learn about motivated reasoning, you start to see it everywhere.

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 ...

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.

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".

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".

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.

I even remember when Facebook first announced their support thinking "Oh sweet, now I can message all my Facebook friends from my current chat app." And when it launched, I could! But then I realized I didn't really want to.

And it wasn't long before support was dropped. I'm not sure anyone noticed.

I was working for a company over a decade ago that saw the military purchase a piece of software from us specifically for its messaging and XMPP based capabilities. We were requested to rewrite chunks of our application just to meet their needs. Makes me wonder if it is still in use somewhere.

Meanwhile, every European techie under the sun is still breathlessly shouting "WHATSAPP! WHATSAPP!" in my ear. "Why would any unevolved caveman still use SMS?" etc.

Well, maybe because Meta sucks and I think protocols are better. I think SMS/RCS/etc. based texting will outlast WhatsApp, and anyone in 10-20 years is free to look up my email here and let me know if I'm right.

That was a hard-won victory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment

A hundred years later, we've got the same story, except today's Big Tech had wised up.

But keep in mind that EU legislature (and "government", such as it is) is as dysfunctional as the US one, just in different ways, don't expect much enlightened lawmaking there either.

"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.

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.

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 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...

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

If you don't want to pay with money or your attention how are they going to pay for all that traffic end engineering?

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?

Then there'd actually be a reason to get gilded up, and 3rd-Party Apps would still work for those paying members.

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.

Confusing Free as in libre and Free as in gratis causes endless turmoil.

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.

Like charging for API access? Yeah, that went well...

Or if Reddit doesn't want to handle billing the users directly for whatever reason, require signin and charge the devs per user. Even some sort of grace period and reasonable prices per-request would have made a big difference, Apollo dev's hard blocker seemed to be conflict with existing billing cycles.

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.)

No LLM required.

"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.

What do you mean you want a six figure salary? How incredibly greedy of you.

It's fair to pay you only what you need to survive.

Reddit has accepted many millions of man-hours of labor. They didn't kick down anybody's door and take it.

Yes, "accept or receive (someone or something)" is indeed the literal dictionary definition of "take". Thanks for subbing in an alternate word that means the exact same thing. I am sure we have all derived great value from your efforts. Or at least a hearty laugh at the pointlessness of it.

Everyone seems to be fixated on the idea that the API should be free and no-one seems to be mentioning that there's some very successful business models built around charging people access to content which the parent company didn't generate. LexisNexis, for legal searches, Elsevier for scientific papers, Facebook, for random graph searches (and occasional political data scraping), Twitter, etc.

It feels scummy to me too to take something free and charge people for it, but it's also not this unique thing people seem to be screaming about. Just go somewhere else if the API is that important to you. (Like hackernews). :)

Similarly, I can look up unreported senior courts cases on the 'Judicial Decisions Online' section of the courts of New Zealand website, for free. But what about the notes written by experienced barristers in the law reports? What about the database cataloguing every judgment that has referred to every other judgment, giving an indication of whether the judgment is still good law?

It seems very popular these days to crap on businesses like LexisNexis and it does sometimes feel like they're taking the mickey given their prices and the terrible web interface to their databases. The fact you can't even 'open in new tab' properly is infuriating. But they're not just selling access to something that ought to be free, as many people seem to like to claim. They provide a lot more than just the raw judgments and statutes.

> This Reddit / Stack Overflow API drama feels weird to me as a user. It's USER submitted data. R/SO didn't create it.

> So what ChatGPT scraped it? They're benefiting the same users who contributed the content on R/SO, and then some.

> It's not like ChatGPT is cloning them.

> It would be like if Printing Houses tried to block authors from publishing their content as an eBook or Audiobook.

> Users contributing to your ecosystem doesn't give you perpetual dominion over 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.

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).

I don't think any of that is true. I don't think people are thinking about third party app users or about the wide availability of content when they post things to Reddit or other social media websites at all. I don't think they're thinking about people using third party apps. I think they're thinking on a much more mundane level.

The whole concept of a "social contract" is fraught with difficulty too. It's a relatively niche idea to try to explain why people follow laws, or how laws can be justified. The idea is that we obey the law for the same reason we obey a contract: exchange of consideration for mutual benefit. But that's not actually a very good explanation, for a long list of reasons, and it certainly can't justify laws of universal application given that eg. children can't be bound to contracts they've signed and we apply laws to everyone even if they don't want us to. The concept certainly doesn't make sense in the context of a web API for a social media website. Even if everyone "expects" that their "content" will be widely available, it does not follow that there is any obligation, legal or otherwise, on Reddit to make it widely available. There just is no logical connection there unless you build one. This post does not. It simply asserts that APIs for content sites must be free. Why? Because!

So why should the site that’s hosting content not be allowed to have a business model that pays the bills?

Given a choice between the following, which would you rather?

* insidious adverts that compromise the impartiality of the platform (because thou shalt not offend the advertiser)

* charging for API access, which affects a tiny proportion of users, and would not in any way prevent you accessing your own content (subject access and data portability is guaranteed by data protection law)

App makers will get angry and stop at some point

This seems backwards to me. It's obviously a move to try (and likely fail, assuming screen scraping works well enough) getting in on the AI money train by charging for Reddit's data being used to train LLMs. I don't think Appolo and other 3P clients are the target of this API change, even if the results of it are anti-competitive and should be stopped regardless of intent.

It’s why I have to admit that I am not sympathetic to third-party apps like Apollo. They implicitly violated the social contract I recognize by providing users with an experience that circumvents Reddit’s attempts to make money. Reddit responded by finding a way to put a price on the ad-free experience.

If you think that APIs for content sites must be free, I think you need to offer more to justify it then this does.

i would like to rather contrast it with the notions of web3 and people wanting ownership of their content, or at least be able to use the platforms without ads or data harvesting.

while the real argument in this post seems to be that the api should be priced "fairly", we need to recognize the limited revenue streams the site has been employing till now, including the meaningless awards.

the underlying costs might be apple and oranges, but the ads till now have not been super-intrusive à la youtube with its upto 5-6 continuous ads, or more relatably 5 banner ads or autoplay videos like many publications.

moreover, given the technically inclined audience here, we can all agree that they have not been fighting back adblockers on their web ui like twitch or news websites.

i have no websites with major traffic or ever got blessed with the "HN effect" on my web infrastructure, but those who have can attest to the unaccounted costs of running a public site for free. so i find it ironic that the most backlash has been from this crowd, who also tend to be happy to pay for chatgpt plus for personal use at a monthly rate costlier* than prime and netflix combined.

[0] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/s6686