33 ms·
Reddit will begin charging for access to its API
- nektro 3y ago@dang this title is awful and doesnt match
- reset-password 3y agoLLMs already have problems with fact vs fiction. I don't see how Reddit of all places has "valuable data" in that regard.
- nekoashide 3y agoTop upvoted comments can filter out the useless information and then it can be trained on actual data and refined.
- Arrath 3y agoExcept when top voted comments are hivemind approved 'funny' quips/responses, or in reply to exercises in creative writing like half the posts in relationshipadvice, iwantthemanager, nuclear/pettyrevenge, etc
- aydyn 3y agoIs this a joke that I'm missing? Top reddit posts are frequently trash filled with misinformation.
- uptownfunk 3y agoI think the value is in the examples it provides of language.
- minimaxir 3y agoMany popular LLMs already include large amount of Reddit comment data which is (usually) cited in their respective papers.
- surgical_fire 3y agoReddit also has a problem with fact vs fiction.
- bena 3y agoIs reddit going to pay users? Or are they just going to collect the content generate by its users and then turn around and charge people to access it? I think we all know that it's more column B than column A. And while I'm not entirely comfortable with LLMs consuming all of that content without reimbursing the creators of that content. I don't see how Reddit charging for its API is different on any meaningful level.
- Rimintil 3y ago> Is reddit going to pay users? They don't need to as they claim a royalty-free license [0] over all content posted to reddit (Section 5). [0] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoThen maybe users should poison the content they post to make their data worthless unless Reddit decides to compensate its users who provide valuable info instead of updoots.
- glonq 3y agoReddit already exploits unpaid moderators to create and manage its communities, so I don't imagine that Reddit is in a hurry to compensate users for selling their data to Big AI.
- taurath 3y agoContent platforms are inevitably reduced in value by monetization
- datavirtue 3y agoI can consume HN content, turn around and use it to derive value. That value spills onto others in various forms or maybe I keep all the value for myself (can't think of how I would horde value without sharing because I would need to offer something to others to receive value myself). Nonetheless, markets don't operate efficiently when people horde shit.
- rebelde 3y agoHow do they plan to keep Google from using its search index of Reddit for training? Or keep OpenAI from using Common Crawl? Do they simply add "No AI" to their TOS?
- minimaxir 3y agoThese proposed changes to Reddit API are highly implied to also affect third-party apps, such as Apollo for iOS: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r... As noted in the comments, the API changes will also affect the quick .json representations of Reddit pages, which were an easy way to play with real-world data for beginners learning coding/data science.
- selfhoster69 3y ago> quick .json representations of Reddit pages Had no idea this existed... replacing the slash at the end of the URL and appending .json will output the post in JSON. Quite nice!
- ok123456 3y agoalso .rss
- imadierich 3y ago[dead]
- nothrowaways 3y ago> “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Totally agree, no question about that. But data comes from users. Shouldn't they also get paid?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0xDEF 3y agoReddit has been experimenting with both fiat and Ethereum based approaches to compensate users. But we are talking about cents.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoExactly. Users who contribute to the community of a for-profit enterprise that monetizes their contribution should also get paid. I remember the good ol' days before reddit, where every community had its own forum, ran for the community, not for profit. Sure, they were running some ads to keep the lights on, but those were non targeted ads, just generic stuff based on the community. With Dpreview dying along with so many other forums that used to serve various communities on the decline, Reddit becoming the one-stop-shop for all communities is the worst possible outcome.
- unglaublich 3y agoThey are getting paid: in the form of a discount on the cost for using the platform.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoWhat's the cost of using the platform?
- Dracophoenix 3y agoWhatever it takes to pay for servers, software engineers, and security teams divided by however many people are using with in a given time period.
- paxys 3y ago> The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I. If this also extends to independent third-party clients then that's basically going to be the end of Reddit.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xen2xen1 3y agoInevitable. Everyone wants to get paid.
- say_it_as_it_is 3y agoOn the positive side, training an AI with Reddit content will ensure that the AI is deeply flawed and will not surpass average human intelligence
- blibble 3y agoif you go to delete your comments remember to overwrite them first because reddit don't actually delete anything (plainly visible in GDPR dump)
- digitallyfree 3y agoHonestly your Reddit comment was probably already archived on Pushshift as soon as you posted it.
- blibble 3y agohosted by one guy? a single letter from a solicitor to his hosting would probably shut that down
- minimaxir 3y agoPushshift has been around for about a decade now and has dealt with its fare share of deletion requests.
- BeFlatXIII 3y agoThat's why we need more second-tier archive mirrors. Redundancy is important.
- colmvp 3y agoTotally understandable. That said, on subreddits I see people who post content without attribution all the time. I recall in /r/aww you can't directly link to an Instagram post but you can "steal" the image and post it, and it's optional as to whether or not you link to the Instagram post within the comments. Likewise, people take videos from YouTube/TikTok and re-host it on Reddit. In smaller subreddits people will post entire pay-walled articles as if writers only get paid in likes.
- dahwolf 3y agoVery common on Twitter too. You'll have an account like "Science is amazing" or something similar which seems uplifting and does show relevant/great content. Given the positive name and quality content, they get popular quickly. But they never attribute or give back. They gain millions of followers whilst the original creators of the content get left behind. One of many things broken on the internet.
- glonq 3y agoSo this is how SkyNet or the Matrix starts, I guess. Any AI trained using the content from Reddit would obviously conclude that humankind deserves to be eradicated. /s
- krono 3y agoWe are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
- warkdarrior 3y agoYou forgot: Please upvote.
- moomoo11 3y agoGod I hope this happens someday to us. Except we are humans so we have already planned for this, and we can take out whatever adversarial alien civilization exists, however advanced they may be on paper. Even if it takes millennia we should be the dominant species in the galaxy and beyond. I’m pro human species so I just want us to win.
- swader999 3y agoWhose to say it hasn't happened to us already?
- mg 3y agoChatGPT is on a trajectory to overtake Reddit in popularity. And every interaction from users with ChatGPT is valuable content provided to OpenAI. Most people don't realize this, but every question contains information. When a user asks "Which city is better for digital nomads, Berlin or Lisbon?", they have given out a bunch of information. That there is something called "digital nomads". That there are cities called "Berlin" and "Lisbon". That those seem to be considered good for "digital nomads". And even more so when the chat continues. If ChatGPT praises how nice a city is for studying and the users replies "I don't study. I need a cheap apartment with fast internet", the user provided information about the preferences of "digital nomads", that apartments can be cheap or expensive, that apartments have internet, that internet can be faster or slower.
- circuit10 3y agoIt doesn’t learn in real time from the chats, though the feedback buttons can be used for training (but I imagine OpenAI review it first)
- minimaxir 3y agoThe primary reasons people visit Reddit are a) timely news that would not be present in a pretrained LLM and b) human discussions around said news. No, Agents that can query current information do not fix these issues.
- alfalfasprout 3y agoThis is not how LLMs work at all. Once your chat session ends that's it. Updating the weights is expensive (although it's done semi regularly). And in updating weights the training datasets' quality becomes an issue. Folks are drastically underestimating the "grey goo" problem when it comes to training data. Now that AI generated content is so cheap to generate, the quality of training datasets is going to plummet.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tomohelix 3y ago
- _jab 3y agoThe New York Times' style guide is starting to look pretty dated. This has gotta be the first time I've seen "L.L.M." as opposed to just "LLM".
- minimaxir 3y agoI asked the author about that: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1648374713130045440 https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1648374713130045440
- gnopgnip 3y agoThe commenters own the copyright
- crakenzak 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230418182954/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230418182954/https://www.nytim...
- paxys 3y agoReddit wants to get paid for content it hosts. Soon Reddit's users will want a cut of it for content they create. Then all the places these users are copying content from will want their share. There's no solution here. Either the web stays (mostly) open and free-for-all like it is now or everyone sets up their own little walls and ends the party.
- wyldberry 3y agoSeems like it will just continue the pattern of things decentralizing and then re-centralizing later. The only constant is the change.
- _siis 3y agoIf you are paywalled, try here https://archive.ph/X3Zf3 https://archive.ph/X3Zf3
- datavirtue 3y agoReddit already derived their remuneration from making their site public. Now they want paid again? Maybe they should lock their entire site behind a paywall.
- gumballindie 3y agoWell obviously. All commercial ai must be trained with licensed data.
- c7DJTLrn 3y agoReddit should consider paying its moderators. Or employ moderators who don't use their vast unchecked powers to astroturf the site on behalf of shadowy companies.
- immibis 3y agoI moderated two large subreddits (on various accounts). They responded to this by permanently banning both the accounts and the subreddits. They don't want users.
- dahwolf 3y agoThat's not really the point, the issue is between AI companies and Reddit, specifically regarding API access.
- c7DJTLrn 3y agoI'm being snarky because Reddit wants to get paid while already profiting from free labor.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoI'm not an AI company but I believe these changes will impact me
- corbulo 3y agoSociety would not be better off if reddit mods had more economic power. The latter point isn't a bug it's a feature. Reddit is designed to function that way. The owners/execs have never expressed any interest in countering it outside of the limpest lip service imaginable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- klabb3 3y agoWhat a twist of fate! The social media generation companies built their success on aggregating other people’s content and offering new ways to interact with it. “No we’re just linking to what other sites provide for free”. Now, there’s a new leather jacket in town. “We’re just training on data that you already provide for free”. Of course it’s fun to watch a turf war, and we can all cheer for our favorite team and quibble about who deserves a punch in the gut. But, we also need to keep an eye on the horizon. This will change the world, even and especially the spaces that we currently rely on. Just look at what happened to legacy media when the aggregators came: it largely turned into blogspam and clickbait. Comment sections (like this one) aren’t perfect, but they’re a damn good pressure valve for regular people to interact with the world. What will happen to those, for instance?
- brucethemoose2 3y agoTheres plenty of incentive for people to shoot the breeze and shout into the void on comment sections. Typing to an LLM just isnt the same, especially with the amnesiac ones we have now. That being said, I don't agree about Reddit comment quality... its just generally not horrible, with the better part of it being old or in niche subs on niche topics (like fandoms or memes) that the LLM trainers are avoiding anyway.
- klabb3 3y ago> Theres plenty of incentive for people to […] shout into the void on comment sections. Typing to an LLM just isnt the same[…] I am concerned with the opposite, that LLMs will shout into our comment sections. For instance, building a convincing sentiment manipulating bit network will be dirt cheap and easy. Even here on HN there’s a financial incentive to flood the place with bots to promote tech products. > I don't agree about Reddit comment quality... its just generally not horrible That’s fine, but the important thing is that most comments are written by real people who wasted time to write it. Not just that, but language is used as a marker. You can tell when someone talks about a subject they know a lot about. This ability to judge for yourself, based on the content alone, will be eroded. Anything can sound convincing, even to the trained ear. This makes content-oriented communities like Reddit and HN particularly vulnerable.
- dogleash 3y ago18 years and still no business model?
- anigbrowl 3y agoHN is also an input to OpenAI's LLMs so look forward to being able to redeem your karma for OpenAI shares on a 1:1 basis.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoRelated to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35617763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35617763 ("Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems"; an aside, but I much prefer the title of this post I'm commenting on as it describes the actual change) and it's hard to find this particularly disagreeable. Especially considering: > Reddit’s API will remain free to developers who want to build apps and bots that help people to use Reddit, as well as to researchers who wish to study Reddit for strictly academic or noncommercial purposes. > But companies that “crawl” Reddit for data and “don’t return any of that value” to users will have to pay up,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The Times.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago> But companies that “crawl” Reddit for data It's not possible to hide crawling at a large enough scale, right? At some point, certain IPs/user agents will (should be?) hit with CAPTCHAs to be able to have access to content and no amount of user agent/cookie/session/whatever spoofing will get around that, yeah?
- wswope 3y agoCat & mouse game. If you’re defending against a whitehat business scraping with curl from data center IPs, sure. Against a less-savory actor using hundreds of IPs from residential proxies/compromised hosts, you’re gonna have a rough time, especially if you’re unwilling or unable to use aggresive fingerprinting or (vomit) CloudFlare. Not to mention CAPTCHAs are generally already a solved problem for scrapers.
- pixl97 3y agoClosing the barn door after the horse has already bolted. Pulling data off Reddit now will likely give you a very large amount of polluted data from LLMs. I mean, yea it could be useful for some broad topics at this point, but still likely to contain a lot of GPTs own feedback. It's likely that companies like OpenAI will just use their old reddit dataset, and then move to scraping things like YouTube for not just text, but audio and imagery too.
- welshwelsh 3y agoIt doesn't really matter if some of the data is generated by LLMs. It's possible for LLMs to improve themselves by training on their own output, there is no strict requirement for "fresh" content. If it's mixed with human content and gets human feedback through voting that's great training data.
- vctrm67 3y agoWhat if an LLM generates absolute crap that then gets upvoted by bots?
- tacker2000 3y agoInteresting… i guess google wont be charged because of the backlinks but ChatGPT will be, because they just show an answer to one’s query and dont actually show any of the “original content” in context, and therefore no back-traffic for reddit.
- gumballindie 3y agoA sensible choice. Now only if open source developers would update their licenses, perhaps a new GPL license, to restrict reselling of IP through AI models. These folks need to adhere to rules if we are to have a healthy ecosystem.
- heavyset_go 3y agoThe argument AI businesses use is that their use of copyrighted work is fair use, which means that there is no license that would prevent your IP from being used by AI models. If that holds up legally, the best you can do is to try to stop your content from being scraped or not release it at all.
- gumballindie 3y agoIf that argument holds then indeed there is no reason to create content. Although not sure how that argument can stand in a free society.
- immibis 3y agoIn a free society everything is fair game for AI. What you want is actually the opposite of a free society.
- krono 3y agoReddit does not own their users' content, however - they would also be simple resellers. All that's happening here is that they have failed to monetise where others are succeeding, and now they are positioning themselves to get a piece of that pie. The right thing for them to do morally, would be to implement content visibility/privacy controls for their users similar to what Facebook offers (strange feeling to be referring to Facebook in this context).
- gumballindie 3y agoMy hope is that large players sealing off their content will motivate individuals to protect theirs. It brings awareness that their data is harvested and sold in ways never seen before, and is then used against them. Ideally those who make free software are the first to understand the implications. Basically what I want is that all models trained on open source data or user created content without proper licensing are also open source and free.
- jug 3y agoSo the title is not correct? API access is free. Crawling is not? A major title change came from the New York Times source that is "Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems". Now that makes it much more clear what this is all about and why it is happening right now.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> So the title is not correct? API access is free. They are going to charge for API access, but it will remain free for more limited purposes.
- Zren 3y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_few_calls_with_reddit_today_about_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... * Offering an API is expensive, third party app users understandably cause a lot of server traffic ... * To this end, Reddit is moving to a paid API model for apps. The goal is not to make this inherently a big profit center, but to cover both the costs of usage, as well as the opportunity costs of users not using the official app (lost ad viewing, etc.) * They spoke to this being a more equitable API arrangement, where Reddit doesn't absorb the cost of third party app usage, and as such could have a more equitable footing with the first party app and not favoring one versus the other as as Reddit would no longer be losing money by having users use third party apps * The API cost will be usage based, not a flat fee, and will not require Reddit Premium for users to use it, nor will it have ads in the feed. Goal is to be reasonable with pricing, not prohibitively expensive. * Free usage of the API for apps like Apollo is not something they will offer, and thus me offering free usage of the app will likely be very difficult, Apollo will almost certainly have to move to an Apollo Ultra only (AKA subscription) model ...
- VLM 3y ago"There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy" Yes that is indeed Reddit in a nutshell. May not want Reddit content in your next ChatGPT model, so not necessarily a bad thing.
- shagie 3y agoGift link for paywall bypass: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html?unlocked_article_code=TNoqm1jRuETVpKaEs3HNHf64jitU0Sh5ze4mNj4isRRrOLPVu33NR4pR_1Fur4qxMJyk2o1wxfnET3z81LARJCOj7GPD4hiF5Nc5-y2DtDg9mquujeImb-BSZld2SoGYtr8C1tj0JQbwTn3SsMHOcr2H-R5UCV-XaPOVwE_oIcScQe5-atz2kS9jS0x10BVdLD11KVkCOMVaf5SjB7NTeFTTEaMdWLqqSSS2yQAAPZSEWALpl2GPKyF2rXEmmFh05n8ubXj4oUeLLn-MQBLtS2nlywlW57bZHRp6lsbeSvFffH9cWVCaClzU2CMfi8eJ3UlScsvAm8zXxv6Lpf3_1WpzqIw&giftCopy=1_CurrentCopy&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-open...
- Tanjreeve 3y agoAnd so the massive behaviour change in response to ChatGPTs "everything is free" model begins.
- StephenSmith 3y agoDoes this mean third party apps like baconreader will break?
- consumer451 3y agoRelated thread including comments from the creator of the Apollo app: > Funny timing, given the post yesterday and my praise for how communicative Reddit has been, but today there's a comparatively much more vague post about changes to the Reddit API. > I posted in that thread and asked a few questions which as of the time of posting have not been answered. > Shortly after the post they emailed me about a meeting, which I've replied to and will keep you all in the loop on. > - Christian https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12qxo6l/reddit_today_announced_changes_to_the_reddit_api/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12qxo6l/reddit_t...
- mattrighetti 3y agoYeah, what about Apollo which is probably the only reason why I still use Reddit? EDIT: I guess it’s safe. > Reddit’s API will remain free to developers who want to build apps and bots that help people use Reddit, as well as to researchers who wish to study Reddit for strictly academic or noncommercial purposes.
- stanislavb 3y agoOh nooo
- deergomoo 3y agoThe cynic in me thinks this will slowly morph into charging access for third-party apps too. Third-party apps don't show ads; there's no reason ads couldn't be included in the feed and required to be shown as a condition of using the API, but I imagine it makes tracking impressions etc far more difficult. Any new features they add also need to either be incorporated into the API or remain unavailable for those users. My only hope is that third-party apps remain niche enough that Reddit leaves them be; the first-party experiences are all awful to the point where I would probably just stop using Reddit if third-party offerings become unavailable.
- Euphorbium 3y agoApollo should ditch reddit and make their own social network.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoThis somewhat reminds me of the Twitter APIpocalypse from a decade ago, which the article forgot to mention...
- eric-hu 3y agoThere's no morphing. This announcement includes 3rd party apps. Link from a sister comment, written by the Apollo dev: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_few_calls_with_reddit_today_about_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... * Edit * They also might be pulling a Tumblr. I really hope they don't. > For NSFW content, they were not 100% sure of the answer, but thought that it would no longer be possible to access via the API, I asked how they balance this with plans for the API to be more equitable with the official app, and there was not really an answer but they did say they would look into it more and follow back up. I would like to follow up more about this, especially around content hosting on other websites that is posted to Reddit, as well as different types of NSFW content (a text post marked NSFW due to a gory moment in a story, for instance).
- VFIT7CTO77TOC 3y agoWhere is the outrage like when spaceship man started charging for Twitter's API?
- minimaxir 3y agoThere was plenty of outrage when Elon killed TweetBot and other third-party clients: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23559180/twitter-blocking-apps-tweetbot https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23559180/twitter-blocking... There was also plenty of outrage for the new API rules, including specifically blocking weather alerts (which Elon lied about restoring): https://mashable.com/article/twitter-exemptions-nws-public-service-safety-weather-accounts https://mashable.com/article/twitter-exemptions-nws-public-s...
- BlueTemplar 3y agoIs it any comparable to the APIpocalypse that already happened to Twitter a decade ago ?
- neonate 3y agohttps://archive.ph/X3Zf3 https://archive.ph/X3Zf3
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- entropicgravity 3y agoBetter yet, detect the AI (by its frenetic speed) and then feed it a bunch of false data.
- dahwolf 3y agoYesterday Stackoverflow, today Reddit. A clear pattern emerges where open web content/communities face existential issues if the current AI paradigm continues. It's a daylight robbery. The sum of 18 years of Reddit is an enormous capital investment as well an immeasurable amount of hours spent by its users to create the content. It's absolutely baffling how a single entity (OpenAI, Google Bard) can just take it all without permission or compensation, and then centrally and exclusively monetize these stolen goods. The fact that we barely even blink when this happens, and that founders confidently execute on an idea like this, tells you everything there is to know about our industry. It doesn't even pretend to do good anymore. Anything goes, really. Anyway, get ready for an "open" web that will consist of ever more private places with ever higher walls. Understandably so, any and all incentive to do something on the open web is not only pointless now, it actively helps to feed a giant private brain.
- TheCoreh 3y agoI understand where you're coming from, but can't fully agree with you. First, Stack Overflow contributions are licensed under Creative Commons. So monetizing them is explicitly allowed. Second, information is not "stolen" nor "goods". Copyright law is completely separate from physical property laws, so even if you could make a case about fair use of training data, copyright-ability of model weights and AI generated content (which I agree are still legal gray areas) and therefore whether or not the "Share-Alike" CC clause is enforceable in this context, it would be an entirely different argument from whether the whole industry is somehow entirely morally bankrupt. Third, given that this is unpaid work made voluntarily by users of the platforms (Reddit, SO), why is it any more acceptable for these platforms to lock it up and monetize it than for AI companies? I think it's completely reasonable to charge for API access, particularly above a certain volume, but not because these companies have a right to protect some sort of "intellectual capital investment", but rather because the server costs of processing the requests are not negligible. If anything, this situation really separates the wheat from the chaff in terms of what pools of open web content are truly "open". If the platforms hosting them expect to retain control of their "investment" can they really be said to be open? I understand the irony, given that OpenAI's own name is somewhat at odds with its practices (of merely providing open access versus truly releasing everything as open source) but I think the reasonable solution to that conundrum is something like Wikimedia Foundation, Internet Archive or maybe CERN for AI, not giving up on free, open content just because it might feed a giant private brain.
- dahwolf 3y agoWe drastically need copyright reform for text, imagery, video. It was never designed for this AI era. If you take a concept like "fair use". Let's say I embed your photo and express an opinion about it. That's what fair use was designed for. In-context relatively harmless usage of the content of others, for the sake of expression, culture and education. That's not the same thing as "let me suck up all content ever created without permission, attribution or compensation, mangle it and sell it via the backdoor whilst making you obsolete". You can't call that fair use, they are wildly different usages at wildly different scales with wildly different impact. We need a new copyright category specifically for AI usage. If nothing is expressed, no training permission is given. One can opt-in and allow for training, allow for training under conditions, etc.
- nabogh 3y agoIn my opinion copyright is a law that is always at odds with the free flow of information. I'd hate for that law to start influencing how I interact with user generated text on the internet. As we see on YouTube, nuance for copyright loses to erring on the side of enforcing copyright even when the use is fair.
- burtonator 3y agoHonestly, I think it's completely unfair for AIs to train on this data. I work in ML so I'm aware of the consequences but society wasn't. My step-daughter is finally crushing it as an graphics artist and she is really pissed at tools like Midjourney. I asked her about it and she said "yes, they steal the artwork of real artists and generate fake knockoffs" ... and I don't think her opinion is invalid.
- dahwolf 3y agoFully agree on everything you said. In addition, we're all kind of forced to hop on to AI whether we're a programmer or artist just to buy ourselves a little more time, delaying the inevitable. Actually, perhaps accelerating the inevitable by contributing to it. Even in an utopian world where we would have an economic model to support this (UBI), the outcome still sucks. It wipes out human culture. There's no point in creating/producing anything as almost anything can be produced by anyone, at incredible quality, at no cost and with little skill. Hence, your daughter being or becoming an incredible artist would have no meaning, except perhaps for herself enjoying the process of creating art.
- iguana_lawyer 3y agoThey’re going to disable old.reddit.com soon aren’t they? Locking the API will prevent any workarounds.
- mgrayson 3y agoOpenAI is in some ways the new Napster. It's not a perfect analogy but it cracks open the same copyright can of worms.
- drooby 3y ago“The world's entire scientific ... heritage ... is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.... The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.” - Aaron Swartz The irony here.
- corbulo 3y agoI can already feel the outrage dying. Yesterday Elon was tech hitler for it, today Reddit is just doing 'what was inevitable anyway'. One of the best parts about social media is watching swarms of people who know nothing pivot around things you know something about.
- freeone3000 3y agoThere’s a key difference here, in that Reddit bots still operate for free and Twitter bots don’t.
- encryptluks2 3y ago[dead]
- loktarogar 3y agoI feel API pricing is fine if the API money is more valuable for a platform than what's being built with it. If you have something valuable and you're not getting value from giving it away, sure. The issue I have with Twitter's new API pricing is it's not either - it's paying a lot for a little, so feels more like an explicit move to stop companies building on Twitter. Like it's trying to kill the API altogther.
- SilverBirch 3y agoAlways a rule of thumb with Elon topics - try to distill whether people are objecting to the principle or to the absurd cack-handed way Elon attempts to implement that principle. Because more often than not a good version what Musk attempts is fine, it's just he's not competent enough to produce the good version.
- moritzwarhier 3y agoWhat exactly are you talking about? How are API access and verifying your identity as a person of public interest the same thing? Or is it because of things you know something about and I don't that I cannot understand what you are talking about? Your unneeded hitler comparison doesn't really inspire confidence in your knowledge either. Do you have sources about the people comparing Musk to Hitler?
- Fudgel 3y agoSome more details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...
- dbg31415 3y agoReddit is such a toxic waste dump these days. Good they are helping others avoid it by charging for it.
- ericmcer 3y agoI’m amazed they are willing to charge for their abomination of an API. The search functionality is terrible, returns unreliable results, and can only return 100 at once. I would happily pay for a great version of the Reddit API. I doubt anyone doing huge scraping jobs on Reddit is using their API to do so.
- thepasswordis 3y agoHere’s an extension to delete all of your Reddit history: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
- victor9000 3y agoIt's hilarious to see Reddit's inept attempts to monetize the content gold mine they've squandered after a decade of devaluing product and engineering.
- jahlove 3y agoThe developer of the iOS app Apollo got some more details from Reddit today: https://redd.it/12ram0f https://redd.it/12ram0f > Reddit is moving to a paid API model for apps. The goal is not to make this inherently a big profit center, but to cover both the costs of usage, as well as the opportunity costs of users not using the official app (lost ad viewing, etc.)
- shmde 3y agoi.reddit.com gone, they want to kill the awesome 3rd party apps next instead of improving theirs. They are definitely killing off 3rd party apps, my prediction is that it will be killed within an year.
- iideamanai 3y agowhat, if everyone start charging, how small creative people built product using APIs
- gloosx 3y agoha-ha. Loving these double-faced stories here and there. “Crawling Reddit, generating value, and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with.” Very well Mr. Huffman, but what about “Posting on Reddit, generating free content which brings multi-hundred-million advertisement profits for the company, and not getting any of that value back is something which your users don't have the slightest problem with.“ The API is just a convenience to get the data, but surely you can get all the data you want without any additional API for free just by using their HTTP API - as any other generic user would do. Of course, filling up an enormous proxy well to avoid various ingenious "protections" could cost you some 10-20 bucks, and solving captchas automatically could cost you another 1$ for 1000, but from there, it's even easier and more enjoying to use than an API. I'm feeling like launching a scrape-it-all service to avoid greedy ip-protocol customs officers could be a profitable venture these days.
- darthrupert 3y agoTechnically speaking, there's already a very competent open-source and federated replacement for Reddit: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy Socially speaking, perhaps not so much.
- ok123456 3y agoThe reddit api was never very good. It's easier just to scrape the site.
- sizzle 3y agoSeems like the downfall of Reddit is eminent between this decision and nerfing the mobile web experience for no good reason other than to vacuum up mobile user data. What do others here think?