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> alright, we'll let you fix our broken s** site but only if you take a vow of poverty. I'm so glad someone brought this up. Every conversation I've seen about

> alright, we'll let you fix our broken s** site but only if you take a vow of poverty. I'm so glad someone brought this up. Every conversation I've seen about Reddit's API pricing on HN has had at least one person asking, "well, how are they supposed to fund the site then?" And that's not Reddit-specific, it's a really common talking point whenever a property/platform starts cracking down on fan/volunteer work. But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary. If 3rd-party accessibility services are important for accessing your service, those 3rd-party developers should be allowed to make money off of their stuff. Sometimes "non-commercial" clauses are appropriate for some projects/terms, but sometimes they get really abused and it's worth taking a step back in many situations and asking why they were included in the first place. Community-focused devs like to eat and have housing too.

TX81Z 3y ago
Or like, don’t have a website that is a steaming pile of the jankiest JavaScript on the web. The damn site barely works and has crashed my browser more than every other site I visit combined. God help anybody with a screen reader. The other story here is these apps all exist because Reddit the site is a joke from a technical standpoint. It’s just a disaster. The community is why people are there and the apps allow the communities to function.
- danShumway 3y ago
  This is also a good point. It's somewhat orthogonal to what I'm getting at, my point is more that even if Reddit wasn't in that position it would still be really weird and unreasonable for them to be pushing a non-commercial requirement. But agreed that in addition to the "Open Source developers like to eat" thing, it's also very worthwhile to ask why Reddit isn't accessible to blind users already. Accessibility can be hard, but it's not that hard. It's not so hard that a company with 2000 employees (I guess less now) couldn't do it. Blind accessibility shouldn't be the community's responsibility to fix; and there's an extra layer of absurdity in people fixing Reddit's horrible accessibility for them, for free, and Reddit responding with, "we've decided in our infinite generosity not to charge you money for the privilege of fixing our site. But God help us if we find out that anybody else is giving you money to do it..."
  - TX81Z 3y ago
    Totally, the root of all this is their site is garbage but has a great user base. If I were them I’d be terrified a moderately competent teenager could break that moat with a fast and performant site.
memefrog 3y ago
>But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary. I don't think there's anything interesting there at all. It's reddit's website, reddit's API, reddit's data. Their policy already says they can charge for API access and change prices at any time. It's not a matter of them having a "moral right to make money" but they do have a legal right to at least seek profits by setting their own prices. I don't see anyone arguing that third party app developers shouldn't be able to seek profit by charging people money for their apps. But if they're going to do that, then they're accepting that they're in a market, and that it's not a free market if you choose to make yourself entirely reliant on a single provider. If you make a reddit app, and reddit increases their prices to a level that makes your operation unsustainable, well that's a risk you chose to make when you chose to tie your livelihood to a reddit app. Risk and reward. I think what people are actually saying is not that they're "morally obligated to not make money" but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month. There's really nothing arbitrary about it. It's not about "fan/volunteer" vs "platform".
- danShumway 3y ago
  Meh. There are moral arguments getting made around Reddit's "right to profit." We can talk about this purely in terms of legal capability, but that's not usually the context these conversations start in. And it's worth mentioning that it's also completely legal and acceptable in a free market for users to protest and boycott Reddit over the API pricing even if that means its harder for Reddit the company to make money and be sustainable. Mass protests aren't against Reddit TOS. And those user expectations about API access (wherever they come from) is part of the risk Reddit took on when they created a content platform; users have no legal obligation to make Reddit the company profitable. I often see conversations about business practices bounce between "well then how do you expect the company to make money" and "that's just how Capitalism works, you can't blame them for doing what they're allowed to do." And it's useful to be conscious of when that transition happens and to ask ourselves what consequences we view as just natural outcomes of the market (hobby developers getting priced out of application development), and what outcomes we view as unacceptable problems that need solutions (AI companies scraping Reddit). To be fair, often those arguments are coming from different people, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But it's still worth thinking about which arguments tend to on average fall into which of those two buckets and why different kinds of free market activity often get talked about in one framing, but not usually in the other. > but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month. Much much more importantly though: I completely reject this reasoning, I think it's exactly the cognitive bias that I call out above. The reason to exempt accessibility tools from API pricing is because those tools benefit blind users. If the people making those tools can also pull in tens of thousands of dollars, then good. A developer making tens of thousands of dollars building that tool is still solving an accessibility problem for Reddit at no cost to Reddit -- and notably Reddit has no equivalent solution of its own to offer instead. The people to have sympathy for in this conversation are low-vision/blind users. And it is not poverty that makes Open Source and/or community-maintained tools useful to those users. Ask yourself: why exactly would a volunteer profiting off of an Open Source or community-maintained tool be worse? I would argue that there are expectations that we have of volunteers that are much harsher than the expectations we have for proprietary platforms. In many cases these volunteers release tools that are more Open than proprietary alternatives, that have better privacy, that are cheaper and/or free to use, and that overall respect users and preserve user-agency much better than the platforms they're building on. And yet, in addition to producing more respectful tools, people also expect them not to make money. Why? It should be the opposite. I want people who are building Open Source tools to make more money than the platforms that aren't in touch with their community.

TX81Z 3y ago

Or like, don’t have a website that is a steaming pile of the jankiest JavaScript on the web. The damn site barely works and has crashed my browser more than every other site I visit combined. God help anybody with a screen reader. The other story here is these apps all exist because Reddit the site is a joke from a technical standpoint. It’s just a disaster. The community is why people are there and the apps allow the communities to function.

danShumway 3y ago
This is also a good point. It's somewhat orthogonal to what I'm getting at, my point is more that even if Reddit wasn't in that position it would still be really weird and unreasonable for them to be pushing a non-commercial requirement. But agreed that in addition to the "Open Source developers like to eat" thing, it's also very worthwhile to ask why Reddit isn't accessible to blind users already. Accessibility can be hard, but it's not that hard. It's not so hard that a company with 2000 employees (I guess less now) couldn't do it. Blind accessibility shouldn't be the community's responsibility to fix; and there's an extra layer of absurdity in people fixing Reddit's horrible accessibility for them, for free, and Reddit responding with, "we've decided in our infinite generosity not to charge you money for the privilege of fixing our site. But God help us if we find out that anybody else is giving you money to do it..."
- TX81Z 3y ago
  Totally, the root of all this is their site is garbage but has a great user base. If I were them I’d be terrified a moderately competent teenager could break that moat with a fast and performant site.

memefrog 3y ago

>But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary. I don't think there's anything interesting there at all. It's reddit's website, reddit's API, reddit's data. Their policy already says they can charge for API access and change prices at any time. It's not a matter of them having a "moral right to make money" but they do have a legal right to at least seek profits by setting their own prices. I don't see anyone arguing that third party app developers shouldn't be able to seek profit by charging people money for their apps. But if they're going to do that, then they're accepting that they're in a market, and that it's not a free market if you choose to make yourself entirely reliant on a single provider. If you make a reddit app, and reddit increases their prices to a level that makes your operation unsustainable, well that's a risk you chose to make when you chose to tie your livelihood to a reddit app. Risk and reward. I think what people are actually saying is not that they're "morally obligated to not make money" but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month. There's really nothing arbitrary about it. It's not about "fan/volunteer" vs "platform".

danShumway 3y ago
Meh. There are moral arguments getting made around Reddit's "right to profit." We can talk about this purely in terms of legal capability, but that's not usually the context these conversations start in. And it's worth mentioning that it's also completely legal and acceptable in a free market for users to protest and boycott Reddit over the API pricing even if that means its harder for Reddit the company to make money and be sustainable. Mass protests aren't against Reddit TOS. And those user expectations about API access (wherever they come from) is part of the risk Reddit took on when they created a content platform; users have no legal obligation to make Reddit the company profitable. I often see conversations about business practices bounce between "well then how do you expect the company to make money" and "that's just how Capitalism works, you can't blame them for doing what they're allowed to do." And it's useful to be conscious of when that transition happens and to ask ourselves what consequences we view as just natural outcomes of the market (hobby developers getting priced out of application development), and what outcomes we view as unacceptable problems that need solutions (AI companies scraping Reddit). To be fair, often those arguments are coming from different people, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But it's still worth thinking about which arguments tend to on average fall into which of those two buckets and why different kinds of free market activity often get talked about in one framing, but not usually in the other. > but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month. Much much more importantly though: I completely reject this reasoning, I think it's exactly the cognitive bias that I call out above. The reason to exempt accessibility tools from API pricing is because those tools benefit blind users. If the people making those tools can also pull in tens of thousands of dollars, then good. A developer making tens of thousands of dollars building that tool is still solving an accessibility problem for Reddit at no cost to Reddit -- and notably Reddit has no equivalent solution of its own to offer instead. The people to have sympathy for in this conversation are low-vision/blind users. And it is not poverty that makes Open Source and/or community-maintained tools useful to those users. Ask yourself: why exactly would a volunteer profiting off of an Open Source or community-maintained tool be worse? I would argue that there are expectations that we have of volunteers that are much harsher than the expectations we have for proprietary platforms. In many cases these volunteers release tools that are more Open than proprietary alternatives, that have better privacy, that are cheaper and/or free to use, and that overall respect users and preserve user-agency much better than the platforms they're building on. And yet, in addition to producing more respectful tools, people also expect them not to make money. Why? It should be the opposite. I want people who are building Open Source tools to make more money than the platforms that aren't in touch with their community.