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> 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 commen

> Based on this man's logic, if I were to run a web forum then I must provide an API or data dump to download the posts created by the users? How about a comment section on my blog? How about a community Discord server? Why not Facebook posts? Or Instagram stories? Yes? I don't think it's a very radical, unreasonable or difficult thing to provide: this is available as a first class feature on most blogging/forum software (RSS feeds) and wasn't even remotely controversial 10–12 years ago. > They also seem to reinvent history such that there was some "implicit" agreement between Reddit and the users of Reddit. There was an _explicit_ agreement: the site's terms of use have allowed free API access with reasonable quotas for 15 years, and are being changed now with very short notice. Of course the terms of service can change, but users are also free to leave, complain, or demand that they don't change. There are also strong cultural factors involved. For example: just like in the US it's customary for tap water to be free at restaurants, and people would be probably angry if you decided to charge for it, on the open web it's customary for some reasonable level of API access to be free. > IMO, just because I wrote some shitposts on Reddit does not mean that I am entitled access to every single shitpost that has ever been written on Reddit. There's no such asymmetry in scale: _everyone_ wrote the content, _everyone_ is entitled to access it. If you're referring to incredibly resource intensive, mass-access to download several terabytes for AI training I can see how that should cost a price. But they're blocking reasonable use-cases.

zoogeny 3y ago
> users are also free to leave, complain, or demand that they don't change Yes, I have no issue with all of those. I'm poking fun at taking that desire for action from a single company in a single instance and extending it to a universal moral principle. My own opinion is that Reddit users were getting something valuable for free and it is being taken away from them. In addition to the totally reasonable protests that they are making, some are taking it a bit far and supporting their tantrum by creating axioms of morality that I believe are a bit excessive.
- rcoveson 3y ago
  Getting something valuable for free sounds weird in the physical world but it's not weird at all in the information world, where costs can diffuse so thinly that many users never even see them. I see no reason why a non-profit reddit couldn't be free if they didn't try to host video or images (links and comments only). Server costs could absolutely be covered by donations (like "reddit gold") and intra-site advertising (sidebar subreddit ads). Just don't hire many people, don't take VC money, and lean on your community for moderation (which is perfectly morally acceptable for a non-profit entity). It's not freeloading, it's just a bunch of people dedicating so much time and attention to communicating with each other that the server costs are dwarfed by the value of the platform to its users.
  - incone123 3y ago
    I know of one long-running message board site which is free of advertising and free for users. A number of users make regular donations and occasionally when funds are low they make an announcement and some other users make a one-off donation. I am very doubtful their model would scale to Reddit's size, and certain they don't have any wish to.
    - rcoveson 3y ago
      I know it seems like it wouldn't scale merely because we haven't seen it happen, but I don't think it's economically impossible or even economically difficult. I don't think there's any reason to believe that your costs go up more quickly than your income from donations/ads. Instead, I think what happens is you just don't get many users in the first place because all their attention ends up acquired by people willing to operate non-sustainable businesses with the aim of extracting value in the future. If by some crazy fluke there weren't any highly motivated money-brains in the social media space, I'm absolutely certain a sustainable non-profit open source solution would exist in place of reddit and facebook, and it would eventually accumulate nearly as many users as those sites have. Maybe not as quickly, and maybe while throwing up donations banners at the same rate as Wikipedia, but it would happen. But you need to get impossibly lucky for the entrepreneurs to ignore "the space" when you have 100k users, and by 1 million users the scent of "alpha" has drawn so many of the biggest, meanest, smartest of the bunch that you need to be an absolute juggernaut of momentum and name recognition (like craigslist and Wikipedia) to have any hope of competeing.
- Meph504 3y ago
  Well said!
keneda7 3y ago
>Yes? I don't think it's a very radical, unreasonable or difficult thing to provide: this is available as a first class feature on most blogging/forum software (RSS feeds) and wasn't even remotely controversial 10–12 years ago. I think demanding someone pay server bills so you can freely access data they have stored on their hardware (to make yourself money) is radical and unreasonable in every way. If it is an education service or something I can see your point and may agree with you. But that is not what is happening. It is people using reddit's resources to make money for themselves. Reddit has the right to want fair compensation for use of its service in a commercial manner. We have the right to stop using reddit if we don't like it. We have the right to run a service that does give free api access if we see it as reasonable. We do not have the right to force reddit to provide us free access to their resources. That is completely unreasonable and would be no different than me going to you and saying you must give me access to all your credit cards and let me use them because I feel like I should have it.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  You've hidden a subtle semantic shift here. This discussion is centered around personal use, yet you're drawing a line outside commercial use as if they were the same thing. For instance, Askhistorians posts were all intended educationally and many of them were produced via API access, some long before Reddit had an app. Is it not reasonable to expect those to still be accessible to others the same way, even with a nominal fee to cover API maintenance costs?
  - keneda7 3y ago
    >You've hidden a subtle semantic shift here. This discussion is centered around personal use, yet you're drawing a line outside commercial use as if they were the same thing. Claiming this is about personal use is the semantic shift not what I said. You are trying to shift back to that because you know if you have a good faith discussion you have no legs to stand on. The reddit changes target commercial use plain and simple. If you create an app that loads reddit content from its APIs for only you to use, these changes are going to have very little no effect on you. That app would be personal use and if you incurred charges for your API use they would be very small (or you are abusing or spamming the API which both are against its terms of use). The most public part of this has probably been the Apollo dev vs reddit. Apollo is commercial. Using Apollo to browse reddit used the Apollo API key not your accounts API key. The crazy charges the Apollo dev listed are due to tens (hundreds) of thousands of reddit users using the Apollo API key to access reddit. That is not personal use. That is a commercial entity using its own API key to access reddit's API.
Meph504 3y ago
You have the option to syndicate information from your site at your leisure. You are not obligated to provide it to whoever wants it,and to cover the cost of providing or insuring it is available. This is a radical notion. As for the for everyone wrote it,everyone has access to it. That is daft, the access to the data is at the discretion of the service hosting it, they never made any claims they would make this data available to everyone anyway they wanted it? If people don't like the terms of a site don't use it, don't think just because you used a service for a period of time you have some right to determine how that service is operated.

zoogeny 3y ago

> users are also free to leave, complain, or demand that they don't change Yes, I have no issue with all of those. I'm poking fun at taking that desire for action from a single company in a single instance and extending it to a universal moral principle. My own opinion is that Reddit users were getting something valuable for free and it is being taken away from them. In addition to the totally reasonable protests that they are making, some are taking it a bit far and supporting their tantrum by creating axioms of morality that I believe are a bit excessive.

rcoveson 3y ago
Getting something valuable for free sounds weird in the physical world but it's not weird at all in the information world, where costs can diffuse so thinly that many users never even see them. I see no reason why a non-profit reddit couldn't be free if they didn't try to host video or images (links and comments only). Server costs could absolutely be covered by donations (like "reddit gold") and intra-site advertising (sidebar subreddit ads). Just don't hire many people, don't take VC money, and lean on your community for moderation (which is perfectly morally acceptable for a non-profit entity). It's not freeloading, it's just a bunch of people dedicating so much time and attention to communicating with each other that the server costs are dwarfed by the value of the platform to its users.
- incone123 3y ago
  I know of one long-running message board site which is free of advertising and free for users. A number of users make regular donations and occasionally when funds are low they make an announcement and some other users make a one-off donation. I am very doubtful their model would scale to Reddit's size, and certain they don't have any wish to.
  - rcoveson 3y ago
    I know it seems like it wouldn't scale merely because we haven't seen it happen, but I don't think it's economically impossible or even economically difficult. I don't think there's any reason to believe that your costs go up more quickly than your income from donations/ads. Instead, I think what happens is you just don't get many users in the first place because all their attention ends up acquired by people willing to operate non-sustainable businesses with the aim of extracting value in the future. If by some crazy fluke there weren't any highly motivated money-brains in the social media space, I'm absolutely certain a sustainable non-profit open source solution would exist in place of reddit and facebook, and it would eventually accumulate nearly as many users as those sites have. Maybe not as quickly, and maybe while throwing up donations banners at the same rate as Wikipedia, but it would happen. But you need to get impossibly lucky for the entrepreneurs to ignore "the space" when you have 100k users, and by 1 million users the scent of "alpha" has drawn so many of the biggest, meanest, smartest of the bunch that you need to be an absolute juggernaut of momentum and name recognition (like craigslist and Wikipedia) to have any hope of competeing.
Meph504 3y ago
Well said!

keneda7 3y ago

>Yes? I don't think it's a very radical, unreasonable or difficult thing to provide: this is available as a first class feature on most blogging/forum software (RSS feeds) and wasn't even remotely controversial 10–12 years ago. I think demanding someone pay server bills so you can freely access data they have stored on their hardware (to make yourself money) is radical and unreasonable in every way. If it is an education service or something I can see your point and may agree with you. But that is not what is happening. It is people using reddit's resources to make money for themselves. Reddit has the right to want fair compensation for use of its service in a commercial manner. We have the right to stop using reddit if we don't like it. We have the right to run a service that does give free api access if we see it as reasonable. We do not have the right to force reddit to provide us free access to their resources. That is completely unreasonable and would be no different than me going to you and saying you must give me access to all your credit cards and let me use them because I feel like I should have it.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
You've hidden a subtle semantic shift here. This discussion is centered around personal use, yet you're drawing a line outside commercial use as if they were the same thing. For instance, Askhistorians posts were all intended educationally and many of them were produced via API access, some long before Reddit had an app. Is it not reasonable to expect those to still be accessible to others the same way, even with a nominal fee to cover API maintenance costs?
- keneda7 3y ago
  >You've hidden a subtle semantic shift here. This discussion is centered around personal use, yet you're drawing a line outside commercial use as if they were the same thing. Claiming this is about personal use is the semantic shift not what I said. You are trying to shift back to that because you know if you have a good faith discussion you have no legs to stand on. The reddit changes target commercial use plain and simple. If you create an app that loads reddit content from its APIs for only you to use, these changes are going to have very little no effect on you. That app would be personal use and if you incurred charges for your API use they would be very small (or you are abusing or spamming the API which both are against its terms of use). The most public part of this has probably been the Apollo dev vs reddit. Apollo is commercial. Using Apollo to browse reddit used the Apollo API key not your accounts API key. The crazy charges the Apollo dev listed are due to tens (hundreds) of thousands of reddit users using the Apollo API key to access reddit. That is not personal use. That is a commercial entity using its own API key to access reddit's API.

Meph504 3y ago

You have the option to syndicate information from your site at your leisure. You are not obligated to provide it to whoever wants it,and to cover the cost of providing or insuring it is available. This is a radical notion. As for the for everyone wrote it,everyone has access to it. That is daft, the access to the data is at the discretion of the service hosting it, they never made any claims they would make this data available to everyone anyway they wanted it? If people don't like the terms of a site don't use it, don't think just because you used a service for a period of time you have some right to determine how that service is operated.