Reddit will exempt accessibility-focused apps from unpopular API pricing changes

What happens when you try?

100% agree, the challenge is that with Digg, we had reddit to flee to. I'm looking at lemmy, which seems similar in many ways, but is federated.

>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".

Just damage control at this point.

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.