11–20 of 300 posts
Good luck lobbying YouTube to make their API free. I'd love to have a version of the YouTube app that didn't cost me any money and also didn't have ads.
If you don't want to pay with money or your attention how are they going to pay for all that traffic end engineering?
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.
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.
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.
I like vehement arguments even when I disagree with them. 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 d…