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APIs for content sites must be free

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Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#121

Post by PaulHoule »

simonw wrote: post #53

I've found myself resisting posting comments on Reddit recently - things like answers to simple questions people have about SQLite - partly because I don't want to cross the picket line but also because I realize that I was relying on a very light social contract that was in place there: I would share my knowledge for free, in exchange for which I knew that I was contributing to a larger dataset that myself and other…

Really? The average discussion on Reddit/StackOverflow/etc is full of wrong answers and it is hit or miss if the "accepted" answer is correct, never mind any of the other ones. These sites are a great model for convincing bullshit but if you wanted something worth training an A.I. you'd need to filter out 90% of the content.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#122

Post by irthomasthomas »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #103
simonw wrote: post #53

I've found myself resisting posting comments on Reddit recently - things like answers to simple questions people have about SQLite - partly because I don't want to cross the picket line but also because I realize that I was relying on a very light social contract that was in place there: I would share my knowledge for free, in exchange for which I knew that I was contributing to a larger dataset that myself and other…

Can someone explain to me why Reddit can't have different price tiers for their API service? Why can't they charge people who want to scrape en masse (LLM trainers) 10-100x more than mobile app API users?

Because why would anyone pay that, when you can just do what search engines do and crawl the site for the data?

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#123

Post by cal85 »

zoogeny wrote: post #54
ineedtosleep wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your arguments accurately cover the OP's argument at all. The key distinction is literally the first sentence: "Social media businesses should not charge* for APIs." If you have a community [whatever] service that would not be a business. If you have a blog, that's could potentially be a very business-adjacent, but I'd argue it doesn't cover the "social media" qualification, so that also doesn't apply.…

> OP is arguing that API access should be free/at cost. Implicitly he is also arguing that it must exist at all. But let's consider further your own commercial clause. Apple has a discussion board for their support community [1] - and now we are mandating that Apple must both have an API for users to access it and must only charge cost. Who gets to determine the cost? Is it hardware costs? Does it include R&D? Is the…

I think a more reasonable argument could be “If a site provides an API for fetching user-generated content, it should be free”. (But just as a moral argument, not something to be enforced with regulations.) The issue is that if they provide a paid API for users’ content, they acknowledge the value in the content provided by their users (whom they already have to thank for all their ad revenue), so it seems unjust for them to suddenly start selling that content, especially without sharing the API revenue with the content creators or something.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#124

Post by thulesgold »

beders wrote: post #47

It's stunning to me how little people like the author of this piece know about the economics of running large scale sites like reddit or twitter. Nothing is free, including providing and maintaining APIs. Someone's gotta pay for the ramen, especially if you can't run ads.

I have a theory that governments and corporations across the world are pushing hard for free APIs. If they cost anything, even very little, then it makes astroturfing too expensive.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#125

Post by randomdata »

dvt wrote: post #68
derefr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking of a legal contract. A social contract is what two sides do in practice in order to not piss the other off.

I know exactly what a social contract is, and it's always superseded by a legal contract (which the ToS sort-of is, though it would have to go through the courts if challenged). Given that the ToS explicitly says that Reddit et al. can do whatever they want with your data, the idea that there's a social contract there is wishful thinking.

The legal contract states that Reddit can do what it wants with the data, yes, but there is no consideration for production. That is where the social contract takes over.

The social contract states (allegedly, at least; we shall see) that producers agree to produce content in perpetuity so long as Reddit plays nice with the data. With that contract broken, production may cease.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#126

Post by clnq »

PaulHoule wrote: post #121
simonw wrote: post #53

I've found myself resisting posting comments on Reddit recently - things like answers to simple questions people have about SQLite - partly because I don't want to cross the picket line but also because I realize that I was relying on a very light social contract that was in place there: I would share my knowledge for free, in exchange for which I knew that I was contributing to a larger dataset that myself and other…

Really? The average discussion on Reddit/StackOverflow/etc is full of wrong answers and it is hit or miss if the "accepted" answer is correct, never mind any of the other ones. These sites are a great model for convincing bullshit but if you wanted something worth training an A.I. you'd need to filter out 90% of the content.

Sadly very true. Most threads are very comparable to ChatGPT 3.5. I think one could recreate Reddit mostly with a LLM.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#127

Post by NelsonMinar »

simonw wrote: post #53

I've found myself resisting posting comments on Reddit recently - things like answers to simple questions people have about SQLite - partly because I don't want to cross the picket line but also because I realize that I was relying on a very light social contract that was in place there: I would share my knowledge for free, in exchange for which I knew that I was contributing to a larger dataset that myself and other…

Thanks for articulating what I meant by the social contract, Simon. I feel the same way, which is why I wrote the post.

General reply to other comments: y'all are right, the post is short and doesn't flesh out all the arguments necessary. But I think I captured the spirit of something about how we, the creators on the Internet, feel about the bargain we strike when we invest in sites like Reddit or Twitter or indeed, Hacker News here.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#128

Post by rcoveson »

incone123 wrote: post #107
rcoveson wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 advertisi…

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.

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.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#129

Post by senko »

PaulHoule wrote: post #119

I would frame it as "messaging applications should interoperate". People understand that a T-Mobile customer can send a text to an AT&T customer. They understand that a Samsung owner can call an iPhone owner. Why do they accept that a Slack user can't send a message to a Discord user? Why do they accept that Google has made 11+ different messaging applications that aren't compatible with each other? Why do they accep…

> People understand that a T-Mobile customer can send a text to an AT&T customer. They understand that a Samsung owner can call an iPhone owner.

That was a hard-won victory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment

A hundred years later, we've got the same story, except today's Big Tech had wised up.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#130

Post by simonw »

dvt wrote: post #114
derefr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh... I really don't think you do know what a social contract is. A social contract is a temporary state of affairs, where both sides are benefitting from being able to implicitly hold the other side to it; where either side can freely breach it, but where this dissolves the social contract that held until that moment; and where dissolving the social contract will (obviously) cause the other side to rescind all bene…

> A ceasefire during a battle is an example of a social contract. This is absolutely false. A ceasefire is not a social contract. It's just bizarre to even claim this, as ceasefires are most often enacted in the context of ceasefire.. uh, treaties . > Not eating your coworkers' food in the office fridge is another example of a social contract. This is a better example (though still a very poor one, as we have laws ag…

"Why would free API access be an implication of using reddit's service?"

Because they offered free API access for 17 years.

Same way Heroku breached a social contract when they got rid of their free tier: if you offer something like that for more than a decade, people will reasonably expect it to continue and will be angry with you if you pull the rug on them.

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