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APIs for content sites must be free

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Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#131

Post by chc »

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I know exactly what a social contract is, and it's always superseded by a legal contract (which the ToS sort-of is, though it would have to go through the courts if challenged).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.

I think you're confusing the term "social contract" with "oral contract." An oral contract will usually be superseded by a written contract, but saying a written contract supersedes a social contract seems like a category error. One determines your legal standing, the other determines your social standing, neither really supersedes the other.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#132

Post by NelsonMinar »

dgrin91 wrote: post #15

I like how he touts Stack Overflow data dumps as an example, even though they also totally sold out and stopped doing the data dumps. They are no better.

Do you have more info on a policy change at Stack Overflow? The latest dump on their own post is from March 2023. In the past dumps have mostly been monthly but it's not entirely consistent. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/224873/all-stack-ex...

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#133

Post by halostatue »

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I know exactly what a social contract is, and it's always superseded by a legal contract (which the ToS sort-of is, though it would have to go through the courts if challenged).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.

There’s still a social contract that is supra the ToS: treat me and my contributions well and we will stick around. Stop, and we won’t.

Yes, Reddit can (try, at least) get away with anything they claim in the ToS — but community members have every right to step away and render Reddit valueless because they have been told that they are not valued.

Pretending that a legal contract supersedes a social contract is wishful thinking. They are orthogonal.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#134

Post by senko »

zoogeny wrote: post #13

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…

HTTP GET is an API. All you have to do is not block well-behaved scrapers.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#135

Post by zoogeny »

rcoveson wrote: post #82
zoogeny wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

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 see no reason why a non-profit reddit couldn't be free

"could be free" and "must be free" are such a moving of the goal posts that it is impossible to argue against. I mean, you didn't even go through "should be free" on your way.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#136

Post by Keirmot »

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…

You’re thinking about standard ceasefires. I’m not the parent posters, but the Christmas truce of 1914 was done IN SPITE of orders to keep fighting between both sides.

I’m guessing that was what they were referring to.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#137

Post by choudharism »

keneda7 wrote: post #73
TheCoreh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 soft…

>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 educa…

This is a false dichotomy - no one is protesting for a free lunch. The vast majority of app developers and users are okay with incurring a fee (and many solutions have been proposed - for example, users needing to subscribe to reddit's premium tier to use 3rd party apps) - reddit management has shown in their conduct (refusal to listen to users / potential customers, applying changes with a staggeringly short notice) that they are negotiating in bad faith.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#138

Post by randomdata »

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…

There was that short period of time where most of the big players (Google, Facebook, etc.) had settled on XMPP and it was all interoperable, to some degree at least.

I even remember when Facebook first announced their support thinking "Oh sweet, now I can message all my Facebook friends from my current chat app." And when it launched, I could! But then I realized I didn't really want to.

And it wasn't long before support was dropped. I'm not sure anyone noticed.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#140

Post by margalabargala »

andersa wrote: post #109
malfist wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article and not just the headline, the author is in favor of charging a cost based fee for API access. A fee that would cover hosting and serving the API, but not generate profit for the parent company benefiting from the 3P users' content.

There would be no benefit to providing it, then.

No first-order benefit, perhaps.

It shouldn't be difficult to look to second- and third-order benefits, though, such as increasing your user base and the amount of generated content.

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