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APIs for content sites must be free

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Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#181

Post by HPsquared »

clnq wrote: post #126
PaulHoule wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reddit probably was a pretty big part of LLM training data. It has a vast trove of conversation on niche topics, and pairings of "what is said in response to input X". Probably the monetisation of the API is an attempt to capitalize on those users.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#182

Post by dietr1ch »

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…

Same, I wish we could contribute content (posts, comments, votes, etc) in a redistributable way.

I'd like to a P2P-backed service to exist, where people can own all the data. I guess that abuse would be a challenge, but there's probably enough good ideas around bittorrent and cryptocurrency to make sharing and trust/voting possible.

My dream is that people could have a ~raspberry at home helping host the internet in a sparse way. Would it be more inefficient than a centralized service? sure, but decentralization is inherently more expensive, yet better thanks to true shared ownership.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#184

Post by keneda7 »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #96
keneda7 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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 n…

>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.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#185

Post by dvno42 »

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…

I feel very similarly. I have mixed feelings on my actions but I just finished running shreddit on all of my comments and deleting my accounts. I wrote content with the (possibly misguided) notion that what I contributed would continue to be openly accessible/searchable. I didn't want what I wrote to end up in a locked up walled garden like Meta's products. Imho Reddit will continue to put walls up around user contributed data. I decided to delete everything while I still could.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#186

Post by alecbz »

andrewaylett wrote: post #102
alecbz wrote: post #35

I think the entirety of their argument is: > social media sites don’t produce content. They merely host it. Millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available. ? But this feels pretty simplistic. Not convinced that people do (or should) upload content expecting they or anyone else can access it however they want. If you create the content then it's obviously yours forever. If you also decide p…

This cuts both ways -- if I'm not going to allow access to that content for free, why would you give me your content? The ToS might allow for it, but people are routinely dismayed when companies stick to the letter of what their ToS allows them to do, especially when they start doing things they never did before.

> if I'm not going to allow access to that content for free, why would you give me your content?

A bunch of reasons potentially, wider reach probably being the main one, but maybe also stuff like ways for your audience to interact with you/the content/each other.

> The ToS might allow for it

"It's in the ToS so it's fine" is a bad argument, but I'm not saying that. I guess there's two things:

a) empirically, do users actually expect that content be available "for free" (in general? just to themselves?) from a platform

b) is there a "good reason" that this should be a social expectation?

a)'s a tricky question with multiple parts but I'm not especially convinced. I imagine a lot of users aren't even really thinking about that kind of thing

b) I could imagine being convinced about, but "they didn't make the content" doesn't feel sufficient.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#187

Post by LeeroyWasHere »

throwaway49274 wrote: post #175
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…

Please explain to me where Reddit is no longer free for Joe Consumer? It's the subreddit mods who are making the data inaccessible to you, NOT Reddit.

The people working for free are the villains, not the multibillion dollar corporation.

Got it, thanks.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#188

Post by robbiemitchell »

The context is a for-profit company. If a third-party using the API is doing so as a substitute for someone using the ad-supported site, the API will be priced to equal the revenue lost from using the site. If the people switching from UI to API are more valuable than usual, the API will cost more than usual.

If the API is being used to support something new -- i.e., not a replacement for a user on the site, but as a new revenue source -- it will be priced to maximize overall API revenue, or overall revenue as an indirect result of growth supported by the API. (Maybe it's one massive customer using it or 100,000 freemium developers.)

The idea that a company "must" do something doesn't make any sense. And the assertion that the company is harming itself is ultimately something the Board, acting on behalf of shareholders, is responsible for.

(FWIW, I agree Reddit is shooting itself in the foot.)

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#189

Post by Terr_ »

drbawb wrote: post #151
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…

>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 It's implicitly provided by hosting the forum, blog, etc. at a publicly accessible URL. HTTP is an API, HTML is a data interchange format. There's this weird idea (which I've seen parroted both in this article, and in u/spez's discourse on the topic) that "scraping" is somehow evil and bad, when it's actua…

Ultimately this is about DRM again, or at least on the same spectrum of motives and behavior: The corporate middleman wants to be able to force restrictions on how consumers manage or view the content that is being produced by other users.

Either forcing you to run a proprietary closed-source client--like their official smartphone app--or else making the desktop rendering so gnarled that you pretty much have to view it exactly the way they intent while having their code pierce your privacy.

It's not just about making sure ads are displayed anymore, I'm sure there's some executive who has asked about preventing people from copy-pasting text...

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