191–200 of 300 posts
Some people like the idea of freedom until they encounter the consequences of freedom.
Freedom is also the choice not to use a platform and the choice to criticize it when they do consumer unfriendly things.
Why not just make API accessible to paid "Reddit Gold" members?! Then there'd actually be a reason to get gilded up, and 3rd-Party Apps would still work for those paying members.
I have to imagine reddit has already thought of this and come up with some justification for why it won't work - because the proposed strategy is just so incredibly lazy. Ultimately I suspect the data somehow suggests (a) the network provider has to provide free access in order to sustain the criticality of the social network, and (b) charging for something that other people are getting for free (a la twitter's 8$ checkmarks, reddit gold, etc.) is just not a very viable product strategy.
So Reddit has decided to stick 3rd party devs with the thorny problem of direct-monetization of users, wherein their cost to the developer is usage-billed while the revenue to the developer is presumably fixed; meanwhile Reddit can cash the checks from their mobile ads.
The most accurate/charitable interpretation of the content, despite the abysmal title, would be: 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 exam…
Which I agree, needs to be justified. You see this kind of talk a lot when power imbalances exist; the person with no power tries to speak on behalf of everyone involved who they think believes as they do, in order to try and stand against the existing power structure.
Sometimes it's highly effective (actually appointed or even de-facto leaders of movements/groups), other times it's kind of laughable and presumptuous.
Without justification, this is the latter. That said, I bet there probably is justification, if the author bothered to look for it or provide it!
I would suspect it's true that users will not make use of a site like Reddit nearly as much if the content isn't then made available for use "as they wish".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. Your HTML is, quite literally, a degenerate form of an API. The simplest way to offer a content API is to offer an alternative endpoint that serves the same stuff as your normal one, except without all the bullshit (er, beautifully design, interactive frontend).
Any issue with Reddit offering a API only to not maintain it, or uphold any sort of SLA uptime, or not worry about releasing breaking changes every week? Having a public facing API is not trivial or cost free.
If they were to offer an API that's just HTML of the website (old.reddit.com specifically, not the new one) but without the cruft that makes for 90% of the markup of a human-facing page, and which exists only to hang styles and scripts off... why wouldn't they maintain it? It's literally the same as what the browser gets, but without the bullshit.
> or uphold any sort of SLA uptime
Do they uphold any sort of SLA uptime for the webpage itself?
The simplest API would be just the meat of the website, so it couldn't possibly be less reliable than the site itself.
> not worry about releasing breaking changes every week?
Reddit is a stable site. Like most social media platforms, they don't release breaking changes often (they do screw with DOM element ids and CSS classes all the time, but that is to make life harder for ad blockers, which is another topic). Sure, some things may move around, be added or removed - but this is webshit we're talking about. You can't truly rely on any API to have a stable, or well-defined structure[0] - so people are already used to treating schemas as open-ended[1] and keeping up with their changes.
> Having a public facing API is not trivial or cost free.
Sure. But I'm trying to establish a lower bound here, and it's clear that this is much lower costs and effort than maintaining the human-facing website itself. And I mean, remember the whole "semantic HTML" and "microformats" trends of yore? Or how HTML5 came to be, with all those tags like and and ? The whole point of that was to make HTML work as both rendering markup and machine-readable API. Consider also that the alternative isn't no public API - it's scraping. So if your public API is somehow more expensive to serve or maintain than either the website itself, or a decluttered version of it, then you're doing something wrong. -- [0] - Don't get me started on the disaster that is Swagger/OpenAPI. [1] - Something Clojure coding philosophy makes explicit: you pass around maps and arrays, you read and write the keys you know about, and stuff you don't recognize you ignore and pass without changing.
100 requests per minute will be free. Can someone explain to me why this isn't enough?
100 requests per minute per what? Like if there's a third party app built against the API, is it 100 rpm for each user of the app, or across the entire app's usage?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stipulate that a 30 day notice for a major change from something that has been available for 17 years is pretty egregious. However, I'm still of the mind that when you build a company/product that 100% depends on a 3rd party existing or allowing one to play in their playground, these are the exact situations that can arise. You have to know that at some point, if the dependency is no longer available, neither is yo…
Sure, and that's why I haven't built a commercial product on top of Reddit. (I actually did run a startup on top of Twitter's API between 2010-2013 - I'm VERY glad not to have to worry about that any more!) I'm not talking about this in terms of being an app developer: I'm talking about it in terms of being a regular user posting content on the site. If you rug-pull my expectations on access to that data in the futur…
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.
It’s why I have to admit that I am not sympathetic to third-party apps like Apollo. They implicitly violated the social contract I recognize by providing users with an experience that circumvents Reddit’s attempts to make money. Reddit responded by finding a way to put a price on the ad-free experience.