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APIs for content sites must be free

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Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#221

Post by zokier »

Blahah wrote: post #148
w0mbat wrote: post #69

The trouble with a free API is that someone can write a $1 client that hides all the ads (the number one requested feature), and now your website has no income. An ad-supported website has to get paid. On the web there is at least some stuff they can do to detect ad blockers, or show ads in sneaky ways that change over time and are hard to block.

That's a good argument against ads, because ads introduce a fundamental misalignment of incentives between the platform and the user. There are many ways reddit could build a collaborative business from their current situation. Advertising is very clearly not going to work, so they just need to look outside that box.

> There are many ways reddit could build a collaborative business from their current situation

Like charging for API access? Yeah, that went well...

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#222

Post by randomdata »

pessimizer wrote: post #217
randomdata wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of your labor should be free also. Yes, it is, and that's ultimately the contention here. Reddit has taken many millions of man hours of free labor. Now it wants to charge for the fruits of that free labor. Legally, they are within their rights to do so. Socially, however, it's thought to be uncouth to exploit workers like that.

> Reddit has taken many millions of man hours of free labor. Reddit has accepted many millions of man-hours of labor. They didn't kick down anybody's door and take it.

> Reddit has accepted many millions of man-hours of labor.

Yes, "accept or receive (someone or something)" is indeed the literal dictionary definition of "take". Thanks for subbing in an alternate word that means the exact same thing. I am sure we have all derived great value from your efforts. Or at least a hearty laugh at the pointlessness of it.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#223

Post by ribosometronome »

thewataccount wrote: post #110
ZoomerCretin wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Absolutely nothing. I don't understand why they don't just support OAuth and then the api usage would be by user, not by the app itself. Otherwise apps like apollo technically would be some of the biggest "users" of the api. What's wild to me isn't just the amount, it's the lack of time. In theory APollo might have enough users will to pay enough for them to profit (albiet with a fraction of the users). But because t…

Isn't this why people are upset? It's pretty transparently them giving the axe to third party apps when they explicitly said that wasn't what they were going to be doing. People don't like being lied to or treated like they're too stupid to know what you're actually doing.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#224

Post by sigstoat »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #62
David_Axelrod wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time you dont just expose your internal api routes to the world. You need to write curated public facing routes that dont include certain schema or records. Takes time to write and maintain that different set of endpoints

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).

> Your HTML is, quite literally, a degenerate form of an API.

i look forward to the folks making this argument telling their boss “it’s ok the HTML is an API that’s all we need to provide”

come on, nobody believes this when they’re not trying to win an argument on the internet

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#225

Post by zokier »

wmgries wrote: post #48
falcolas wrote: post #18

My take is slightly more nuanced - if you're paying a company to access their content, it shouldn't matter how you're accessing that content. 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.

A different version of this argument is: why should it matter if I'm querying the content using the API directly versus by using the HTML web interface? If it's the case that different consumers of the API might put different load on the system than the web page that the provider can't/doesn't want to support, why isn't rate limiting the solution? This also provides providers a way to fairly monetize their API: we're…

The HTML interface has ads baked in, which pay for the request. API does not.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#226

Post by AlotOfReading »

keneda7 wrote: post #184
AlotOfReading wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This isn't correct. The API restrictions are per client id, so your app must be limited to you specifically. Having different accounts that share a client id is the whole purpose of Oauth. It's entirely orthogonal to commercial use. The changes affect everything from moderation bots to non-commercial clients to archival services and everything else.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#227

Post by [deleted] »

jstarfish wrote: post #215
simonw wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> 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. That's not a social contract, it's the definition of entitlement. By no interpretation is it reasonable to expect anybody to offer a free service indefinitely. Thinking otherwise…

[deleted]

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#228

Post by TeMPOraL »

sigstoat wrote: post #224
TeMPOraL wrote: post #62

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).

> Your HTML is, quite literally, a degenerate form of an API. i look forward to the folks making this argument telling their boss “it’s ok the HTML is an API that’s all we need to provide” come on, nobody believes this when they’re not trying to win an argument on the internet

Look, if you have a webpage, you're already providing it. If your webpage is of any use to anybody, someone is likely consuming it by scrapping. So if your dedicated API is harder and/or more expensive to provide and maintain than the degenerate API of your webpage's HTML, you're doing something wrong.

I'm not trying to win an argument. I'm trying to point to an obvious reference point for cost/effort behind an API that's handling the same data and interactions the webpage does.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#229

Post by joshsabol46 »

+1 I tweeted exactly this same sentiment just yesterday:

> This Reddit / Stack Overflow API drama feels weird to me as a user. It's USER submitted data. R/SO didn't create it.

> So what ChatGPT scraped it? They're benefiting the same users who contributed the content on R/SO, and then some.

> It's not like ChatGPT is cloning them.

> It would be like if Printing Houses tried to block authors from publishing their content as an eBook or Audiobook.

> Users contributing to your ecosystem doesn't give you perpetual dominion over that content

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#230

Post by ThinkBeat »

""the social contract""

There is no such thing.

Faceboook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram whatever exist to make money, or whatever those who own it or run it wants.

It is your choice. You wish to spend your time adding value to a website someone else runs great. Does that give you rights? Nope.

Normally in extremely obfuscated ways, the contract you do enter into by using a site will tell you exactly that you have no rights at all and they own everything you do.

I agree that it can be unfair. But you actively decide to provide content. You cant make up the rules for the sites you do use. You can stop whenever you want. You can start your own site.

I did so a few years ago when I got sick of this shit. On the other hand, I have few visitors. I can howl in the wilderness. For me it is preferable.

If you do engage in one of the big social sites, you are given access to an enormous audience. You can post something that "goes viral". You get fame, site gets $$$$, maybe you get $$$. News can easily quote you from some of the big social sites.

How often do you: Thinkbeat today said on his blog thinkbeat.blog that ""

Compared to Such and Someone posted on Twitter...

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