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APIs for content sites must be free

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261–270 of 300 posts

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#261

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. 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 moder…

>This isn't correct. The API restrictions are per client id, so your app must be limited to you specifically.

It is exactly correct. I said you build an app for ONLY YOU TO USE. You can still use multiple reddit accounts that you control but no one else is using your API key. Or put another way, you register an API key and then grant that API key access to all your reddit accounts (using OAuth most likely). No other persons reddit account would be using your API Key.

Also that is not the whole purpose of OAuth. You have been able to attach multiple accounts to a single clientId for decades. There are still plenty of sites using SAML that have multiple user accounts tied to one clientId. In fact you can very simply do this today without OAuth. Make a table called clients that owns a table called users. Any user that logs in will have a record in the users table you look up using their userId and then look at the clientid or apikey attached to the parent client record. Then use the clientId/apikey to access any resources you need.

OAuth is delegate authorization framework. Its purpose was to give users the ability to give a system limited access to their data without giving that system their password. It allows you to seperate Authentication and Authorization. Here is a good link to learn about OAuth: https://developer.okta.com/blog/2017/06/21/what-the-heck-is-...

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#262

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…

Speaking of semantic shifts, "reasonable to expect" has nothing to do with obligation or whether people deserve anything. It's "reasonable to expect" that it will rain tomorrow, based on what I've seen on the weather maps and in the forecast. The rain has no obligation to me to fall.

"Reasonableness" is a decent way to describe the norms of a social contract. They're not legally enforced (reddit clearly has no legal obligations here besides), and 'unethical' feels like the wrong adjective. It's also the word grandparent comment used. What word would you choose instead?

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#263
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'm making a concerted effort not to open reddit, and as a result am spending more time doing side project things.

One such project has been modding an old video game console. On multiple occasions when running into issues, search results are pointing me to reddit posts which I've tried to avoid in favour of alternative results but I find myself still needing more information only to discover the links are to blacked out subreddits - it has been brutal!

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#264

If you don't provide an API for your content, but you're happy to render some HTML containing the content when I browse to your website, then if I want the content, I will get the content. No API is necessary. I will happily waste your resources scraping HTML if it's necessary to get the content I want, so it's in your best interest to provide it via an API, which is ultimately just a more efficient interface to the…

In the era before JSON and pervasive Javascript, HTML was the API. The Web is an API. The people saying "API" are really just saying "the same data that's in the HTML, but stripped of extra junk". HTML was never supposed to be about presentation, it was data meant for a variety of user agents. Has everyone forgotten? Are they too young to remember? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#265
but if internet is only reddit and onlyFans and so one i think we enter the middle age. I miss complexe forums with passionated guys. redeit ends up rants and garbage of newbies, I dont use it so much . Maybe I'll be donwvoted but years ago I did learn and also meet people with forums. Now its redeit full of newbies

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#266
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 usually spend a few hours a week helping people with 3d printer issues and since all this has blown up I have just ignored it all. Not worth putting that knowledge into Reddit and toying with deleting that which I have contributed already.

It would be much better if this knowledge was available elsewhere for other souls to peruse. Say, maybe, a blog?

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#267
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'm making a concerted effort not to open reddit, and as a result am spending more time doing side project things. One such project has been modding an old video game console. On multiple occasions when running into issues, search results are pointing me to reddit posts which I've tried to avoid in favour of alternative results but I find myself still needing more information only to discover the links are to blacked…

I'm in a similar boat. Thankfully you can often use an internet cache to view the contents (this doesn't help Reddit out, which would defeat the purpose of the protest).

I've done this for a few coding things that I needed an answer fast. It does show how much will be lost if things don't improve, but like you I didn't want to fuel Reddit in any way (assuming the sub is even open anyway).

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#269
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…

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)…

So I would agree with about reddit management especially how they treated the Apollo dev but this thread is on a piece about why APIs for content sites should be free. It is not about reddit managements conduct or lack of common sense. There is still a free tier with reddit's API. It is rate limited to 100 request a minute per API key. So if you are using reddit for your own personal use, it is very rare you are going to need more than 100 apis requests a minute.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I usually spend a few hours a week helping people with 3d printer issues and since all this has blown up I have just ignored it all. Not worth putting that knowledge into Reddit and toying with deleting that which I have contributed already.

It would be much better if this knowledge was available elsewhere for other souls to peruse. Say, maybe, a blog?

I do have it cross-posted to my blog actually, and have my downloadable profiles there.
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