APIs for content sites must be free

I may agree with the idea, but it is pure fiction. Instead of begging companies to be nice, we should figure out how to change our entire software paradigm so it becomes impossible.

Imagine comparing coal miners to the equivalent of internet janitors who volunteer to work for free as long as they get their share of petty power.

Tons of them are basically just protesting since they won't be able to exert said petty power as efficiently as they used to.

I can't imagine getting to a point where I'd defend Reddit powermods, even over spez himself. But even in your very shaky analogy, the mods are at worse the petty bourgeois, not some sort of proletariat of Reddit wtf.

This post makes no argument. It is just a pile of assertions. Simply stating that there is a "social contract" doesn't make it so. What evidence does the author have that "millions of users create the content expecting it will be widely available"? Even if that's true, what evidence is there that they do so with the expectation that it will be widely available through an API or through third party apps? And even if they do expect that, by what logic can you conclude that there is now a social contract that that expectation will be fulfilled?

I don't think any of that is true. I don't think people are thinking about third party app users or about the wide availability of content when they post things to Reddit or other social media websites at all. I don't think they're thinking about people using third party apps. I think they're thinking on a much more mundane level.

The whole concept of a "social contract" is fraught with difficulty too. It's a relatively niche idea to try to explain why people follow laws, or how laws can be justified. The idea is that we obey the law for the same reason we obey a contract: exchange of consideration for mutual benefit. But that's not actually a very good explanation, for a long list of reasons, and it certainly can't justify laws of universal application given that eg. children can't be bound to contracts they've signed and we apply laws to everyone even if they don't want us to. The concept certainly doesn't make sense in the context of a web API for a social media website. Even if everyone "expects" that their "content" will be widely available, it does not follow that there is any obligation, legal or otherwise, on Reddit to make it widely available. There just is no logical connection there unless you build one. This post does not. It simply asserts that APIs for content sites must be free. Why? Because!

LexisNexis does not just "charge people access to content which the parent company didn't generate". I could access most legislation through the government legislation website that shows the current version of every piece of legislation. I could piece together legislative history by looking through all the various amendments over the years compared to the originally enacted Acts. OR, I could look at LexisNexis, who have done all that work already and also have notes for pretty much every provision linking all that data together with academic and judicial commentary, major cases on those provisions, etc.

Similarly, I can look up unreported senior courts cases on the 'Judicial Decisions Online' section of the courts of New Zealand website, for free. But what about the notes written by experienced barristers in the law reports? What about the database cataloguing every judgment that has referred to every other judgment, giving an indication of whether the judgment is still good law?

It seems very popular these days to crap on businesses like LexisNexis and it does sometimes feel like they're taking the mickey given their prices and the terrible web interface to their databases. The fact you can't even 'open in new tab' properly is infuriating. But they're not just selling access to something that ought to be free, as many people seem to like to claim. They provide a lot more than just the raw judgments and statutes.

This implies that the Reddit administration thinks things through. They have a track record proving they indeed do not.