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APIs for content sites must be free

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Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#281

Post by awestroke »

kpw94 wrote: post #235
awestroke wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can't include ads in an API response

You could, but with EU and other legislations you'd have to make it clear it's an ad, so in API-speak, there'd be a "is_sponsored=true". That makes it too easy for API consumers to ignore. (Compared to human eyeballs browsing a webpage) But you could make it part of the ToS: if you're using the API to present posts to users, you MUST show all the posts in the list, including the is_sponsored=true ones.

Even so, how would you track impressions?

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#282

Post by drchaos »

clmckinley wrote: post #209
miah_ wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack Overflow is under a moderator strike at the moment too! The company has disabled the data dumps of the content after a recent layoff. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390106/moderation-s...

I predict that all sites like this which thrive on community generated content will be getting rid of apis and bulk exports. This is because ai companies have used those tools to build their systems on data that prevents the need to the source website. This is an existential threat to sites like StackOverflow and a huge, missed opportunity for reddit.

AI companies can just scrape the content, and since the sites don't have an exclusive license to it (it's user-generated, after all) there is little they can do against that.

Actually, I'm not even sure the AI companies don't do this already. If I'd start such a company, I'd invest in a generic crawler once, instead of building countless integrations for all the different, proprietary APIs or dump formats.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#283

Post by rldjbpin »

clickbait aside, this seems like a myopic take on social media IMHO.

i would like to rather contrast it with the notions of web3 and people wanting ownership of their content, or at least be able to use the platforms without ads or data harvesting.

while the real argument in this post seems to be that the api should be priced "fairly", we need to recognize the limited revenue streams the site has been employing till now, including the meaningless awards.

the underlying costs might be apple and oranges, but the ads till now have not been super-intrusive à la youtube with its upto 5-6 continuous ads, or more relatably 5 banner ads or autoplay videos like many publications.

moreover, given the technically inclined audience here, we can all agree that they have not been fighting back adblockers on their web ui like twitch or news websites.

i have no websites with major traffic or ever got blessed with the "HN effect" on my web infrastructure, but those who have can attest to the unaccounted costs of running a public site for free. so i find it ironic that the most backlash has been from this crowd, who also tend to be happy to pay for chatgpt plus for personal use at a monthly rate costlier* than prime and netflix combined.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#284

Post by iLoveOncall »

randomdata wrote: post #203
iLoveOncall wrote: post #25

This assumes that the API is the reward provided by the website to "buy" the user-generated content, as if the website did not provide value otherwise. Nobody posts on Reddit just to access the content via an API, it's not a finality of using Reddit, it's a nice to have.

1. It is impossible to use Reddit without an API (a webpage is just another API). 2. No API is ever truly free. There are always tradeoffs that come with a cost. 3. Not all APIs have the same cost. The question is, at what point does an API become a cost too much? There is a lot of indication that changes at Reddit will mean that some APIs that were previously considered to be acceptably priced will no longer be acce…

Given that your very first point is arguing semantics, I think it shows how weak any argument that you can bring forward is, so I won't even read the rest.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#285

Post by amelius »

willcipriano wrote: post #243
h4ckerle wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to. You can self report and if you incorrectly report it is a crime. As simple as that. This is also exactly how the definition of very large online platforms (which is a site from 45+million montly active Users) in the EUs new Digital Services Act works [1]. Some companies (primarily porn) are believed to have misreported, and are being investigated for that[2]. If they are found guilty they will have…

Couldn't the government claim you are lying about how many users you have, and then demand you show them how many you have? How will they prove how many users they have without handing over the list of users?

Theoretically, if your forum is like Reddit they can just crawl the site and look for usernames that appear on top of posts.

But I'm sure there are other ways.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#286

Post by jangxx »

dylan604 wrote: post #143
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…

The funny thing to me is this sort of expectation that a site/app that accepts user contributed content must provide access to it other than the site/app it was submitted.

So are you saying that because I submitted a lot of reddit comments through Apollo I should also be able to access them through Apollo? Because that's a statement I would agree with but I'm not sure it's what you meant.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#287

Post by randomdata »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #284
randomdata wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It is impossible to use Reddit without an API (a webpage is just another API). 2. No API is ever truly free. There are always tradeoffs that come with a cost. 3. Not all APIs have the same cost. The question is, at what point does an API become a cost too much? There is a lot of indication that changes at Reddit will mean that some APIs that were previously considered to be acceptably priced will no longer be acce…

Given that your very first point is arguing semantics, I think it shows how weak any argument that you can bring forward is, so I won't even read the rest.

1. Defining previously nebulous terms to clearly identify how they will be used as follows is not arguing semantics. To frame it as a semantic argument is erroneous.

2. Comments are always written by the author, for the author. If you do not want to read it, great. It wasn't ever for you.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#289

Post by David_Axelrod »

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).

Don't mind the other commentor, spirited discussion is always welcome! I was thinking about this and even hacker news is a good example of how an html view can differ from data model. Hacker news doesn't show you the vote count of every comment despite having that data available. They chose to not even render it into the template so no scraper will ever have access to that information.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#290

Post by jodrellblank »

awestroke wrote: post #288
jodrellblank wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t you? “Sent from my iPhone.”

Any time I see "Sent from my iPhone" I assume the sender is a fool

Are you missing the point that adverts can be inline with normal content and therefore can be included in an API result?
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