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APIs for content sites must be free

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Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#41

Post by willcipriano »

amelius wrote: post #28
zoogeny wrote: post #13

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…

> I often get the feeling that in these circumstances people derive first principles from specific desired outcomes. But that's exactly how laws are made. E.g. why do we have consumer protection? Because it helps us! It's democracy in action. It's not like nobody would ever build another forum if there were laws like the ones proposed by GP. And if you're worried that every little forum should comply to complicated l…

> laws only apply to large players, e.g. >1M users.

What if I don't want to share my user list with the government?

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#42

Post by is_true »

dgrin91 wrote: post #15

I like how he touts Stack Overflow data dumps as an example, even though they also totally sold out and stopped doing the data dumps. They are no better.

SO dumps are a great example, it's common to find regurgitated SO data in google search, ranking above the original content.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#43

Post by notJim »

This post just asserts the existence of a right that comes out of nowhere. The rights you have on a website are established by agreement between you and the site's creator. You are free to not post on the site if you disagree with the terms of that agreement. If you choose to post, you have apparently come to the conclusion that the exchange is mutually beneficial.

If you think that APIs for content sites must be free, I think you need to offer more to justify it then this does.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#44

Post by adrr »

88913527 wrote: post #17

Won't machine learning largely solve this problem? Fine, don't provide an API, but I can extract a useful JSON document from your HTML representation.

If you're referring to reddit you can just add .json to the URL. eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog.json or https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/149ad64/teslas...

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#45

Post by williamcotton »

Why not a publicly owned platform instead of forcing private businesses to operate for the good of the general public?

Why not stop building public pools and just force people to make their private pools available for anyone to swim?

Is it because we have seemingly lost faith in the very notion of a republic?

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#46

Post by ashinybrowncoat »

This seems to be a lost author looking at socialist media platforms, not capitalistic social media. Things that actually have a cost should not necessarily be provided for free, even if one does not understand said cost (such as the author of this story). Providing an API is an add-on and not actually required of any social media platform but it does cost money to maintain the storage of the content as well as to not just build said API but also to maintain it (including keeping it secure and scalable). This author seems to be thinking of some kind of socialist media platforms, not the current capitalist social media platforms we have now. Even so, I would definitely welcome the idea of socialistic media platforms although I am not even sure how one could be built and/or managed. This sounds about the same as "McDonald's should be free" and I don't really see a big difference other than the actual consumption of said good/service.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#47

Post by beders »

It's stunning to me how little people like the author of this piece know about the economics of running large scale sites like reddit or twitter.

Nothing is free, including providing and maintaining APIs.

Someone's gotta pay for the ramen, especially if you can't run ads.

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#48

Post by wmgries »

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 giving you some basic level of access that matches what you get through the website for free, but if your access pattern is such that you put a load on our system that we can't tolerate, then we'll charge you (by providing a paid tier).

Re: APIs for content sites must be free

#49

Post by oth001 »

beders wrote: post #47

It's stunning to me how little people like the author of this piece know about the economics of running large scale sites like reddit or twitter. Nothing is free, including providing and maintaining APIs. Someone's gotta pay for the ramen, especially if you can't run ads.

Read the footnote.
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