Such arguments are always just different forms of "everything on the internet must be free, always", which is a valid ideological position to hold, sure, but one should also realize that it is not going to work in the real world.
APIs for content sites must be free
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Re: APIs for content sites must be free
#92The article disagrees with the headline. The article says
>*I don’t mind a site charging a nominal fee for API access. Either to cover the cost of API service itself, or more importantly to encourage API developers to be efficient when making API requests.
Re: APIs for content sites must be free
#93"Must" [as "be necessary"] and "should" are ultimately meaningless when you're dealing with corporate.
Corporate only understands "allowed", "required", and "forbidden". Handle it accordingly.
Re: APIs for content sites must be free
#94There's some argument to be made because of Section 230. They are just distributors of user generated content and gatekeeping may go against that.
Re: APIs for content sites must be free
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know exactly what a social contract is, and it's always superseded by a legal contract (which the ToS sort-of is, though it would have to go through the courts if challenged). Given that the ToS explicitly says that Reddit et al. can do whatever they want with your data, the idea that there's a social contract there is wishful thinking.
Uhh... I really don't think you do know what a social contract is. A social contract is a temporary state of affairs, where both sides are benefitting from being able to implicitly hold the other side to it; where either side can freely breach it, but where this dissolves the social contract that held until that moment; and where dissolving the social contract will (obviously) cause the other side to rescind all bene…
That's exactly what I meant by a social contract, thanks for clarifying it so well.
Re: APIs for content sites must be free
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? 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 soft…
>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…
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 nominal fee to cover API maintenance costs?
Re: APIs for content sites must be free
#97[ LAUGHS IN LEXISNEXIS ]
Everyone seems to be fixated on the idea that the API should be free and no-one seems to be mentioning that there's some very successful business models built around charging people access to content which the parent company didn't generate. LexisNexis, for legal searches, Elsevier for scientific papers, Facebook, for random graph searches (and occasional political data scraping), Twitter, etc.
It feels scummy to me too to take something free and charge people for it, but it's also not this unique thing people seem to be screaming about. Just go somewhere else if the API is that important to you. (Like hackernews). :)
Re: APIs for content sites must be free
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know exactly what a social contract is, and it's always superseded by a legal contract (which the ToS sort-of is, though it would have to go through the courts if challenged). Given that the ToS explicitly says that Reddit et al. can do whatever they want with your data, the idea that there's a social contract there is wishful thinking.
Uhh... I really don't think you do know what a social contract is. A social contract is a temporary state of affairs, where both sides are benefitting from being able to implicitly hold the other side to it; where either side can freely breach it, but where this dissolves the social contract that held until that moment; and where dissolving the social contract will (obviously) cause the other side to rescind all bene…
I have these thoughts about the homeless problem.
Re: APIs for content sites must be free
#99I'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…
> things like answers to simple questions people have about SQLite
What about just to answer the guy who had the question?
Re: APIs for content sites must be free
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think your arguments accurately cover the OP's argument at all. The key distinction is literally the first sentence: "Social media businesses should not charge* for APIs." If you have a community [whatever] service that would not be a business. If you have a blog, that's could potentially be a very business-adjacent, but I'd argue it doesn't cover the "social media" qualification, so that also doesn't apply.…
> OP is arguing that API access should be free/at cost. Implicitly he is also arguing that it must exist at all. But let's consider further your own commercial clause. Apple has a discussion board for their support community [1] - and now we are mandating that Apple must both have an API for users to access it and must only charge cost. Who gets to determine the cost? Is it hardware costs? Does it include R&D? Is the…
A server-rendered HTML website is an API. If said HTML website is unauthenticated and freely accessible by any user-agent, then it's a de-facto public API, too. This is the case for the Apple discussion boards. You don't have to authenticate with their backend before scraping anything you'd like off of the site. You can build third-party tools to read or even interact with this site, by scraping the HTML.
This thing with Reddit is only the big deal that it is, because Reddit's backend blocks "app" user-agents from simply scraping pages from the non-authenticated Reddit HTML website. (If this wasn't true, they'd just do that, and none of this would be an issue.) But these third-party UAs are instead forced to go through the authenticated data API — where they can then be API-credit-limited and forced into paid data-API subscription plans.