If you ran a website, would you allow 3rd parties to reproduce and sell your data for free?

I ran a popular wiki for a decade and did exactly that, complete with API.

Charging for it would have been insane landlord behavior because all the content on it was created by its users.

How do we educate the masses on avoiding insane digital landlords?

Which is all the big players btw. And most small players too. It’s not just a big n corrupt edge case.

I struggle with pitching the value of it in my products and would like to help peers

You can't because the digital landlords make everything free or almost free in the beginning, before raising it to stratospheric levels once the market is captive. Google did that with Maps. OpenAI is doing it with its API. And people like free or almost free things rather than reasonably-priced things.

It's not always so capital intensive anymore to make things free, there are technical advancements that make that easier these days so I believe there is edge to be found. In particular I'm exploring offline-first apps in addition to decentralization/self hosting, because offline-oriented apps help avoid expensive servers. Users like the privacy benefits and I enjoy the benefits of minimizing UGC custody.

Help me understand, how would Reddit work offline?

it obviously wouldn't, don't play stupid / go away

I don't know to what degree that this will be a watershed moment, but I'm hopeful that this is a high-profile enough of a wakeup call that some dedicated subset of power users puts their efforts into developing the ecosystem around federated alternatives that have the possibility of breaking free from extractive models of social media. Even if that's 100 people out of the millions potentially affected by the reddit changes, that could bring a lot of benefit.

MediaWiki has DataDump^1, and ArchiveTeam has a bot that can use it this extension as an API to mass-archive many wikis at once. Very useful since it gives an archive of article revisions and images in a machine-readable format that can be used to recreate the entire wiki, minus user accounts.

^1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataDump

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4LUn9Nv.png

> 3rd parties to reproduce and sell your data for free

You mean... like Reddit, which's reproducing and selling users' data...? (play canned laughter)

To answer your question, I'd charge them to cover the bandwidth cost.

Yea that's how business works - you take parts, add value, and produce new parts. In this case a curated set of links with discussion. The costs for you the user are so low (ad supported) because users do most of the work. You'd have to pay a monthly fee if Reddit had to employee thousands of people to curate the links for you. And given you don't like paying money in the first place, there would be no Reddit.

The idea of having third parties only pay for bandwidth and not lost ad revenue is absurd. Some special class of users who are not paying their fair share which in turn means more ads for everyone else to make up for free loaders.

Reddit didn't make any of that data. It was community members.

If you're a community leader in charge of some subreddit... would you continue to let Reddit host the data if they continuously make it more expensive to access the data?

Yes, I do. I give users access to the API for free and then I do not monitor their use of it. So it is almost certsin that some of our competitors scrape our site and use our data for free.

It’s not your data. It’s your user’s data.

Yes. I love CC0 and hate IP. I find other ways to make the money than licensing access to data (or aspiring/building toward in some parts).

For my apps that rely on UGC, I take it a step further and remove myself from UGC liabilities somewhat by having users self host in various ways, appified for simplicity. I definitely don’t paywall license access to UGC - this allows me to operate much more leanly by not having full custody of UGC. Win-win

Obviously UGC hazards are still important to build against but these models offer interesting ways to do that as well

If all the content on my website was literally donated by 3rd parties for the explicit and practically only purpose of online dissemination, I'd definitely think twice before paywalling it.

Yes, aside from selling. It's important for archival efforts.

In the case of Reddit and Wikipedia, it's also an important part of how the volunteer moderators/contributors run the site. On Reddit there are a huge selection of community-owned moderation bots that monitor subreddits for posts matching rules.

Users created, curated, promoted, moderated the entirety of the content for free. Guess that should stop

The point of mentioning the ARPU is to demonstrate that Reddit is letting these apps capture (or in most cases flush down the toilet) the value. Reddit goes out of business if they don't capture it themselves or continue to dump investor money in to a hole.