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 education service or something I can see your point and may agree with you. But that is not what is happening. It is people using reddit's resources to make money for themselves.
Reddit has the right to want fair compensation for use of its service in a commercial manner.
We have the right to stop using reddit if we don't like it.
We have the right to run a service that does give free api access if we see it as reasonable.
We do not have the right to force reddit to provide us free access to their resources. That is completely unreasonable and would be no different than me going to you and saying you must give me access to all your credit cards and let me use them because I feel like I should have it.
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?
Claiming this is about personal use is the semantic shift not what I said. You are trying to shift back to that because you know if you have a good faith discussion you have no legs to stand on. The reddit changes target commercial use plain and simple.
If you create an app that loads reddit content from its APIs for only you to use, these changes are going to have very little no effect on you. That app would be personal use and if you incurred charges for your API use they would be very small (or you are abusing or spamming the API which both are against its terms of use).
The most public part of this has probably been the Apollo dev vs reddit. Apollo is commercial. Using Apollo to browse reddit used the Apollo API key not your accounts API key. The crazy charges the Apollo dev listed are due to tens (hundreds) of thousands of reddit users using the Apollo API key to access reddit. That is not personal use. That is a commercial entity using its own API key to access reddit's API.
This isn't correct. The API restrictions are per client id, so your app must be limited to you specifically. Having different accounts that share a client id is the whole purpose of Oauth. It's entirely orthogonal to commercial use. The changes affect everything from moderation bots to non-commercial clients to archival services and everything else.
It is exactly correct. I said you build an app for ONLY YOU TO USE. You can still use multiple reddit accounts that you control but no one else is using your API key. Or put another way, you register an API key and then grant that API key access to all your reddit accounts (using OAuth most likely). No other persons reddit account would be using your API Key.
Also that is not the whole purpose of OAuth. You have been able to attach multiple accounts to a single clientId for decades. There are still plenty of sites using SAML that have multiple user accounts tied to one clientId. In fact you can very simply do this today without OAuth. Make a table called clients that owns a table called users. Any user that logs in will have a record in the users table you look up using their userId and then look at the clientid or apikey attached to the parent client record. Then use the clientId/apikey to access any resources you need.
OAuth is delegate authorization framework. Its purpose was to give users the ability to give a system limited access to their data without giving that system their password. It allows you to seperate Authentication and Authorization. Here is a good link to learn about OAuth: https://developer.okta.com/blog/2017/06/21/what-the-heck-is-...
Yes, I have no issue with all of those. I'm poking fun at taking that desire for action from a single company in a single instance and extending it to a universal moral principle.
My own opinion is that Reddit users were getting something valuable for free and it is being taken away from them. In addition to the totally reasonable protests that they are making, some are taking it a bit far and supporting their tantrum by creating axioms of morality that I believe are a bit excessive.
It's not freeloading, it's just a bunch of people dedicating so much time and attention to communicating with each other that the server costs are dwarfed by the value of the platform to its users.
I am very doubtful their model would scale to Reddit's size, and certain they don't have any wish to.
If by some crazy fluke there weren't any highly motivated money-brains in the social media space, I'm absolutely certain a sustainable non-profit open source solution would exist in place of reddit and facebook, and it would eventually accumulate nearly as many users as those sites have. Maybe not as quickly, and maybe while throwing up donations banners at the same rate as Wikipedia, but it would happen. But you need to get impossibly lucky for the entrepreneurs to ignore "the space" when you have 100k users, and by 1 million users the scent of "alpha" has drawn so many of the biggest, meanest, smartest of the bunch that you need to be an absolute juggernaut of momentum and name recognition (like craigslist and Wikipedia) to have any hope of competeing.
"could be free" and "must be free" are such a moving of the goal posts that it is impossible to argue against. I mean, you didn't even go through "should be free" on your way.
Network effects tend to pick extreme winners and losers. From most user's perspectives, there isn't much of a choice. I have an iPhone for a totally stupid reason: My family's chat is an iMessage group and they coordinate photo albums with Apple's shared albums thing. I use reddit for literally no reason at all except that other people use it.
I assert that it would be better for me and most to use an equivalent networking facility maintained by a non-profit entity, and that if there were some kind of cross-site replication such that you really could choose which option to use, a very large number of people would pick the option that didn't present inline or otherwise invasive advertisements, and (indirectly) the option that had free API access, via something like Apollo (software that's simply built better than its competitor on its OS).
So not only do I believe non-profit-reddit (hey, that's "NPR", complete with donation drives) could exist, I believe it would be better for its users and so it should exist. But I also believe it can't really exist as long as somebody is throwing a bunch of (indebted) money into winning the network effects war. So I believe that for-maximum-profit-reddit should not exist.
But I admit the belief feels empty since I'm not authoritarian enough to take it all the way to "reddit must not exist". So I'm just sad instead.
You are not obligated to provide it to whoever wants it,and to cover the cost of providing or insuring it is available.
This is a radical notion.
As for the for everyone wrote it,everyone has access to it. That is daft, the access to the data is at the discretion of the service hosting it, they never made any claims they would make this data available to everyone anyway they wanted it?
If people don't like the terms of a site don't use it, don't think just because you used a service for a period of time you have some right to determine how that service is operated.
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.
> They also seem to reinvent history such that there was some "implicit" agreement between Reddit and the users of Reddit.
There was an _explicit_ agreement: the site's terms of use have allowed free API access with reasonable quotas for 15 years, and are being changed now with very short notice. Of course the terms of service can change, but users are also free to leave, complain, or demand that they don't change. There are also strong cultural factors involved. For example: just like in the US it's customary for tap water to be free at restaurants, and people would be probably angry if you decided to charge for it, on the open web it's customary for some reasonable level of API access to be free.
> IMO, just because I wrote some shitposts on Reddit does not mean that I am entitled access to every single shitpost that has ever been written on Reddit.
There's no such asymmetry in scale: _everyone_ wrote the content, _everyone_ is entitled to access it. If you're referring to incredibly resource intensive, mass-access to download several terabytes for AI training I can see how that should cost a price. But they're blocking reasonable use-cases.