[keneda7]

>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 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.

[AlotOfReading]

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?

[pessimizer]

Speaking of semantic shifts, "reasonable to expect" has nothing to do with obligation or whether people deserve anything. It's "reasonable to expect" that it will rain tomorrow, based on what I've seen on the weather maps and in the forecast. The rain has no obligation to me to fall.

[AlotOfReading]

"Reasonableness" is a decent way to describe the norms of a social contract. They're not legally enforced (reddit clearly has no legal obligations here besides), and 'unethical' feels like the wrong adjective. It's also the word grandparent comment used. What word would you choose instead?

[keneda7]

>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.

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.

[AlotOfReading]

> 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.

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.

[keneda7]

>This isn't correct. The API restrictions are per client id, so your app must be limited to you specifically.

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-...

[choudharism]

This is a false dichotomy - no one is protesting for a free lunch. The vast majority of app developers and users are okay with incurring a fee (and many solutions have been proposed - for example, users needing to subscribe to reddit's premium tier to use 3rd party apps) - reddit management has shown in their conduct (refusal to listen to users / potential customers, applying changes with a staggeringly short notice) that they are negotiating in bad faith.

[keneda7]

So I would agree with about reddit management especially how they treated the Apollo dev but this thread is on a piece about why APIs for content sites should be free. It is not about reddit managements conduct or lack of common sense. There is still a free tier with reddit's API. It is rate limited to 100 request a minute per API key. So if you are using reddit for your own personal use, it is very rare you are going to need more than 100 apis requests a minute.

[pessimizer]

What if they don't want to be in that business?