[johnday]

I fail to follow your chain of reasoning. How can the claim both be "clearly false" and unclear in its statement?

The use of "should" as the very first line of the body text actually makes the argument extremely clear, which is that there is a non-legal, non-technical imperative for API access [leaving only a moral/social imperative, as you determine]. I think you are probably smarter than the very low reading comprehension bar in order to understand what is being said, so I'm not sure what value you are deriving from pretending not to.

[pessimizer]

> there is a non-legal, non-technical imperative for API access [leaving only a moral/social imperative, as you determine].

There is no more an argument here than if I said there was a moral/social imperative for them to clean my house. An argument derives conclusions from premises.

[CobrastanJorji]

"X must do Y," taken literally, would imply that X did Y. But here, X did not do Y. That's the "clearly false" part. and that's fine, because that's how language works. People speak hyperbolically or metaphorically all the time.

But the author must be trying to say something when they say "X must do Y," and it's not clear to me what. Are they just using "must" to mean "should?" Or do they mean something stronger? And what does "should" even mean? Do they mean should like "it would be a tactical mistake not to?" Evidently not because they start talking about social contracts and such, which are more about some sort of community unstated rules or traditions or something.

Put another way, if I say "X must do Y" to you, and you want to disagree, how would you do that? Would "X is not required to do Y" be a rebuttal? Or "Y would not be very nice?" I can't tell if either assertion would contradict the author's assertions. What are they trying to say?

Maybe it's just me being annoyingly pedantic (it's happened before!), but it's the title of the post and even after reading the whole thing I'm no closer to being able to summarize their argument. Is it just "I don't think Reddit should do this because it's a useful tool and it'd be mean," but with the word "must" thrown in randomly for oomph?