The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
This article has so many inaccuracies… I haven’t talked with a single person that thinks Reddit shouldn’t charge for api access. And the final comment about being legally obligated to pursue profit is just factually incorrect. https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
You can find plenty of other sources just like that one saying the same thing. I’m pretty sick of this myth, because it gives all these companies a bogeyman to hide behind.
This point struck me too:
Reddit is under no obligation to make its API free. But, it seems, the company has overreached in enforcing the new policy. If its target is the largest AI firms, then it should focus on curbing their parasitic proclivities and not going after beloved and useful software its users and moderators depend on.
This is my feeling. I understand that it could cost something. But the eye-watering rates for the small fish and the speed of the extortion is the issue.
Reddit knows the rates it proposed are extortionist. They don’t have the nerve to honestly state that 3rd party access will be stopped from July 1 and accept responsibility, so instead they tried to find a way to blame 3rd parties.
Think of it as killing two birds with one stone: they monetize users by getting AI firms to pay for all the valuable content redditors have posted over the years, and they kill off app competitors who are giving redditors alternatives to the mobile app.
That’s really all it’s about.
AI firms will just scrape anyway.
Which, somewhat hilariously, will be more resource intensive than the API. It’s a part of the reason why companies have APIs, to dissuade scraping.
Its difficult personally to believe its a myth due to my memory of the Twitter buyout where I recall the main struggle being that the CEOs of Twitter couldn’t deny Elon purchasing Twitter due to the threat of lawsuit from their shareholders, and after announcing his plans to purchase Twitter for the inflated price Elon couldn’t back out due to the same threat however I am open to the idea that I could of been misled on that situation.
As for the why of a myth like that circulating I doubt its due to malice and more due to misunderstanding as Ive always understood that any wording made on a legal case could be used as precedent. It could also fit well with people rationalizing why companies seek record profits while underpaying workers for their labor.
If anyone could clarify the Twitter situation without sucking off elon it would be appreciated
The rule is that a corporation is primarily organized for the benefit of shareholders, but it’s not exclusively organized for only that purpose, and the corporation has no obligation to maximize the benefit for shareholders today versus tomorrow, in cash versus in future equity, in certain profit versus uncertain risks, etc. So the company can choose to pay out dividends to shareholders, or reinvest profits back into the company. It can give money to charity to improve public goodwill, and it can give bonuses to non-shareholder employees to keep things running smoothly, and shareholders can’t sue that their money is going to non-shareholders.
Its difficult personally to believe its a myth due to my memory of the Twitter buyout where I recall the main struggle being that the CEOs of Twitter couldn’t deny Elon purchasing Twitter due to the threat of lawsuit from their shareholders,
The article actually talks about that specific scenario, in the Revlon case. If a company is going private and buying out its shareholders, then there’s not an ongoing set of broad interests to balance. The shareholders are being forced to give up their shares in exchange for cash, so if that transaction is going to go through, the corporation has an obligation to maximize the price for those shareholders. There’s no today versus tomorrow, dividend versus reinvestment, etc., because that one transaction distills everything down into money for shares.
With the Twitter case, it’s a bit in between the two: were the Twitter shareholders better off between taking the cash for shares today, or declining the cash to keep the company and see if that is better for them in the long term? The directors were obligated to negotiate a deal and submit that deal to a shareholder vote. So if the shareholders decide “hey this is a good deal for us,” then that pretty much simplifies the question into a clear answer, rather than a complicated set of countervailing interests of uncertain weight.
You’re right. Would you recommend I take the post down?
no haha, I like the title. and it started a good conversation! leave it up! hopefully people read the comments though :D
It’s his site. He will always win. Fuck him and greedy capitalists fucks like him.
PS: Enjoy Lemmy
It hasn’t been his site since 2006, that’s when u/spez & Ohanian sold reddit to Conde Nast. rn, u/spez is only an employee in reddit.
Wasn’t lemmy created by tankies? Avoided it for kbin (I’m aware of the federation) due to this.
When I see people say what you’re saying, I know that they don’t have a basic handle on how the Fediverse or Lemmy works.
They developed the platform and currently run Lemmy.ml. The whole point of federation is that they cant control other instances.
You’re safe from the big bad scary communists on Lemmy.
You’re safe from the big bad scary communists on Lemmy.
Kbin.social doesn’t defederate lemmy.ml, so either way we’re playing by their “don’t say Uyghur genocide because we don’t think it’s real and we will ban you based on that belief” rules if we accidentally stumble into there.
This is where I would like to see individual-level instance blocking so that it doesn’t show up in the home feed, same as how I can block everything that pops up in a language I don’t speak.
Edit: Turns out we have that! Just found another thread showing how. On kbin, it’s possible to view entire instances separately, and there’s a “block” button similar to individual magazines/communities/users. To see lemmy.ml, the link would be
https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.ml
but replacing the lemmy.ml part with any instance should take people to that instance just the same.
I’m glad you found a solution!
Kbin.social doesn’t defederate lemmy.ml
Again, kbin.social is just one instance of kbin. Go find another if it doesn’t suit you. See https://fedidb.org/software/kbin
And Reddit has been backed by Tencent - CCP supporters by default - and Peter Thiel - a white supremacists and actual, literal fascist.
The politics of the people behind for-profit endeavours that the public has no actual control over regardless of stake seemingly never comes up. The politics of people behind things that challenge for-profit endeavours and gives control of things back to the public is often under the microscope.
We don’t know ernest’s politics. What if it came out tomorrow that he was an anarchist? Or that he was also a Leninist? Or was a white supremacist? Or that he liked Nickelback?
Or that he liked Nickelback?
I’ll see past many things, but Nickelback?
Not even once.
Lemmy the software vs lemmy.ml the server.
And Thomas Edison electrocuted animals to death. Yet we still use lightbulbs.
It’s open source so who cares
I do fee so much better now that reddit is dead to me. I check lemmy few times a week.
Feels like Spez won’t be taking this one to the chin. Let’s just see how deep the ship will sink with its captain.
I don’t think the ship is doomed yet but they’re definitely in ‘what is that ominous noise coming from the bilge’ territory. To carry on the analogy they’ll plug the leaks as best they can and try and make it to the safe harbour of the IPO (where she can sink at her mooring for all Spez cares) which they could still well do, but it’s also likely the captain and his officers being half-baked sons of lubberly farts will smash into several reefs on the way and sink their already damaged vessel.
Judging by the recent less big brand advertising, I think he was trying to shore up the IPO but failed. At the very least Reddit is still alive but it’s going to be valued less.
Didn’t Reddit already drop at least 40% in valuation from when they started the IPO process a year or so ago?
Yes, but almost all ad-based business models in tech fell, too. There’s less advertising money on the internet today than in 2022 or 2021, so investors are more skeptical in business models that primarily rely on internet ad revenue.
Throw in the fact that Reddit’s advertising platform is actually difficult to use and not particularly effective, and you have the problem where Reddit simply can’t charge the same rates that Facebook and Google can. That’s what’s going to kill the site, when advertisers decide it’s just not worth advertising on that platform.
How platforms die aka enshittification : First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
sauce : https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
reminding me I need to manage to archive my data off reddit. XD And ready the kill script on June 30ths to delete my posts.
