Not to derail this conversation but there is an extremely concerning pattern of big companies restricting programmatic access.
Elon with the Twitter changes and kneecapping third party clients.
Reddit with this situation.
WhatsApp with their systematic elimination of OSS API alternatives by sending legal threats/C&Ds to maintainers.
API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 and it's being robbed from us.
We need to start thinking about our human Right to Automate. If the companies don't want to give people reasonable access then it should be our right to make alternatives.
They closed the gates when their specific niche has been captured so that they can extract maximum value. As a result interoperability between services is dead. Fediverse is a valiant effort but the barrier to entry is relatively high, even for techies. It's time to accept that people just like the "comfort" of walled gardens.
The point is to kill third party applications. Social media companies watched Facebook do it with little outrage, and quite a bit of upside -- they completely control the user experience, all by squeezing out 3rd parties slowly and without fanfare. Twitter and reddit want to benefit from that as well, but don't have the political savvy to pull it off without protest. But the goal is the same, complete control of the user base and how they access the site. API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 up until a company realizes it's more lucrative to lock their users in harder.
True. This is only going to get worse unless technical people in these companies put a foot down.
Maintainers do not have the resources to pay for a legal defence (companies know this), the community has shiny-object-syndrome and so it's up to internal employees to show resistance to these immoral policies.
I think it's moreso that we need stronger decentralized options to be adopted. Google embraced both email with Gmail and jabber with Google talk. With Google talk they eventually reached a high enough usage rate that they closed it off, and effectively killed jabber, because there wasn't a large other service using it. With email though, they couldn't do that. They've slowly made it harder to interact with Gmail from outside Gmail. But email lives and can't be locked down.
I think the protocol needs some work, but I think ActivityPub and the fediverse, with Mastodon and Lemmy and the like, are the way forward. Centralized sites will always have this problem, because they spend VC money for growth, and eventually those investors expect their money back. If a site is just one part of a large ecosystem, investors can't push the site to close off like this for a profit and control.
How do you juxtapose this with the fact that Reddit is still unprofitable? Engineers cost money. Venture capital isn’t an infinite well.
The profitability of a business is a testament to its sustainability (or lack thereof). Persisting unprofitable structures is inherently unsustainable - despite how valuable they may be to users.
If the point was to be profitable, I would get it. But that's not the point. The point is to lock down their users into their app so they have a more solid looking IPO. But the guy planning the IPO is repeatedly saying that reddit isn't profitable.
If they wanted to make money, they could've charged an amount for the API that covered their costs and made them a profit. Or they could've required the apps to show their ads. Or they could've said that the free API access is now only for reddit gold subscribers. They're instead charging an amount for the API that clearly no app can afford, not negotiating at all, and locking nsfw content out of the API (it's already locked out of the mobile site).
The point is to lock down the users. Not profit, at least not right now.
I reject any premise that free/reasonable programmatic access is dichotomous to profitability.
Just as Devs are forced to resolve bugs in their code, business people should sort out the bugs in their balance sheet.
These decisions are being made now not due to profitability concerns, they're being made due to the lack of backlash from the tech community and laziness.
"Oh? Elon start charging extortionate rates for the heavily restricted API & Zuck gets away with throwing his legal weight around at OSS Devs and nobody bats an eye? Cool, we'll do the same thing!"
> The point is to kill third party applications. Social media companies watched Facebook do it with little outrage, and quite a bit of upside -- they completely control the user experience, all by squeezing out 3rd parties slowly and without fanfare. Twitter and reddit want to benefit from that as well, but don't have the political savvy to pull it off without protest.
What exactly do you mean by "political savvy?" The lacking the impulsiveness to make abrupt changes? The ability to accurately foresee the reaction to their changes, and change plans to minimize the negative ones?
Were there ever any popular 3rd party clients for Facebook? I don't recall any. Maybe the smart thing that Facebook did was keep control from the start. People don't typically get mad when they lose something they never had in the first place.
I deleted my long term account a few months back for other reasons (too much time on there, becoming toxic is weird ways). But, it is astounding just seeing how poorly they are handling this. It seems like they are willing to do anything to try and contain any form of resistance with the thinking that others will never find out or tell others.
It is a very juvenile way of handling criticism and feed back. They simply cannot accept that they have handled this API thing poorly and have completely doubled down on it despite all the negative feed back.
i have a theory. Remember many many years ago when reddit had that donate button and everyone was expected to complete it to 100% on a daily basis to make sure reddit had enough funds to host the whole thing? people around the world made sure, everyday that reddit could be up so that they themselves could enjoy it.
along comes VC funding and a dream of IPO, afterall, if facebook, google, reddit and others could do it, why the heck not reddit.
first they brought video and photos which astronomically increased hosting costs, then they started enshittifying their app with slow feature decay for third party apps.
at this point, the playbook was set. reddit was to follow twitter who used the generosity of third party developers to make people get hooked to the "twitter" and then decided to dump them. today, only twitter app works. reddit wants that.
reddit is claiming "costs" but if not for these third party apps, there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON FOR REDDIT TO EXIST. Its not like we have friends and family and sacred photos and memories there. Its memes and flame wars.
here is my predictions,
1. any/all of reddit's TPA's will re-emerge with a lemmy/kbin backend and people will use it as they were earlier.
2. there will be slight issues with federation and searching for communities across fediverse but browse.feddit.de has already solved that bit pretty nicely so all they have to do is introduce that in the app in the search.
3. you can see, unlike mastodon that needs USERS, and hashtags, a community, say technology on lemmy.ml can be reached by anyone searching for technology on browse.feddit.de and the same people can reach other subs so it shouldn't be much difficult to restart from where they left on reddit.
4. if reddit thinks it can just shove the whole thing under the rug, well, these people leaving are NOT coming back, regardless of who they bring as new mods. The "TRUST" wont be there.
Mine was the dumbest throw away thing ever about cow tipping. Simply that cows don't like strangers coming up to them and that it is difficult to tip a cow because 1 ton of cows is not a lot of cows.
Chrome attempts to detect these lookalike domains by comparing the URL you visited with other URLs that are either very popular, or that you have visited previously. These checks all happen within Chrome -- Chrome does not communicate with Google to perform these checks.
All the companies are cutting off access so others can’t build chatGPT-like AI models from their “content.”
The internet is going to be less open and less searchable going forward. Go look at google image search these days. Useless. Mostly to cut off access to millions of images to build models.
> Go look at google image search these days. Useless. Mostly to cut off access to millions of images to build models.
I think that was mostly due to copyright laws. The past few years, media companies, publishers, etc have been using copyright laws to paywall, hide or restrict more content - books, images, news articles, videos, documents, etc.
If Reddit wanted to make more money they should have invested in search. A few months ago there were many articles about how Google’s search was deteriorating and people had started going to Reddit. They could have easily had a slice of Google’s pie. Especially because the thing people really want most is recommendations (products, content, resources) - with everything changing so fast, Reddit was the place to see what real users were saying. This is the most monetizable kind of search. Now with users shredding their accounts and subs going private, they may have missed their chance.
I'm a sw eng, but at university I attended a pair of economics courses, more than 10yo. I remember teacher talked about the API economy, how everything would connect and flow through APIs, and I thought why a company would have given their data away for free and keeping the burden of the API infrastructure. Now API crackdown is real, green walled gardens are everywhere.
I wish a reddit terminal interface still worked. Everyone I try is broke or near broken. Then reddit gets nada from me and I don’t need a browser to read shit from them and their shit ui
I'm a sw eng, but at university I attended a pair of economics courses, more than 10yo. I remember teacher talked about the API economy, how everything would connect and flow through APIs, and I thought why a company would have given their data away for free and keeping the burden of the API infrastructure.
Now API crackdown is real, green walled gardens are everywhere.
Is the source of this project (or something similar) available anywhere? They can easily ban a single website, but it would be harder if everybody who wanted "API" access could self host this translation layer
Since it was a read-only api, I'm assuming they used the readily available json endpoints that require no authentication. reddit blocked it in any of the ways you can block a good faith actor -- by user agent or IP address.
Elon with the Twitter changes and kneecapping third party clients.
Reddit with this situation.
WhatsApp with their systematic elimination of OSS API alternatives by sending legal threats/C&Ds to maintainers.
API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 and it's being robbed from us.
We need to start thinking about our human Right to Automate. If the companies don't want to give people reasonable access then it should be our right to make alternatives.
Solidarity with the maintainers of Reddiw.