> alright, we'll let you fix our broken s** site but only if you take a vow of poverty.
I'm so glad someone brought this up. Every conversation I've seen about Reddit's API pricing on HN has had at least one person asking, "well, how are they supposed to fund the site then?" And that's not Reddit-specific, it's a really common talking point whenever a property/platform starts cracking down on fan/volunteer work.
But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary.
If 3rd-party accessibility services are important for accessing your service, those 3rd-party developers should be allowed to make money off of their stuff. Sometimes "non-commercial" clauses are appropriate for some projects/terms, but sometimes they get really abused and it's worth taking a step back in many situations and asking why they were included in the first place. Community-focused devs like to eat and have housing too.
Or like, don’t have a website that is a steaming pile of the jankiest JavaScript on the web. The damn site barely works and has crashed my browser more than every other site I visit combined. God help anybody with a screen reader.
The other story here is these apps all exist because Reddit the site is a joke from a technical standpoint. It’s just a disaster. The community is why people are there and the apps allow the communities to function.
This is also a good point. It's somewhat orthogonal to what I'm getting at, my point is more that even if Reddit wasn't in that position it would still be really weird and unreasonable for them to be pushing a non-commercial requirement.
But agreed that in addition to the "Open Source developers like to eat" thing, it's also very worthwhile to ask why Reddit isn't accessible to blind users already. Accessibility can be hard, but it's not that hard. It's not so hard that a company with 2000 employees (I guess less now) couldn't do it.
Blind accessibility shouldn't be the community's responsibility to fix; and there's an extra layer of absurdity in people fixing Reddit's horrible accessibility for them, for free, and Reddit responding with, "we've decided in our infinite generosity not to charge you money for the privilege of fixing our site. But God help us if we find out that anybody else is giving you money to do it..."
Totally, the root of all this is their site is garbage but has a great user base. If I were them I’d be terrified a moderately competent teenager could break that moat with a fast and performant site.
>But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary.
I don't think there's anything interesting there at all. It's reddit's website, reddit's API, reddit's data. Their policy already says they can charge for API access and change prices at any time. It's not a matter of them having a "moral right to make money" but they do have a legal right to at least seek profits by setting their own prices.
I don't see anyone arguing that third party app developers shouldn't be able to seek profit by charging people money for their apps. But if they're going to do that, then they're accepting that they're in a market, and that it's not a free market if you choose to make yourself entirely reliant on a single provider. If you make a reddit app, and reddit increases their prices to a level that makes your operation unsustainable, well that's a risk you chose to make when you chose to tie your livelihood to a reddit app. Risk and reward.
I think what people are actually saying is not that they're "morally obligated to not make money" but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month.
There's really nothing arbitrary about it. It's not about "fan/volunteer" vs "platform".
Meh. There are moral arguments getting made around Reddit's "right to profit." We can talk about this purely in terms of legal capability, but that's not usually the context these conversations start in. And it's worth mentioning that it's also completely legal and acceptable in a free market for users to protest and boycott Reddit over the API pricing even if that means its harder for Reddit the company to make money and be sustainable. Mass protests aren't against Reddit TOS. And those user expectations about API access (wherever they come from) is part of the risk Reddit took on when they created a content platform; users have no legal obligation to make Reddit the company profitable.
I often see conversations about business practices bounce between "well then how do you expect the company to make money" and "that's just how Capitalism works, you can't blame them for doing what they're allowed to do." And it's useful to be conscious of when that transition happens and to ask ourselves what consequences we view as just natural outcomes of the market (hobby developers getting priced out of application development), and what outcomes we view as unacceptable problems that need solutions (AI companies scraping Reddit).
To be fair, often those arguments are coming from different people, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But it's still worth thinking about which arguments tend to on average fall into which of those two buckets and why different kinds of free market activity often get talked about in one framing, but not usually in the other.
> but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month.
Much much more importantly though: I completely reject this reasoning, I think it's exactly the cognitive bias that I call out above. The reason to exempt accessibility tools from API pricing is because those tools benefit blind users. If the people making those tools can also pull in tens of thousands of dollars, then good. A developer making tens of thousands of dollars building that tool is still solving an accessibility problem for Reddit at no cost to Reddit -- and notably Reddit has no equivalent solution of its own to offer instead.
The people to have sympathy for in this conversation are low-vision/blind users. And it is not poverty that makes Open Source and/or community-maintained tools useful to those users.
Ask yourself: why exactly would a volunteer profiting off of an Open Source or community-maintained tool be worse? I would argue that there are expectations that we have of volunteers that are much harsher than the expectations we have for proprietary platforms. In many cases these volunteers release tools that are more Open than proprietary alternatives, that have better privacy, that are cheaper and/or free to use, and that overall respect users and preserve user-agency much better than the platforms they're building on. And yet, in addition to producing more respectful tools, people also expect them not to make money. Why?
It should be the opposite. I want people who are building Open Source tools to make more money than the platforms that aren't in touch with their community.
I don't see any evidence that people "expect them not to make money". Has anyone actually said that? I think the confusion is between the positive and negative meanings of "right". Neither party has the "right to make a profit" in the positive sense that society is obliged to structure itself in such a way that the eventual result is their making of a profit. Both parties have the "right to make a profit" in the negative sense that there are no legal restrictions in place that prevent their making of a profit per se.
In other words, they have the right to participate in commercial activity with the goal of making money, but they aren't entitled to success in that venture.
The confusion seems to be that Reddit is the entity making the decision here and they're the ones feeling the effects. Reddit has raised its prices. The response is "well it's a free market, they can do what they like, they've got the right to seek to make a profit". The apps have said they'll have to shut up shop as a result of the changes. The response is "well it's a free market, they aren't entitled to make a profit". There's no conflict here, it just looks like one on the surface if you aren't careful to distinguish between the right to make a profit and the right to seek a profit.
> I don't see any evidence that people "expect them not to make money". Has anyone actually said that?
I'm not sure I follow. Reddit has said they expect them to not make money. Reddit's API pricing is high enough that any small accessibility app or client that is not exempted from that pricing will have to close up shop.
Reddit is effectively saying that they expect these devs to either not make money or to stop developing the app. In practice, those are the only outcomes that are reasonably possible -- exemption from pricing or the apps going away. And its entirely within Reddit's control and up to Reddit's preference to decide which of those outcomes happen.
> but that the "accessibility" sympathy card rings false when it comes from people pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month.
This too is what I'm calling out. What do you mean by "sympathy" here? Do you have sympathy for the app developers, or do you have sympathy towards the blind users? Because if that sympathy is directed towards the blind users (and I would argue that is who the sympathy should be directed towards), then whether the devs are making money should change nothing at all about how you feel about those tools.
My point is that the profitability of an accessibility tool is completely irrelevant to the conversation about whether or not it's good for Reddit to allow free access to the API for important accessibility tools. It's really weird for Reddit to have that criteria in its carve-out, and it's worth interrogating why they included it.
It's worth asking why Reddit said "okay, obviously for really important tools like blind accessibility apps, we're going to make sure that they can access the API unless they have some form of funding in which case, tough luck." Well wait a second, a blind accessibility app making money doesn't make it any less essential for blind users that the tool stick around. Nothing has changed, blind users still need the app. And because of how expensive the API changes are, Reddit demanding that people trying to serve the community make no money or get blocked via an API they can't possibly afford is basically the same thing as them saying, "we don't think that community accessibility tools should have sustainable funding."
Basically no community accessibility tool is going to be rich enough to afford these kinds of prices. If they're not exempted, they won't be able to exist.
And as you yourself said, there is a sympathy argument being made here. But importantly, the idea the devs could make a living off of their work helping the community suddenly made that argument ring false to you. Why? What changed about the way you felt about the developers, about the value of the app, about the position that blind users are currently in -- that made that sympathy suddenly feel unmerited? Okay money is in the equation, suddenly you felt like the sympathy argument no longer was appropriate. Dig into that -- who were you feeling sympathy towards, and why did you suddenly stop feeling that sympathy when there was money on the table?
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> There's no conflict here, it just looks like one on the surface if you aren't careful to distinguish between the right to make a profit and the right to seek a profit.
I am not going to accuse you in particular of being inconsistent about this, that's not my intention at all. But you aren't the only person on HN, and short answer is: I disagree, a lot of comments I read about this are not making the distinction you describe (particularly comments that call people out for complaining about Reddit's policy).
Note that people are absolutely allowed in a free market to complain and verbally attack companies that make decisions that hurt the community regardless of whether the company is allowed to raise prices. Reddit has the right to seek a profit, and the community has the right to punish Reddit in the marketplace for trying to seek a profit in a certain way that the community deems to be harmful. This too is the free marketplace of ideas.
Again, I am not accusing you specifically of making this argument. But there are absolutely people on HN making the argument that critics of Reddit's policy have some kind of moral requirement to come up with a solution to Reddit's financial woes. The perspective you suggest is not usually typical of the conversation, and my top-level comment was discussing that normal disconnect. The typical comment I see is not distinguishing between right to make/seek a profit, it is specifically suggesting a right to make a profit in selective scenarios, and then clarifying that there is only a right to seek a profit when Open Source/community funding is introduced into the conversation.
Not saying that's what you are doing. But I completely disagree that the typical commentary around this subject is ideologically consistent.
I'm so glad someone brought this up. Every conversation I've seen about Reddit's API pricing on HN has had at least one person asking, "well, how are they supposed to fund the site then?" And that's not Reddit-specific, it's a really common talking point whenever a property/platform starts cracking down on fan/volunteer work.
But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary.
If 3rd-party accessibility services are important for accessing your service, those 3rd-party developers should be allowed to make money off of their stuff. Sometimes "non-commercial" clauses are appropriate for some projects/terms, but sometimes they get really abused and it's worth taking a step back in many situations and asking why they were included in the first place. Community-focused devs like to eat and have housing too.