> I was relying on a very light social contract that was in place there
This was never a social contract so I actually wonder how you or the original blog poster ever got to that idea. In fact, it's explicitly not the social contract if you ever read the Terms of Service of sites like Twitter and/or Reddit.
I know exactly what a social contract is, and it's always superseded by a legal contract (which the ToS sort-of is, though it would have to go through the courts if challenged). Given that the ToS explicitly says that Reddit et al. can do whatever they want with your data, the idea that there's a social contract there is wishful thinking.
Uhh... I really don't think you do know what a social contract is. A social contract is a temporary state of affairs, where both sides are benefitting from being able to implicitly hold the other side to it; where either side can freely breach it, but where this dissolves the social contract that held until that moment; and where dissolving the social contract will (obviously) cause the other side to rescind all benefits they were granting the other, and instead revert to whatever it perceives as the game-theoretic global optimum — usually involving local indefinite defection, to "make an example of" the party that violated the social contract.
A ceasefire during a battle is an example of a social contract. Neither side shoots until the other does. Once someone shoots, the other side responds with everything they have, to make an example of the side that shot first.
Not eating your coworkers' food in the office fridge is another example of a social contract. Once someone violates it, people either stop putting food in the fridge, or start petty games of bringing random leftovers dosed with ex-lax to work and leaving them in the fridge.
A social contract isn't "superseded by a legal contract"; a social contract is relied upon in preference to a legal contract. The legal system only applies when a given social contract is broken and dissolved by one party breaching it, thus leaving no recourse other than the underlying legal reality.
The social contract for Reddit, that did exist until it was breached, was "Reddit lets people consume its data for free; and in exchange, users act to curate and maintain and grow the data, rather than actively polluting/destroying/lessening the data." Now that that social contract is dissolved, users are doing everything they can to make Reddit a shithole.
> A ceasefire during a battle is an example of a social contract.
This is absolutely false. A ceasefire is not a social contract. It's just bizarre to even claim this, as ceasefires are most often enacted in the context of ceasefire.. uh, treaties.
> Not eating your coworkers' food in the office fridge is another example of a social contract.
This is a better example (though still a very poor one, as we have laws against theft), and the key here is that a social contract is implied or implicit. Why would free API access be an implication of using reddit's service? Almost no other social media website does that.
International law in general is more like a social contract than a legal contract since there is very limited recourse to enforce it against violators other than rounding up a bunch of other countries and getting them to agree to enact a punishment.
"Why would free API access be an implication of using reddit's service?"
Because they offered free API access for 17 years.
Same way Heroku breached a social contract when they got rid of their free tier: if you offer something like that for more than a decade, people will reasonably expect it to continue and will be angry with you if you pull the rug on them.
> Same way Heroku breached a social contract when they got rid of their free tier: if you offer something like that for more than a decade, people will reasonably expect it to continue and will be angry with you if you pull the rug on them.
That's not a social contract, it's the definition of entitlement. By no interpretation is it reasonable to expect anybody to offer a free service indefinitely. Thinking otherwise is just a form of social parasitism that strips the host of its own agency, because they were dumb enough to make a handshake agreement decades ago.
Like decrying your favorite band for "selling out" and evolving with the times. You'd rather they only make music a diminishing fanbase wants, until they starve?
Even child support agreements can be renegotiated every 3 years and last up to 21 years at most if your ex's attorney is particularly conniving. You likely renegotiate your own salary every 1-3 years as well. Reddit stuck to their end of the agreement for 17 years (already impressive for anything in tech!), it's now untenable, but fuck them for not going insolvent.
Only the generations raised with the internet seem to have the expectation that if you offer anything for free, you're expected to continue doing so forever even if it kills you.
You’re thinking about standard ceasefires. I’m not the parent posters, but the Christmas truce of 1914 was done IN SPITE of orders to keep fighting between both sides.
I’m guessing that was what they were referring to.
> as ceasefires are most often enacted in the context of ceasefire.. uh, treaties.
Also known as "armistice treaties." (Where "armistice" is preferred, because otherwise "ceasefire" would have two very different meanings.)
Yes, an armistice usually causes a ceasing... of fire... at the site of any battles that happen to be going on at the time. But you wouldn't usually call what happens on the front lines as a result "a ceasefire." You'd call it "the battle being quit by both sides." During an armistice, both sides usually pack up and go back to their respective bases to be held for redeployment.
"A ceasefire", when the term actually comes up in practice in relation to "phenomena you can experience during a battle", does not usually refer to the ceasing-of-fire that exists as part of the enactment of an armistice. Rather, a ceasefire is used mostly to refer to a temporary, tactical Nash-equilibrium state that lasts a few hours or days; is local to a particular battleground; and is enacted bottom-up by the boots on the ground just not shooting anybody for a while.
(A ceasefire is usually considered an example of a principal-agent problem — during a battle, the known Commander's Intent is to drive your opponent to surrender. A ceasefire does not accomplish this; in fact, it gives both sides time to replenish materiel, and thereby "gives ground" on a war of attrition. But a ceasefire is a state that's better for everyone who's actually there at the site of the battle — so it can be held to by social contract of the people who are actually there.)
Mind you, the phenomena of "a ceasefire" doesn't exist much any more in its original usage (land wars), as land wars have evolved past the point where ceasefires are feasible, due to the introduction of over-the-top raids, guerilla warfare, precision drone strikes, and other approaches designed to punish stillness and allow top-down enforcement of bottom-level participation. Ceasefires still come up pretty often in naval combat, though! (And they can also still come up in land wars in edge-case situations when a particular land-war battle has the properties of a naval battle — e.g. if two strike forces of armored vehicles meet.)
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I should mention, as well, that there can be ceasing-of-fire during an armistice, where both sides continue to just sit there guarding the lines they had established for the whole armistice period. This is the case mostly for wars of conquest being fought to claim scraps of land inch by inch. (There's a well-known one of those going on right now, in fact.)
During an armistice in this kind of war, the zone between the previous front lines of each side will stay watched, to make sure neither side "slips" the lines forward a bit in the other's absence. This creates a No Man's Land [or eventually a Demilitarized Zone], where both sides agree that no one from either side may enter as long as the armistice holds. (A good example of such a No Man's Land / DZ exists between North and South Korea, which have maintained such an armistice for decades now.)
The soldiers posted to guard a No Man's Land / DZ aren't usually the same soldiers used for combat — so for the soldiers who were on the front, they do still experience the armistice as "and then we were picked up and taken back home." The ceasing-of-fire is just one step in that higher-level "clocking out" process.
(The only time you'll have the same soldiers sitting there during an armistice that were originally delivered there to fight the battle, is if the armistice period isn't expected to last very long. And even then, only if both sides are willing to "tip their hand" to reveal their lack-of-confidence in how long the armistice will last.)
> I know exactly what a social contract is, and it's always superseded by a legal contract
Legally sure, it is also legal to be a jerk but in most circles/societies there is social contract to not be. Social contracts are often built on top of legal contracts where you live by the social contract and fall back on the legal protections of the legal contract where that fails. Most ToSs and contracts with social media companies are one sided though so for the average user there is not much to fall back on.
I think why people use social contracts on top of legal ones is because it is hard to get all of the details right in a legal document while in a social contract is normally more flexible and can change through time with iterative back and forth and therefore can make both sides better off compared to if they just stuck with the legal framework.
It remains to be seen who is thinking wishfully. If Reddit dies because their users all go away, there really may have been a social contract which Reddit breached. Reddit has a ToS which may attempt to supersede such a social contract but it doesn't necessarily.
The legal contract states that Reddit can do what it wants with the data, yes, but there is no consideration for production. That is where the social contract takes over.
The social contract states (allegedly, at least; we shall see) that producers agree to produce content in perpetuity so long as Reddit plays nice with the data. With that contract broken, production may cease.
There’s still a social contract that is supra the ToS: treat me and my contributions well and we will stick around. Stop, and we won’t.
Yes, Reddit can (try, at least) get away with anything they claim in the ToS — but community members have every right to step away and render Reddit valueless because they have been told that they are not valued.
Pretending that a legal contract supersedes a social contract is wishful thinking. They are orthogonal.
You are thinking of a social agreement often called a “handshake agreement” or “verbal agreement”. Yes a verbal or social agreement at law is often superceded by a written agreement mainly because there’s a specific common clause in written agreements that say exactly this.
The above legal concept is distinct from the term “social contract” that is a sociological term and has a wider definition that a mere legal meaning. Most of our laws are intended to capture concepts that have wider social and cultural relevance to the society to which they apply.
“Marriage” by example is a term with both a distinct legal meaning in many legal jurisdictions as well as a wider sociological conception that can vary from culture to culture.
I think you're confusing the term "social contract" with "oral contract." An oral contract will usually be superseded by a written contract, but saying a written contract supersedes a social contract seems like a category error. One determines your legal standing, the other determines your social standing, neither really supersedes the other.
This was never a social contract so I actually wonder how you or the original blog poster ever got to that idea. In fact, it's explicitly not the social contract if you ever read the Terms of Service of sites like Twitter and/or Reddit.