APIs for content sites must be free (🔥 Score: 152+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/5GSi2 Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/5GSi2
Like the author of this paper said, for me it’s not really about third party apps. The problem is that reddit try to monetize a content that is our collective property.
Is it our property though?
Intellectually speaking yes, but legally speaking? Probably not. Chances are if its stored on their servers, it belongs to them.
Legally, currently, yeah. Needs to change though. I’m ok with monetizing the presentation and delivery but if you want to use collective property you should still have to make that available as part of the deal.
Replacing “comment” with “artwork” kind of helps illustrate it. If we all made tons of artwork for Reddit, then they started gating it behind a paywall and while painters and all the behind-the-scenes painting staff earned nothing – well that’s kinda where we are today.
But what you mentioned absolutely happens, though.
It’s €17 to go to the Louvre. Many of the paintings there are public domain, which logically says they should be free as they have no owners. Yet to see them, most people need to pay €17.
Those are paintings locked behind a paywall. The pieces may be donated freely by an artist - just as users contribute freely on a website - but the museum still charges for admission.
So while I’m not defending the practice - and there are many free museums; even the Louvre has ways to get in for free - it’s also not exactly a way to convince others that the practice is inherently bad.
Wouldnt the image of the painting be public domain but the physical piece be different?
Like you could take a photo of the Mona Lisa and use it however you like, but the physical item itself is private property and access to it can be monetized?
Yeah, pretty much this. When I post anything on social media I intend to speak publicly to anyone who wishes to listen. I’m not speaking to Reddit, Lemmy, whoever in confidence, so no matter what the ToS says, my intent is any advice or anecdote I give is anyone’s to view and use, not in the content host’s sole ownership.
Not the Hacker News that I’m familiar with.
I’m partial to https://www.hckrnws.com/ because I am just a lurker.
It’s a Telegram bot that filters top rated articles in news.ycombinator and it links them like that. You can click the ‘comments’ link and see for yourself.
Why not link directly to the hacker news post then? I’m always suspicious about redirect services like that.
Yep, reposts bots are expanding.
@Penguincoder @IcyPractice Mute them and move on. Something i learned on Quora, Mute , Block , Report. not that anyone here uses Quora. Good life lesson though
Why?
I figure its fair to charge for access if you pay the moderators and the contributors.
Seems like they are taking over the moderator roles now, by force. Maybe the mods will also be the main contributors soon?
I also think it is the greater good to let AIs train for free.
I’m not entirely sure about this. Freely available AI’s, sure, maybe. But corporate closed source AI’s that charge per token? I’m not saying no, but I’d love to hear someone justify the thinking behind why this is “the greater good”.
I am not sure I agree entirely with this, while I do think there should be third party clients, we have entered the age where allowing API access is giving free reign to very valuable LLMs to train on your data, which also IMO violates your users privacy. I think it’s better to have it be gratis but not libre, perhaps some kind of app approval process or some such.
I think it’s possible to have a middle ground, just by putting properly formed license terms like foss projects. Ie. Specify that the AI/bot must be following certain rules(ie, fetch the comments but not the user IDs), because if we don’t provide data for open and free alternative, there will be no good AI tools for common folks. And the top dogs are all hoarding data with sneaky ToS.
That was wild, yeah. Social media sites shouldn’t lock down APIs because it’s all user generated and LLMs should be given free reign to harvest user content for their own proprietary ends?
I guess I can agree that these two ideas aren’t fully contradictory, but there’s a lot of friction between these two conceptions of user’s rights to their content/data.
Nothing can stop screen scraping. A nefarious LLM startup could hire an outside group to screen scrape the data and give it to them for training. Charging exorbitant amounts of money for the API hurts users far more than other companies with a profit motive to get the data.
What is readhacker.news? Why not just use the news.ycombinator link anyway
It’s the way a Telegram bots deliver the links. See response above.
