this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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APIs for content sites must be free (๐Ÿ”ฅ Score: 152+ in 2 hours)

Link: https://readhacker.news/s/5GSi2 Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/5GSi2

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[โ€“] remi_pan 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[โ€“] Googleproof 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe this isn't true everywhere, but I would have thought that our comment history would be legally ours via GDPR?

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

But what you mentioned absolutely happens, though.

It's โ‚ฌ17 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 โ‚ฌ17.

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm partial to https://www.hckrnws.com/ because I am just a lurker.

[โ€“] IcyPractice 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Why not link directly to the hacker news post then? I'm always suspicious about redirect services like that.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep, reposts bots are expanding.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@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

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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".

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is readhacker.news? Why not just use the news.ycombinator link anyway

[โ€“] IcyPractice 2 points 1 year ago

It's the way a Telegram bots deliver the links. See response above.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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?

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