CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company

That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service.

Ouch

  • constantokra@lemmy.one
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    2 years ago

    Wide op for ai scraping and nothing are not the only two options. They could easily limit api calls to what would be good for single users or mods and have each user generate their own key. Apps could let users input their key. Most users wouldn’t bother and would switch to their app anyway so it would get them 95% or what they claim to want without being a dick about it.

    • CrateDane@feddit.dk
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      2 years ago

      Plus AI companies can just scrape reddit without using the API. It’s still a website after all.

    • FanciestPants@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      I’m not sure if I wasted my time, but I spent a few hours today editing all of my posts on Reddit to be a single comma or period. I didn’t comment or post a lot by any means, but just got irritated enough to try to keep from contributing in any way to Spez profiting off of user provided content.

      • Sparking@lemm.ee
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        2 years ago

        Can’t shreddit do this in bulk? I am considering doing it for my comments, but I think I will just leave them up there. I did have a great time on reddit until they announced their API changes, so I will leave them with that much. But I did get a backup of everything I wrote using bulk downloader.

        But I am still considering just doing a shreddit just for kicks.

    • Pika@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      that’s how they did it. They put a 10 request a minute on bots and a higher oauth limit (100) for individuals. large User client type apps could have somewhat easily converted over to that system but due to time constraint they didn’t. I do think they extorted their third party devs sure but, honestly the individual user limit isn’t super unreasonable as long as you aren’t liking or disliking every post. the search api is 100 posts per Api request, it was more the no NSFW and the no advertising limits they put on it that sucked

      edit: its actually 10 or 100 per minute not hour

      • Sparking@lemm.ee
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        2 years ago

        It’s not that simple, because the third party apps ship with a single api key. So I used Relay for reddit, and used the same api key as everyone else on that app. You could create an app, and then have everyone make their own key, but that is just asking for trouble. Definitely too technical for most people, and you would probably need to put in billing info for a scenario where you go above the free-tier call limit.

        • Pika@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Yeah but if you’re going to use the oauth 2 method you don’t use the same API key as everyone, how that works is you authorize your account with the bot, the company gives you a bearer token and then that token is what’s used for rate limits. The Bot client token is not used in that process, the oauth2 bearer token is

          this is taken from the reddit Api docs: As of July 1, 2023, we will enforce two different rate limits for those eligible for free access usage of our Data API. The limits are:

          If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute (QPM) per OAuth client ID
          If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 QPM
          

          so apperently I undershot it, it’s actually 100 requests per minute not per hour like I originally thought it was

    • Sparking@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      Honestly, I think the sad truth is that reddit is bleeding money, and every action they take from here on out will be about recruiting whales and driving off everyone else. That’s steve’s brilliant business strategy - make reddit p2w.