this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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The only reasonable subscription price to use a website you provide content for is free.
Who pays for the servers?
The users of reddit paid for the server costs many times over using the awards system. When it first started they kept saying how many years' server costs they had in the bank, just from selling reddit gold.
I don't mean reddit. You made a general statemet that you shouldn't pay to access user generated content.
Even Lemmy has users contributing tens of thousands of dollars to pay for servers. Someone has to pay.
Well we've both given one example: passionate users who believe in and want to support the platform.
Another example would be the business itself through the data they exploit. In fact, if they're collecting and exploiting user data, thus generating a profit from the user, then really they should be paying the user for the data.
You can't sell a car without paying for the nuts and bolts, yet data companies don't pay us for the materials we provide that are integral to their product.
There's certainly some grey area with a free service that collects data for free. I'd still argue this is wrong, just because the value exchange is completely disproportionate. But when you're paying for the product/service and they still collect your data (looking at you, Microsoft), then that's just really scummy and wrong. With the reddit API charges, reddit is asking users to pay reddit so they can give reddit data that reddit can profit from. That's fucked up.
That's fair. With the reddit example, the data reddit collects is used for advertising. Because reddit accounts are anonymous, there's not much to sell to third parties.
But with a third party reddit app, reddit can't show ads. The data is pretty useless. I'm not convinced third party apps can be a meaningful part of the revenue stream.
They don't need to be. Showing ads to users isn't Reddit's only revenue stream, and they're only requiring it out of greed. The whole point of API is to make it easier and cheaper for things to access reddit's database, without API then other services will scrape from the website, which uses far more of reddit's resources. And that's before you consider the fact that reddit's API charges bear no reasonable proportionality to any actual costs.
Blocking third party apps or requiring apps pay for API access and pass the cost on to the user is akin to blocking or charging users to access the website while using an ad blocker. Yet, users are apparently far more forgiving than they are with sites that block ad blockers.