zlacker

>>robbie+(OP)
Everyone saying their pricing is absurd had better get ready for the new wave of API pricing.

Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base.

Twitter was one of the first to give access to cheap mass data, and now they're one of the first to charge through the nose for that. The move is going to be that if you're not enterprise level you're not getting this data anymore, and I doubt it stops with reddit.

>>Eji170+HR
>I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

>>the_sn+uY
In economics they call this rent seeking[1]

> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society.

You can see Reddit as a landlord, owning the land (or website) that the value grows on. They don't contribute value themselves, instead they make money by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

>>tornat+ph1
> by charging rent to everyone who wishes to grow value on their land.

That goes beyond rent-seeking into feudalism.

Rent seeking is running an application as a service that could just be a tool you pay once for, and instead have to pay for monthly. Charging people rent for access to a commons in which they provide all of the value is digital serfdom.

>>hinkle+Sk1
The business’s servers, bandwidth, and employees are “commons” now?

>>lotsof+hm1
We could fight about the actual value of the CPU, HDD, network, etc is. Not literally zero. The manpower to keep it running is a stronger argument, but I still think it's missing the point. The real value is the community generated content, and yeah, that's a commons.

>>stavri+xq1
> The real value is the community generated content, and yeah, that's a commons.

According to which court or government?

I'm not familiar with every country, but I don't think a single G20 country or the UN has spelled out anything like that.

>>Michae+8s1
I was absolutely not using the term in a legal sense. Is "commons" even a legal term? I suppose I should have said "should be a commons" - as in, a publicly generated and maintained 'good thing' (susceptible to tragedy).

>>stavri+ut1
Okay, it's certainly an interesting idea to speculate about, maybe some country will recognize it in the future. Though it seems unlikely, unless most of the world agreed, considering WIPO and various other treaties which have been ratified.

How is this relevant to the present issue regarding reddit?

>>Michae+Qv1
In regards to the idea of reddit rent-seeking - the primary value of reddit is not something they create, it's something they _host_. It could be anywhere, but by dint of network effects, it happens to be there. Reddit is not valuable because it owns a serverfarm, or even because it employs people to maintain the serverfarm. It's valuable because it controls a cultural meetingpoint.

Aggressive control of the meetingpoint (which it is able to do), is rent-seeking because reddit controls _access_ to the value, but does not create the value. You were making a point that reddit doesn't provide literally nothing. That's true, but it's a red herring. Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.

edit: I'm sorry, you were not making that point. I was responding to that point.

>>stavri+lx1
> Reddit is not valuable because it owns a serverfarm, or even because it employs people to maintain the serverfarm. It's valuable because it controls a cultural meetingpoint.

How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?

> Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.

This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.