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.
> 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.
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.
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.
How is this relevant to the present issue regarding reddit?
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.
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.
This ignores the nature of network effects. The value of the thing is precisely that other people are using it. That's not a value that's created by reddit, it's a value that's _exploited_ by reddit.
"Just go somewhere else" requires either a phenomenal degree of coordination, OR to just bite the bullet that not everyone will move to the same place at the same time, which fragments the community (which was, again, the bulk of the value in the first place).
The difficulty of network effects is that, as the group gets larger, the value goes up faster than linear AND the cost of coordinating a migration ALSO goes up faster than linear. A gathering that's 1/10th the size, isn't worth 1/10th as much. It's _significantly_ weaker. And migrating en-mass is an n^2 coordination problem. It's closer to a hostage situation than it is to a value-add.
> 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?
Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even. Does that justify indefinite control of an important resource? Legally probably, but you can tell I think it shouldn't.
So you could've just lead with the fact that you don't care about private property and have an anti-social outlook on life. It was spelled out to you why there's value in Reddit. You say the commons are the important thing.
If I go to your living room with 3 friends and we start talking about life and philosophy, you'll ask me to leave or pay rent. But I will tell you no, you just host the place where cultural discussion is happening, I don't care if you worked hard to get your home, I'll just be there and it's not up to you to control that home forever. I could've gone into any home, the value is in my discussion, so you should be happy I'm having it there and allow me to have it for free, since there's no value in your home and you shouldn't even own it for the future.
> Private property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy, with socialist perspectives making a hard distinction between the two. As a legal concept, private property is defined and enforced by a country's political system.
> The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy
That is a political statement, whereas what I described is a practical situation of life. Do you support the viewpoint that I replied to that it doesn't matter if someone owns something, even if they worked hard for it, that you should be able to come in and takeover because of discourse that happens there? If so we can disagree on that, there's no need to make it a wider political statement.