You can't because the digital landlords make everything free or almost free in the beginning, before raising it to stratospheric levels once the market is captive. Google did that with Maps. OpenAI is doing it with its API. And people like free or almost free things rather than reasonably-priced things.
It's not always so capital intensive anymore to make things free, there are technical advancements that make that easier these days so I believe there is edge to be found. In particular I'm exploring offline-first apps in addition to decentralization/self hosting, because offline-oriented apps help avoid expensive servers. Users like the privacy benefits and I enjoy the benefits of minimizing UGC custody.
I don't know to what degree that this will be a watershed moment, but I'm hopeful that this is a high-profile enough of a wakeup call that some dedicated subset of power users puts their efforts into developing the ecosystem around federated alternatives that have the possibility of breaking free from extractive models of social media. Even if that's 100 people out of the millions potentially affected by the reddit changes, that could bring a lot of benefit.
MediaWiki has DataDump^1, and ArchiveTeam has a bot that can use it this extension as an API to mass-archive many wikis at once. Very useful since it gives an archive of article revisions and images in a machine-readable format that can be used to recreate the entire wiki, minus user accounts.
Yea that's how business works - you take parts, add value, and produce new parts. In this case a curated set of links with discussion. The costs for you the user are so low (ad supported) because users do most of the work. You'd have to pay a monthly fee if Reddit had to employee thousands of people to curate the links for you. And given you don't like paying money in the first place, there would be no Reddit.
The idea of having third parties only pay for bandwidth and not lost ad revenue is absurd. Some special class of users who are not paying their fair share which in turn means more ads for everyone else to make up for free loaders.
Reddit didn't make any of that data. It was community members.
If you're a community leader in charge of some subreddit... would you continue to let Reddit host the data if they continuously make it more expensive to access the data?
Yes, I do. I give users access to the API for free and then I do not monitor their use of it. So it is almost certsin that some of our competitors scrape our site and use our data for free.
Yes, aside from selling. It's important for archival efforts.
In the case of Reddit and Wikipedia, it's also an important part of how the volunteer moderators/contributors run the site. On Reddit there are a huge selection of community-owned moderation bots that monitor subreddits for posts matching rules.
If all the content on my website was literally donated by 3rd parties for the explicit and practically only purpose of online dissemination, I'd definitely think twice before paywalling it.
Yes. I love CC0 and hate IP. I find other ways to make the money than licensing access to data (or aspiring/building toward in some parts).
For my apps that rely on UGC, I take it a step further and remove myself from UGC liabilities somewhat by having users self host in various ways, appified for simplicity. I definitely don’t paywall license access to UGC - this allows me to operate much more leanly by not having full custody of UGC. Win-win
Obviously UGC hazards are still important to build against but these models offer interesting ways to do that as well
