You are fighting a straw man you yourself erected. Nobody believes they have a right to reddit but nor does reddit have a right to viewership. They are trying to leverage the value their communities bring to the platform. There is nothing morally wrong with this.
When people castigate the mere idea that Reddit should be trying to guarantee a return to its investors - and I can point you to examples of this if you wish - it's hard to interpret this as anything other than people saying that their interest to unfettered API access is more important than the interest that investors have in a positive ROI. I guess you could say that this isn't establishing a "right to Reddit" but that seems like hair-splitting to me - "we don't have a right to Reddit but anything that would take Reddit away from us would be evil."
> t's hard to interpret this as anything other than people saying that their interest to unfettered API access is more important than the interest that investors have in a positive ROI.
Reddit is removing all api access to for-profit apps. Anyone willing to pay who contacted reddit has been ignored. By acting in bad-faith, they lost all moral ground at all.
Users are deciding whether or not they should trade their comments, moderation, and submissions to reddit in exchange for the platform reddit provides.
Anything that would take functionality or access away isn't "evil" it merely decreases the value proposition potentially putting it below a threshold where its not worth bothering to provide the content that make's reddit worth visiting leaving the shell of reddit owned by its corporate overlords worth little.
The protest is demonstrating to Reddits CEO that it is in fact a negotiation because while they have no right to tell Reddit how to run its ship they don't have to join they voyage much less act as crew.
It's not their job to make Reddit profitable. If they wanted reddit to be profitable they could have not spent years adding negative value to the platform and wasting expensive developer hours. Alternatively they could have made third party app access a paid feature instead of asking developers to predict and then pay for usage.
>Anything that would take functionality or access away isn't "evil" it merely decreases the value proposition potentially putting it below a threshold where its not worth bothering to provide the content that make's reddit worth visiting leaving the shell of reddit owned by its corporate overlords worth little.
Sure, this would make sense, but obviously there's a lot of moralized rhetoric being thrown around here which go beyond a dispassionate expression of "if you do this Reddit will no longer be personally valuable to me and I will leave." Uncharitably, people are trying to wrap up their ill-based moral indignation in these dispassionate expressions - "if you do this than I'll be so outraged that Reddit will no longer be personally valuable to me and I will leave." The moral indignation still lacks justification, though.
