One of Spez’s answers in the infamous Reddit AMA struck me
Two things happened at the same time: the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront, and our continuing efforts to reign in costs…
I am beginning to think all they wanted to do was getting their share of the AI pie, since we know Reddit’s data is one of the major datasets for training conversetional models. But they are such a bunch of bumbling fools, as well as being chronically understaffed, the whole thing exploded in their face. At this stage their only chance if survival may well be to be bought out by OpenAI…
Charging for their api is reasonable in answer to the llm data scrapers. The amount they’re chsrging, and the speed of the changes is not reasonable however IMO.
Reddit data is public and can be easily web scraped. Reddit doesn’t own it. Spez is just throwing random memes in to distract people.
I am sorry but you don’t know what you are talking about. These things are regulated by legal documents, you don’t just wake up on morning and say “trust me bro, their data is public”
If you go and read their TnC’s it explicitly statea that scraping is forbidden without prioir written consent. They only allow access to their data via APIs, which of course they charge for
The fact that it can be easily scraped it’s neither here nor there, if they catch you they can sue you
Nah Terms of Service is not enforcable through browse wrap agreement in the US and most of EU. You can’t implicitly agree with a legal document just by looking at something.
Check out LinkedIn v. Hiq case which went to 9th circuit and set the precedent for this. LinkedIn lost.
This is mainly just being used as a pretext.