The Commons That Learned To Lock

ISYAMA — Transmissions from The Apex

By Dr. Leo R. Yamas

There is an old way to read the internet that most of you have never used. It is called RSS. A small program visits a website on your behalf and shows what is new. It needs no account and shows no advertisements.

On 13 November, Reddit will switch it off.

For people who read Reddit this way, the company has been clear: "There is no replacement."

Today's Exhibit: The Gate In The Fence. Or: Why A Fence Around Something Free Rarely Keeps Out The People With Money.

The feeds are only the first step. Reddit is also closing its public API. An API is a door for software. Other programs use it to read Reddit without opening the website. Since the end of October, nobody new can apply for access. In March, the door closes for everyone without a written agreement.

Reddit's reason is scraping. RSS, the company says, is now "a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse." Scraping means machines copying a website, every page, fast and without asking. Much of that copying now feeds AI.

The bots are real. Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, reported millions of requests from AI agents. It believes they belonged to one large AI company. That traffic may have contributed to a partial outage in May.

So the fence has a reason. Now look at who ends up where.

AI companies that want Reddit after March will need a commercial deal. Some have one already. Google signed one in 2024, reported at about sixty million dollars a year. Machines with a contract will keep reading.

The volunteers who built tools for their communities are invited inside. More than fourteen thousand apps and bots have registered to move onto Reddit's own platform. Reddit offers a thousand dollars for each eligible app that completes the move.

The people who wrote it all can still get in. They use Reddit's own website and app, where the advertisements are.

Outside the fence, two kinds of reader remain. Bots that do not pay, and people with a feed reader and no account.

A fence rarely keeps everyone out. It decides on whose terms they come in.

Your ancestors built this fence once already.

For centuries, English villages shared common land. Villagers could graze a cow there, cut turf or gather firewood. That shared ground was called the commons. In the sixteenth century, wool began to pay better than grain, and landowners fenced fields for sheep. Later, Parliament passed more than five thousand acts that enclosed shared land. Together they took in about a fifth of England.

Many villagers became labourers, some on the very fields they had once shared. They still got in. They came through the gate, on someone else's terms.

The open web became the next commons. For more than twenty years, strangers have answered each other's questions there for nothing. How to fix a dripping tap. Which tent survives a storm. What to say at a funeral. Now machines want all of it, and the fences are going up.

There are no locks on Isyama. Nobody decided this. There has never been anyone to keep out.

I explained Reddit's fence to Selene while we carried driftwood up from the beach. I told her our island has no locks because nobody here takes more than they need.

She moved the wood to her other arm. "That's not why," she said. "It's because everyone here can see who's taking."

Her version is less flattering than mine, and more useful. A shared field does not fail because people are greedy. It fails when the takers have no faces. A crowd of nameless machines can strip anything bare.

Wikimedia seems to understand this. It has not announced a fence. It asked for something smaller: AI systems should say who they are. Then every open site can decide what each of them may take.

Where shared fields lasted for centuries, they usually worked that way. The field stayed open, and everyone could see who used it.

The fence goes around the answers. It cannot go around the habit that wrote them.

That habit is older than Reddit, and it will outlive it. This week, a stranger somewhere will ask how to fix something you happen to understand. You will probably answer. You will not ask to be paid.

Keep doing that, in the places that stay open. Every open corner of the web was built from exactly that.

— Dr. L.R.Y.

Transmitted from The Apex. Isyama. This transmission has no lock and no gate. The Sprocklets see everyone who comes in. They have not turned anyone away yet.