International law in general is more like a social contract than a legal contract since there is very limited recourse to enforce it against violators other than rounding up a bunch of other countries and getting them to agree to enact a punishment.

"Why would free API access be an implication of using reddit's service?"

Because they offered free API access for 17 years.

Same way Heroku breached a social contract when they got rid of their free tier: if you offer something like that for more than a decade, people will reasonably expect it to continue and will be angry with you if you pull the rug on them.

> Same way Heroku breached a social contract when they got rid of their free tier: if you offer something like that for more than a decade, people will reasonably expect it to continue and will be angry with you if you pull the rug on them.

That's not a social contract, it's the definition of entitlement. By no interpretation is it reasonable to expect anybody to offer a free service indefinitely. Thinking otherwise is just a form of social parasitism that strips the host of its own agency, because they were dumb enough to make a handshake agreement decades ago.

Like decrying your favorite band for "selling out" and evolving with the times. You'd rather they only make music a diminishing fanbase wants, until they starve?

Even child support agreements can be renegotiated every 3 years and last up to 21 years at most if your ex's attorney is particularly conniving. You likely renegotiate your own salary every 1-3 years as well. Reddit stuck to their end of the agreement for 17 years (already impressive for anything in tech!), it's now untenable, but fuck them for not going insolvent.

Only the generations raised with the internet seem to have the expectation that if you offer anything for free, you're expected to continue doing so forever even if it kills you.

You’re thinking about standard ceasefires. I’m not the parent posters, but the Christmas truce of 1914 was done IN SPITE of orders to keep fighting between both sides.

I’m guessing that was what they were referring to.

> as ceasefires are most often enacted in the context of ceasefire.. uh, treaties.

Also known as "armistice treaties." (Where "armistice" is preferred, because otherwise "ceasefire" would have two very different meanings.)

Yes, an armistice usually causes a ceasing... of fire... at the site of any battles that happen to be going on at the time. But you wouldn't usually call what happens on the front lines as a result "a ceasefire." You'd call it "the battle being quit by both sides." During an armistice, both sides usually pack up and go back to their respective bases to be held for redeployment.

"A ceasefire", when the term actually comes up in practice in relation to "phenomena you can experience during a battle", does not usually refer to the ceasing-of-fire that exists as part of the enactment of an armistice. Rather, a ceasefire is used mostly to refer to a temporary, tactical Nash-equilibrium state that lasts a few hours or days; is local to a particular battleground; and is enacted bottom-up by the boots on the ground just not shooting anybody for a while.

(A ceasefire is usually considered an example of a principal-agent problem — during a battle, the known Commander's Intent is to drive your opponent to surrender. A ceasefire does not accomplish this; in fact, it gives both sides time to replenish materiel, and thereby "gives ground" on a war of attrition. But a ceasefire is a state that's better for everyone who's actually there at the site of the battle — so it can be held to by social contract of the people who are actually there.)

Mind you, the phenomena of "a ceasefire" doesn't exist much any more in its original usage (land wars), as land wars have evolved past the point where ceasefires are feasible, due to the introduction of over-the-top raids, guerilla warfare, precision drone strikes, and other approaches designed to punish stillness and allow top-down enforcement of bottom-level participation. Ceasefires still come up pretty often in naval combat, though! (And they can also still come up in land wars in edge-case situations when a particular land-war battle has the properties of a naval battle — e.g. if two strike forces of armored vehicles meet.)

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I should mention, as well, that there can be ceasing-of-fire during an armistice, where both sides continue to just sit there guarding the lines they had established for the whole armistice period. This is the case mostly for wars of conquest being fought to claim scraps of land inch by inch. (There's a well-known one of those going on right now, in fact.)

During an armistice in this kind of war, the zone between the previous front lines of each side will stay watched, to make sure neither side "slips" the lines forward a bit in the other's absence. This creates a No Man's Land [or eventually a Demilitarized Zone], where both sides agree that no one from either side may enter as long as the armistice holds. (A good example of such a No Man's Land / DZ exists between North and South Korea, which have maintained such an armistice for decades now.)

The soldiers posted to guard a No Man's Land / DZ aren't usually the same soldiers used for combat — so for the soldiers who were on the front, they do still experience the armistice as "and then we were picked up and taken back home." The ceasing-of-fire is just one step in that higher-level "clocking out" process.

(The only time you'll have the same soldiers sitting there during an armistice that were originally delivered there to fight the battle, is if the armistice period isn't expected to last very long. And even then, only if both sides are willing to "tip their hand" to reveal their lack-of-confidence in how long the armistice will last.)