Hacker News Reader

Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

The site doesn't provide recipes, it provides endpoints (API calls) that users can write recipes to use.

How it worked until now:

1) IFTTT wrote glue code to interface with a site's published API, and IFTTT could then write recipes to use the site. IFTTT thus stitched together other sites published APIs as a service.

How IFTTT has decided it will work from now on:

1) IFTTT comes to you and orders you to write private endpoint(s) that do X, Y, and Z. They reserve the right to ask for additional endpoints, different call results, or anything else they dream up down the road. You sign a legal agreement promising to ask "how high?" any time they say "jump". You will not be compensated for this privilege.

View on HN

Wouldn't you be performing this work because you believe it will facilitate the transfer of traffic to your site? Aren't you comitting to make changes as and when ifttt change their API so that you can continue to receive their calls? Sites/services can just walk away if they don't want the traffic. No one's obliged to pay or do anything they don't want to.

It is correct in the sense that they're not forcing anyone to use IFTTT, but they make it sound like the website owner is responsible for the degradation of service, while in reality it's IFTTT's decision.

Yeah, but i'm not getting how they're doing anything wrong. It's their site/service; they can make any changes they want. It's like developers having to keep up with changes to Android, for example. The UI can change from release to release; new rules get added to the play store; how access to external storage is allowed/handled changes often. Google isn't doing it for the fun of it and it makes no sense to take them to task over it; it's just one of those "keep up" things which has been at the root of software development for as long as I can remember.

Keeping up with something you chose to support (like if you wrote an Android app) is reasonable. But that is the opposite of what happened here. IFTTT chose to support pinboard, not the other way around. If they are choosing to stop support, they need to own up to it, not put the blame on IFTTT.

I think you've really missed the point here.

Nobody is arguing that IFTTT can't change their service as they see fit. They can, as they've chosen to here, move from a model in which they write client code for other sites APIs, to a model where other sites write client code for their API. It's obviously beneficial to IFTTT if they can offload this work to other sites for free.

What's shitty and rude and presumptuous about their behaviour is going to other sites who never asked to be part of IFTTT (IFTTT was just a consumer of pinboard's public API) and saying "here sign this and get cracking on implementing our specs".

And when a site owner refuses such a "request", IFTTT is basically lying to its customers when it says that Pinboard has chosen to leave the service, rather than "IFTTT has chosen to shut down their working pinboard API client code".

To reuse your analogy, it's as though Google themselves built an App client for my site, then decided to move to a model where Android apps were responsible for hosting and bandwidth of their own app (their right) and disable all apps in the store who didn't specify a hosting location (their right), deleted the app they built (their right), mailed me the specs for their app and a deadline to reimplement it myself and host it at my cost (why would I be interested in this? I never asked for any of this), and then when I told them to get bent emailed customers "Sadly, beloved app $APP has chosen to take themselves out of the Android store" (lying).

I think the subtlety that's not evident from these comments is that Maciej didn't solicit IFTTT integration to begin with. In fact, as I recall it, IFTTT did a hacky integration that misused Pinboard's authentication, and Maciej had to help them correct that.

Later, after putting a bizarre legal agreement in front of him to sign, IFTTT announced that Pinboard would stop working on their service in a manner that made it sound an awful lot like Maciej had just decided to stop supporting IFTTT. In reality, all the agency in this relationship belonged to IFTTT.

I should clarify that the terms of service I quoted are a thing you agree to by using their developer site, and that I was not given a document to sign.

If they actually succeed at that, it's gonna be a laughing season. Every time a company does something and becomes widely successful, their methods are then recommended on business trainings, startup conferences, etc. So if IFTTT actually manages to subdue many services this way, you can expect other startups to think they can build business out of a) hooking up to your service without your knowledge, and b) telling you you're supposed to become their customer now.

Isn't that the Yelp business model? They're notorious for calling up businesses (mainly restaurants) and then offering the business a way to pay to remove negative comments on Yelp (there was a case where some were entered by a Yelp employee!)

It's essentially the "protection/promotion" model.

That's a nice restaurant you have there... it'd be a shame if something happened to it.

No, the Yelp business model is to sell ads.

That didn't happen. Please cite.

Its a fairly well known accusation that has many pieces of circumstantial evidence as well as many lawsuits.

Many business owners have claimed yelp salespeople have called them and tried to sell them the ability to bring down unfavorable reviews or that they would highlight them.

One google search away: yelp wins lawsuit that says they are perfectly within their rights to manipulate their ratings: http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/yelp-extortion-lawsuit/

"Yelp is pay-for-play, and the court says that’s just fine."

> “[T]he business owners did not allege sufficient facts to support their claim that Yelp authored negative user reviews of their businesses.”

The ruling was that if yelp manipulated ratings, that's fine, but there's no evidence they did. I don't know whether to believe they've done it or not. There's a lot of business owners over the years who report having gotten shady calls, but it'd be really hard to prove those calls are from yelp and not from fly-by-night scammers. I get calls from "Cardholder Services" and "Microsoft" pretty regularly, so it shouldn't be surprising if there are extortive yelp scammers.

> Wouldn't you be performing this work because you believe it will facilitate the transfer of traffic to your site?

That is surely how IFTTT will pitch it to 3rd parties... but, really, probably not. Being accessible in the Recipe list isn't great advertising, anyone not using your site already probably isn't going to sign up due to seeing your name on IFTTT.

Framed another way, there is a famous saying in the design industry: "I can't pay you, but it would be great for your portfolio". Classic exploitation tactic; manipulative and predatory.

Part of the point is that IFTTT has a fully working connector today, and is just going to turn it off in a few days' time if Maciej doesn't sign this new agreement. And Is then sending emails to his customers laying the blame at his feet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com