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Comment by krausejj | Hacker News Reader

word of warning to anyone who wants to integrate with facebook. although their blog posts say they are only removing select endpoints, as the comments in the link above indicate, they have basically shut off access to core endpoints well beyond what they listed. instead of errors, the endpoint returns empty data.

this is extremely disappointing. our app was reviewed by FB (including source code), we have thousands of impacted users, and FB gave no indication that they would start doing this (and the issue was silent).

is a walled garden better than an API that lets users share their data? should we shut down the entire graph because of a few bad actors? is this how FB treats developers?

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The cynical side of me says that Facebook realized awhile ago that the API was NOT helping them making any more money.

If anything, it was preventing advertisers from spending more money, or using their own tools like Facebook Insights.

Now that Cambridge happened, they're using this golden opportunity to shutdown the other API endpoints, so that they can keep more of the data, and advertisers will have to spend more money.

If I'm being emphathetic, I'll say I'd even do the same thing if I was in Facebook's position right now.

> The cynical side of me says that Facebook realized awhile ago that the API was NOT helping them making any more money.

This is so hard to quantify. A developer ecosystem around your product helps build engagement and lock-in. It provides free testing ground for experiments with your data (for better or worse).

A lot of people look at this as a "gift" to the developer community, but the relationship is symbiotic.

Now, given where Facebook is, am I surprised? Hell no. Billions of investors' dollars went away (temporarily, surely) almost overnight[1]. Their reputation took a hit. They needed to do ... something, anything. I get that.

But they didn't take a smart approach, likely because of the time constraint. The smart approach is lock down the parts of the graph that have the largest vectors for privacy invasion. Instead, they just hit the STOP button and are apparently calling it a day. In fact, there are some conflicting reports on some endpoints that officially will be up for review but privately have been discussed as permanently deprecated. I expect a walled garden.

We saw this with Twitter for different reasons. The lesson - as a developer/entrepreneur - should be: never make another company a mission critical component of your own. If there's a rug to be pulled out from under you, one day it will be.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/facebook-has-lost-60-billi...

The developer ecosystem served its purpose for FB. It accelerated their growth to the mass market. It is probably a net negative nowadays. They have an ad business not a platform business.

> The developer ecosystem served its purpose for FB

Maybe, maybe not.

Let's say tomorrow InstaFaceSpace launches and gets a bunch of hype. You know, it's got shiny fonts and your mom's not a user yet.

There's a migration, just as there was from Friendster->MySpace->Facebook. InstaFaceSpace is open for developers, giving them the tools they need to make and monetize applications on top of their platform. Stop me if you've heard this one before ...

Let's say this is embraced and there's some tangible migration. Apps are being built on InstaFaceSpace - cool apps, fun apps, secure and privacy-ensured apps.

Now Facebook realizes they need to have the platform they threw away and its ecosystem to retain users. Now what? Can they say "hey come back we've got all this new stuff and these hot new endpoints?" Developers won't go back.

It leaves Facebook vulnerable. Perhaps not as vulnerable as the PR nightmare they're going through, but there are scenarios where it comes close.

Were apps really the reason for the growth FB experienced in the past decade?

I'd argue it was the apps (and the publishers) that led to the decrease of organic posting in Facebook. Instead of seeing posts from your friends, now you see viral articles, and app-related statuses.

It was one of the reasons and an inflection point. I remember the rush of activity with the release of the platform. People were poking each other and sending game requests. These were all FB apps. It was one in of a string of hits by FB, creating a lot of goodwill. They quickly released FB to many languages, often crowdsourcing them.

They've fracked with their developers so many times already. What's one more time going to do? I think many developers remember what FB has done in the past. They've changed virality, forced the use of FB credits, limited access to newsfeed, released really broken APIs, etc...

blocked adsense ads with flimsy excuses .. that one was particularly funny

I agree, I think opening the platform up to app developers added value faster than Facebook could have added it themselves and increased their user base. With the network advantage Facebook now has it's likely that if they cull all of those apps they won't shed too much of their user base.

I think that early on that API was definitely making them more money, but the balance has shifted. I suspect they kept the API around as long as they did to avoid a sudden PR disaster when they removed it (like twitter). The congressional hearing and all the recent news has served to lessen that cost and may actually end up being a boon for them.

> is this how FB treats developers?

Yes?

Look, I hate to be "I told you so", but this shouldn't be a surprise: this is how Facebook has treated partners all along.

Remember when the big thing that drove engagement on Facebook was games? Zynga was making a mint on that. Until one day Facebook's metrics showed that the constant "Help my farm!" updates were pissing people off; they flipped a switch and games disappeared, and Zynga got kneecapped. I think it still technically exists, but it's a shell of what it was.

Then it was all about sharing as many news articles as possible, and Facebook built all these relationships with news publishers. That lasted until fake news and Facebook deciding people want more status updates from friends, and the publishers all got their traffic slashed with naught but a "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."

When your business lives on Facebook's platform, you exist at their whim. As soon as they decide you're no longer useful, you're cut off. You really should've had a plan for this.

Not to mention the fact that that we've lived through all of this before with Twitter. Entire businesses were built on their API and then were obliterated in one fell swoop.

Time to move on to the next thing, unfortunately.

I'm out of the loop, what is the next walled garden everyone's playing in right now? Instagram? Snapchat? Youtube?

I'm hoping folks will have a "fool me twice" mentality with this.

No API is permanent and no service will ever be reliable in this regard.

On the other hand, there's been a decent number of people who have made lots of money because they were the first to build an useful product on a platform.

Examples being Buffer, Hootsuite, BuddyMedia

Sure but then you're in the boat where you have some n finite period of time to slingshot from needing API Service to having a viable enough business to live without it.

we do have a plan. but we also expected facebook to at least tell us when and if they cut off access — not put up a blog post that says they are removing some endpoints, and then just cut them all off regardless without warning.

this simply doesn't seem like the way to treat people who have invested time in a platform.

Yeah that is absolutely true. Facebook used the platform as a way to keep people busy while they were focusing on growing the network to include everyone and their dog. After that they used the platform as an accessory and testing ground for new platforms (mobile / news sites / chatbots etc) .

Add to that the constant nightmare of rearranging chairs in the APIs for no reason. Still, facebook provides virality, but you can have that with minimal data usage from their platform if you ask your users to enter the data you need manually.

And BranchOut. Raised $50M or so, and experienced hypergrowth for a while by hanging onto Facebooks coattails. Until it stopped.

yes, we should shut down the entire graph if it is leaking like a sieve, I don't understand why that is a question.

It's an ethical question as well as a financial and technical one. The answer probably depends on if you make money using peoples information or not.

And the financial question has different answers for different entities - Developers who make money creating Facebook apps, Facebook who makes money from people who send data to and spend time on Facebook and on the Facebook apps developed by those developers, and advertisers.

> is a walled garden better than an API that lets users share their data? should we shut down the entire graph because of a few bad actors?

What is the social cost of those bad actors? What is the social benefit of "good" actors? How many integrations were simply neutral?

I'm legitimately curious about who was using the API for the benefit of society, versus engagement/advertising (which is "neutral" at best).

You should be working on trying to take back ownership of your relationship with your users from Facebook, and remove the API from any future business plans. Implement your services off of Facebook, and email your app users telling them your services have migrated to your website or mobile app. If it wasn’t obvious already, the API is being ground into dust, and it will only further deteriorate after GDPR takes effect.

Social service API's have a rich history of treating developers poorly. Anyone building and relying on social API's should be prepared for and plan for when they start flipping switches with little or no warning. That's been my experience over the last eight years, anyway.

It’s analogous to an open hose with a few bad actors, in that case yes shut the hose and create a better one

I wonder how many people that are claiming Facebook should shut off access to their api insult Apple for their walled garden in the same breath

yes but at least apple is consistent. when you spend time integrating with things, some level of predictability is important, no?

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