Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Twitter's API is notoriously bad for 3rd party apps.[0] In order to use the standard API, you need to register for a developer account, which requires manual approval and which Twitter can deny for any reason.[1]

Facebook has a history of outright suing 3rd party apps.[2]

If I can log into Twitter, I should also be able to update my account with an HTTP request. That's it. I shouldn't need to sign an agreement, or tell them why I'm programmatically accessing my account, or dig into a settings page. I should be able to grant an OAUTH permission to anyone that gives them access to that API, and Facebook shouldn't be able to sue that person just because they got around an IP block. That should just be part of my account.

I don't know if this legislation guarantees that (the article doesn't link to the text of the bill). Most tech legislation is bad, so there's a good chance it doesn't. But the principle remains.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/16/17699626/twitter-third-pa...

[1]: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/developer-porta...

[2]: https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

i wonder what caused them to limit their platforms so much.

wanting to own all ads placed against user content

wanting to lock users in and make it harder to leave for another service and still maintain a presence (which is also a constant ad for that other service) by cross-posting

wanting to make it harder to see the stuff you're following people for without ads inserted every few posts

It s still possible to leave but nobody leaves. Surely they benefit from some extra safeguards, but i don't think either are worried that users will take their data elsewhere. Usually when a new platform emerges, it 's a new format (e.g. tiktok).

I 'm pretty sure their response was in order to avoid bad PR during the Analytica scandal period.

A mixture of bad tech legislation, concerns over Russian interference, and good old-fashioned anti-competitive tendencies.

Having itself supplanted MySpace, Facebook is in a good position to see how easy data-exports can help competitors supplant a dominant company.

3rd-party clients are also a good way to remove ads and tracking, which is obviously not in Twitter or Facebook's best financial interest.

Yet they still provide with tools to export all data . So i don't think the migration of users is a major concern for them.

I 'm personally all in favor of making the APIs open and unlimited again, but within a month you 'll have journalists nagging again

Export tools happened after GDPR.

they existed long before gdpr, e.g.:

https://www.askdavetaylor.com/export-data-facebook/

This fight is much older than that. If you want to get sad, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed

As I understand it for Twitter in particular, third-party apps were limiting the reach of their business-related tactics that users hated. Namely, none of those apps implemented any kind of invasive advertising, tracking, and recommendations – which made those apps much better from the UX standpoint than the official ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com