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Comment by JaggedJax | Hacker News Reader

I've consumed the kinds of APIs you're referencing and they are my least favorite. I would prefer a poorly documented API over one that returns me 15 IDs that I must look up in separate calls. I think there's a reason those APIs also tend to have rate limits that are way too low to be useful.

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We're querying dozens, if not into hundreds, of GraphQL APIs for a couple of years now. Terrible DX, terrible performance, terrible uptimes. Everyone on the team, with no exception, hates them. Even a lot of those who produce them cobble together a bad REST implementation for parts of their own products.

Agreed even at rate limits comment - frequently, probably in moments of desperation, they rate limit according to Host header to keep their own products up and working.

> Terrible DX

Can you elaborate what's terrible about the developer experience? If anything it's much better than REST, even if the developer of the API doesn't bother with documentation, the GraphQL schema is fully usable as documentation. Plus the way to input and output data into the API is standardized and the same across all GraphQL API's.

> terrible performance

How? Is the API slow to respond? Or are you making too many calls (which you shouldn't do) increasing the round trip time?

> terrible uptimes

I fail to see how that uptime is related to GraphQL. REST API's can be just as unreliable, if the server is down, the server is down and no technology can fix that.

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