Platforms should be forced by law to open themselves to third party clients ffs. Yes, spam will be a problem - but seriously: FB is big enough to afford investigation teams that cooperate with law enforcement to tackle the spam at the source.
Software in the pharma industry works kind of like this. That's why it can take months to years to make a tiny one line change to an application once it's been validated by the FDA.
The specifics are obviously difficult to reason about, but the scale of network effects and/or amount of internet communities which only exist as facebook groups or whatsapp groups and would simply be gone if either stopped existing is... troubling.
Same can be said about Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc
Yet spam still exists, how is that possible if your assumption was true?
It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to enough.
I don’t understand why people always think hard problems aren’t solved because of some deep conspiracy. Sometimes they’re just hard.
I didn't allege any conspiracy. I alleged that it isn't done because it isn't profitable enough.
Moderating is expensive as fuck, so platforms do the bare minimum required by law. Facebook makes 23 billion dollars net profit a year, Microsoft 72 billion dollars, Google/Alphabet around 60 billion dollars.
Even investing just 20% of these insane amounts of money into a joint effort to combat scams and cybercrime at the source (both by assisting law enforcement and by lobbying for laws) would put a serious dent into cybercrime. Imagine what someone like Pierogi of Scammer Payback, Trilogy Media and the other scambaiters could do if they had an actual budget, and now imagine what actual law enforcement could achieve if they had the resources to actually Follow The Money.
Even Reddit, which has historically been extremely open towards third party apps, now gates features - RIF for example can't integrate with rewards, which is IMO pretty moronic as it could be a pretty good revenue stream for Reddit.
Capitalism has failed, and it's high time governments step in to break open the walls of the gardens.