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Comment by smashah | Hacker News Reader

Not to derail this conversation but there is an extremely concerning pattern of big companies restricting programmatic access.

Elon with the Twitter changes and kneecapping third party clients.

Reddit with this situation.

WhatsApp with their systematic elimination of OSS API alternatives by sending legal threats/C&Ds to maintainers.

API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 and it's being robbed from us.

We need to start thinking about our human Right to Automate. If the companies don't want to give people reasonable access then it should be our right to make alternatives.

Solidarity with the maintainers of Reddiw.

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They closed the gates when their specific niche has been captured so that they can extract maximum value. As a result interoperability between services is dead. Fediverse is a valiant effort but the barrier to entry is relatively high, even for techies. It's time to accept that people just like the "comfort" of walled gardens.

The point is to kill third party applications. Social media companies watched Facebook do it with little outrage, and quite a bit of upside -- they completely control the user experience, all by squeezing out 3rd parties slowly and without fanfare. Twitter and reddit want to benefit from that as well, but don't have the political savvy to pull it off without protest. But the goal is the same, complete control of the user base and how they access the site. API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 up until a company realizes it's more lucrative to lock their users in harder.

True. This is only going to get worse unless technical people in these companies put a foot down.

Maintainers do not have the resources to pay for a legal defence (companies know this), the community has shiny-object-syndrome and so it's up to internal employees to show resistance to these immoral policies.

I think it's moreso that we need stronger decentralized options to be adopted. Google embraced both email with Gmail and jabber with Google talk. With Google talk they eventually reached a high enough usage rate that they closed it off, and effectively killed jabber, because there wasn't a large other service using it. With email though, they couldn't do that. They've slowly made it harder to interact with Gmail from outside Gmail. But email lives and can't be locked down.

I think the protocol needs some work, but I think ActivityPub and the fediverse, with Mastodon and Lemmy and the like, are the way forward. Centralized sites will always have this problem, because they spend VC money for growth, and eventually those investors expect their money back. If a site is just one part of a large ecosystem, investors can't push the site to close off like this for a profit and control.

How do you juxtapose this with the fact that Reddit is still unprofitable? Engineers cost money. Venture capital isn’t an infinite well.

The profitability of a business is a testament to its sustainability (or lack thereof). Persisting unprofitable structures is inherently unsustainable - despite how valuable they may be to users.

If the point was to be profitable, I would get it. But that's not the point. The point is to lock down their users into their app so they have a more solid looking IPO. But the guy planning the IPO is repeatedly saying that reddit isn't profitable.

If they wanted to make money, they could've charged an amount for the API that covered their costs and made them a profit. Or they could've required the apps to show their ads. Or they could've said that the free API access is now only for reddit gold subscribers. They're instead charging an amount for the API that clearly no app can afford, not negotiating at all, and locking nsfw content out of the API (it's already locked out of the mobile site).

The point is to lock down the users. Not profit, at least not right now.

I reject any premise that free/reasonable programmatic access is dichotomous to profitability.

Just as Devs are forced to resolve bugs in their code, business people should sort out the bugs in their balance sheet.

These decisions are being made now not due to profitability concerns, they're being made due to the lack of backlash from the tech community and laziness.

"Oh? Elon start charging extortionate rates for the heavily restricted API & Zuck gets away with throwing his legal weight around at OSS Devs and nobody bats an eye? Cool, we'll do the same thing!"

> The point is to kill third party applications. Social media companies watched Facebook do it with little outrage, and quite a bit of upside -- they completely control the user experience, all by squeezing out 3rd parties slowly and without fanfare. Twitter and reddit want to benefit from that as well, but don't have the political savvy to pull it off without protest.

What exactly do you mean by "political savvy?" The lacking the impulsiveness to make abrupt changes? The ability to accurately foresee the reaction to their changes, and change plans to minimize the negative ones?

Were there ever any popular 3rd party clients for Facebook? I don't recall any. Maybe the smart thing that Facebook did was keep control from the start. People don't typically get mad when they lose something they never had in the first place.

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