So as long as they're winning, every corp is going to either shut down APIs or absurdly gouge prices. This is the new internet that we've voted for with money and attention.
I think you’re missing the real cause of this shift: These free APIs existed during the investment-fueled growth phase, then disappeared when they started switching into the real business mode.
We had an unusually long period of time where companies could play the startup game of spending money and headcount on things that didn’t generate much or any revenue. Free APIs were an artifact of that. The disappearance of the Twitter and Reddit APIs coincides with them shifting toward profitability.
You don’t have to “vote for” anything for this to happen. When it stops being easy to run companies at a loss year over year, the parts of the company that aren’t generating more revenue than they cost either get price increases or dropped entirely.
I’ve been at a startup-like company going through this change. It was sad, though not at all surprising, when management started taking inventory of everything people were working on and cross referencing it with how much that was generating in revenue. There were a few moments of internal revelation when someone realized that entire teams of expensive engineers had been working on features and products that either very few people used or that were very complex but generated no revenue. It doesn’t make business sense.
The abuse landscape has also changed dramatically. In the early days, free APIs were rarely used features by a few power users. Now, any free API is guaranteed to be abused by some growth hacking startup who wants to vacuum up all of your data and use it for SEO spam, AI training, or other purposes.
Not just profitability, but more profit.
> You don’t have to “vote for” anything for this to happen.
No, but once they shut the door on 3rd party apps people still use the services, even if it's a shittier experience. So why wouldn't they restrict or shut down APIs?
Any platform that relies on serving ads will not have a full-featured API, because it's an obvious way to ignore ads (and maintaining the API costs you money).
API isn't free.
It never has been free, but they string along developers for as long as it's convenient and then turn against them. It's a pretty obvious pattern, yet devs fall for it every time.
Because I'd be happy to pay a bit more to have api access to a service I use, perhaps because I'm using some 3rd party software etc. For example, now I'm using offical apps for Reddit and Twitter, whereas in the past I used great third party apps (Apollo and Tweetbot) which were an order of magnitude better. Sure, they never showed the ads. But just let me pay with money instead of using a shitty app and seeing ads?
I've been also thinking this. They should have a tier for users that want to use 3rd-party integrations, and/or a tier for people who want to create such things. Strava could also do something like this. However, both companies have been going the other way and crippling their existing free APIs, and then suffering user backlash. It's almost like it's a bad idea to remove features... Who'd have thought.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Strava/comments/1gv4dob/strava_anno...
Price gouging is using price changes to gouge you. The prices could get jacked up, but not gouged.
Today they still exist, but with the exception of the most basic and dated corporate free APIs (e.g. reddit) they are gated by API keys and often access limits.
It was truly rare to see access limits in 2005; APIs were slow and unreliable but not limited.
If anyone documented the loss of APIs (particularly in 2008 IIRC?) I would to read more about it myself too. I think Tom Scott did a video on this, but I can't find it.
As APIs became reliable & fast, they imposed limits on them
So not sure what was lost considering it sounds like they didn’t work well and when they did work they were incredibly slow aka self imposed rate limiting
Musk did it to decrease transparency, because bot hunting and similar research was enabled by the API.