Comment by rasengan
The trend of shutting down / charging steeply for API access has fundamentally changed the internet.
The trend of shutting down / charging steeply for API access has fundamentally changed the internet.
Yep. Short-sighted companies don't realize that API was a truce, to save money and increase security (e.g. giving user/pass to third-party clients -> OAuth) on both sides. But anything that can be displayed, can be scraped... https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole
I honestly don't know what to think of this time. On one hand it's sad in principle to see Reddit and Twitter lock down to the point they have.
But on the other hand they'd both already become cesspools by that time, and I was still visiting them daily. And now I've quit them both which is a good thing.
The whole point of the Internet up until about 2019 was that it was so cheap to host information it was basically free. If your site scaled up, you covered the hosting costs with ads or donations or something. The expensive part was finding content, so "user generated content" sites had to entice users to post stuff. That resulted in an implicit social contract with the users; these sites lived in fear of the users taking their content elsewhere.
Now the Web is expensive for some reason, and users have become so dependent on a small number of sites as a communications medium that the megacorporations running them feel like they have infinite leverage, and the social contract of user-generated content is completely forgotten.