Comment by dpark

Comment by dpark 18 hours ago

5 replies

Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true? I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn’t seem to be one of them.

I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and decided the opposite, because they don’t have strong market share with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a legitimate strategy. Don’t know who wins.

I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here. What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I don’t think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code. Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to compete to be the cheapest commodity model.

theshrike79 3 hours ago

The Hoi polloi were never going to leave Reddit.

But there are specific subreddits and communities who did, /r/linux and related being the biggest ones, who moved to Lemmy.

As for Twitter blocking the API, they just killed all of the fun bots people made (two of mine) - the actual goverment propaganda troll-bots never went away, they just paid the $10 for the checkmark to get top of everyone's replies and kept running as-is.

ethbr1 18 hours ago

Anthropic thinking they're Reddit ~2023 feels pretty arrogant.

And if they've made a business decision to do this, rolling it out without announcement is even worse.

Did they think no one would notice?

  • dpark 18 hours ago

    Anthropic has like 4x Reddit’s revenue and 8x the valuation. I don’t understand the arrogance.

    Plus I’m the one who compared them to Reddit. They certainly didn’t issue a statement that said “well it worked for Reddit”.

    • ethbr1 3 hours ago

      Reddit had a first move and scale advantage by then that Anthropic could only dream of.

      Plus its product utility scaled with user count.

      To the upthread/sibling conversations about substitutability of LLMs (and therefore pricing power).

  • dbbk 5 hours ago

    Why would they need to make an announcement? Their subscription plan is for their products only. Other companies were hacking it to use it. It's not surprising they would shut it down.