Its been some time since xitter, reddit, and other sites began paywalling their API, causing third party integrations and apps to collapse.
I’m wondering, did any of these sites end up with paying customers for the API? Are there examples of third parties paying to continue their services? These sites sacrificed massive amounts of community and developer good will to privatize the internet - how did it work out for them long term?
It was not about getting paid for API usage, though they let the door open so they could sell that service for very specific purposes but not for alternative apps.
Their point, and it was admitted during the leaked conversation with one of the independent app developers, was about opportunity cost. Their official apps offer ways to get more money out of users, more advertisement, in app payments and all that. That’s the reason why the phone browser experience has also been killed.
Seems to work fine for those you listed. They wanted people to use their services directly and that’s what they get. It was never about making money off the api, it was about limiting api usage
I think one of the major reasons they wanted to close the free APIs was to prevent data scraping for AI models without paying the big dollars. Of course that also meant users would be limited to the service’s own apps with their own ads so it’s a bit of a win-win for them.
I’d imagine the only people paying the insane API prices are the AI/ML companies (edit: like google with its Reddit deal)
You can still scrape Reddit without the api. Main reason was to prevent people using 3rd party apps.
I can still use Stealth for Reddit
Basically, each of these sites used open standards and APIs as a way to grow their service. Eventually once they got to the user base they wanted and beat out the competition, they could tighten the screws, lock things down, since the users didn’t have any place to go, they were locked in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
In terms of specifics, it’s unclear if they were ever profitable before locking things down, since the main goal at that phase wasn’t making money, it was growing active users and killing competitors. I would have to imagine that with the locked down APIs, they are more profitable, and they never really cared about the community and good will, only when it was beneficial to grow their user base.
I don’t know all the numbers, but the point isn’t to make money from people paying for API access, but to force people to use their official applications – which meets their goals of farming more data/advertising money/engagement/whatever.
Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought X angle was to get the larger corpo users to buy in such as Nintendo share function, news orgs that would aggregate tweets, universities that used it for research and such. But I agree regarding reddit, definitely wanted to drive users to their engagement ads.
The whole Twitter > x thing has never made any sense. Musk misunderstood what he was signing and accidentally lost an uncountable fortune to buy a social media company and turn it from trash to the shit that skinny raccoons would turn down. Seems to be going well though.
I’m pretty sure he wanted to harm it before the elections or at least make it more right wing. I think he succeeded in both to a degree, his candidate won and he’s getting his reward.
Data farming to teach AI on our personal info and accomplishments.
Right, the metrics they’ll look at are hosting costs went down 5% and ad revenue went up 10%.
