9 ms·

this is easy to say as a comment on HN but unavoidable to a large degree for businesses in the marketing and social media space.

• nkozyra 4y ago
  Well these are riskier businesses to start for this reason. I did cage it by saying make sure your whole company doesn't collapse if one API gets shut down.
• LadyCailin 4y ago
  Part of these types of businesses is accepting that risk then, and knowing that despite doing everything right, your business may be unceremoniously shut down because of some PM’s whim. I wouldn’t want to be in that kind of position, but I guess more power to those that do.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  Yeah, I don’t think it’s right to say “never try.” It’s more, “never lose sight at how brittle your business is. The other company owes you nothing if it’s not written in a contract. You aren’t a victim when it breaks your business.”
• uoaei 4y ago
  That is a risk of doing business. If they don't anticipate this kind of thing and build contingencies around it, they are simply bad at business. "Free market for thee, but not for me" is not a strong argument in any context.
  • i386 4y ago
    Risk without risk mitigation is just bad business.
    • BoorishBears 4y ago
      You don't understand risk or business if you think a good business mitigates all risks, or even its largest risks. The biggest risk for a medical company is harming patients. Do they just throw up their hands and stop being a medical company? The biggest risk for social media firm is the social media they serve through goes down. So what, they throw up their hands and stop being a social media firm?
      • i386 4y ago
        Absolutely not what I am saying, please read up.
      • ipaddr 4y ago
        The biggest risk is losing all money and going out of business. Harming patiences are a cost.
• dylan604 4y ago
  you play in the mud, you're going to get dirty. if your entire marketing company focuses on social, then why that doesn't fall into "all eggs, one basket" concept is beyond me. Sure, it's much easier to get a company rolling when you have to do nothing but use the product of someone else as the core of your business, but why that's not an immediate red flag to someone in that position is something i just don't understand.
  • BoorishBears 4y ago
    This has got to be the most platitudes I've ever seen stuffed in a single comment... I almost want to say it's satire. But yeah, there's a lot of real valuable businesses built on existential risks. We're currently getting a reminder that our banking system puts all its eggs in the idea not too many people will ask for money at the same time. Optimizing for black swan events is just generally not good business.
  • lozenge 4y ago
    Marketers and customer service need to be able to manage their social accounts, that's a product space which inherently relies on API access to those website. Maybe you wouldn't want to build that product, but clearly somebody will.
    • gloosx 4y ago
      Could you just use API's IG app uses itself to manage accounts? And scrape the data you need with GET requests behind a proxy list? Before any public APIs everybody was doing it, is it any hard these days to fall back to regular user API instead of some fancy regulated 'developer-only' API?
      • altdataseller 4y ago
        Its all rate limited. Inpossible to scrape
        • gloosx 4y ago