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Ask HN: How is it likely for Hacker News to block its public API in the future?
Following the "Reddit Vs. Apollo" saga, Reddit just joined the club of giants.. I mean locked-gates which includes: The Metas, YouTube and recently, Twitter.
Reddit's decision to end the free API access to its data marks the end of the 3rd-party frontends as we know them.
As far as I can tell, the only remaining player in the city is "Hacker News", with its free Firebase API [0].
With their statement as "we're making the public Hacker News data available in near real time", I am wondering for how long this will remain true? What do you think?
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0. https://github.com/HackerNews/API
- bombcar 3y agoHacker News isn't monetized; the whole point is to provide a group of people who can read the little ads for employment at startups. So they have no reason to try to monetize the API.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 3y agoEven if they were paying Dan a million a year to moderate, it’d be worth it considering trailing YC returns generated by the talent HN pulls in for YC portfolio companies.
- biomcgary 3y agoI didn't realize that dang was Dan. I just assumed it was something like "dang, I'm in trouble for useless comments again". (But, yes, his moderation is worth a lot!)
- bombcar 3y ago[Dan G]ackle. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
- mtmail 3y agoStripe acquired Indihackers, then recently spun it out again. Indihackers now needs to monetize to pay for servers, bandwidth, salaries (not sure what the timeline is, https://twitter.com/csallen https://twitter.com/csallen report $8k of $10k MRR reached). If the same happens to Hackernews, being spun out of YCombinator, I'd say some hard decisions will be taken. That said YCombinator seens HN as business expense and advertising. So far it looks like they're happy to pay the bills. HN runs on 2-3 servers, staff of 1, relatively little bandwidth (no images), no advertising, no sales team.
- FeetYeet 3y agoIn comparison, Reddit has 2,000 staff.
- Havoc 3y agoShortly before it IPO's so I'm guessing never
- bifrost 3y agoI think its likely to be zero chance that it'll block API access. The whole point of HN is to read and contribute, its for the community.
- omgmajk 3y agoThis is basically an advertising platform for startups and the like, it has very little cost compared to similarly sized sites (as far as I can tell), I don't think it's very likely that it would change any time soon. Shame if it did though.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- est31 3y agoHacker news is more a place that uses its property as a nerd watering hole to occasionally feature job ads for Y combinator funded companies. For this goal, it needs to be as nerd-friendly as possible. Reddit on the other hand targets a different demographic. So I'd say at the current point, it's unlikely. But this can always change. Reddit also once didn't have the redesign and once had free API access (still has for a few days). In the end, the cloud is someone else's computer.
- SllX 3y agoI think Hacker News still runs on a single core PC, possibly still under someone’s desk, but if Y Combinator ever needs to spin it off for an IPO in order to afford an Athlon 64 X2 and a shelf, maybe they’ll charge for API access then.
- dang 3y agoNot likely. But we do eventually plan to replace the Firebase API with a different one that will be more usable and run on our own servers.
- graymatters 3y agoAll it takes is a narcissistic CEO that has half brain.