3 ms·
It's stunning to me how little people like the author of this piece know about the economics of running large scale sites like reddit or twitter. Nothing is fr
by beders 3y ago
It's stunning to me how little people like the author of this piece know about the economics of running large scale sites like reddit or twitter.
Nothing is free, including providing and maintaining APIs.
Someone's gotta pay for the ramen, especially if you can't run ads.
- oth001 3y agoRead the footnote.
- malfist 3y agoIf you read the article and not just the headline, the author is in favor of charging a cost based fee for API access. A fee that would cover hosting and serving the API, but not generate profit for the parent company benefiting from the 3P users' content.
- andersa 3y agoThere would be no benefit to providing it, then.
- margalabargala 3y agoNo first-order benefit, perhaps. It shouldn't be difficult to look to second- and third-order benefits, though, such as increasing your user base and the amount of generated content.
- andersa 3y agoThat makes sense.
- thulesgold 3y agoI have a theory that governments and corporations across the world are pushing hard for free APIs. If they cost anything, even very little, then it makes astroturfing too expensive.