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The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

dbreunig.com

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Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#41

Post by pfraze »

skybrian wrote: post #37
Permit wrote: post #28

> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users…

Nowadays we expect popular tweets to be screenshotted, just as popular webpages are usually archived somewhere. Bluesky has decided that it’s not a bug and is not going to be fixed: you can delete a post, but someone could have saved it, and worse, it’s digitally signed.

We generally would characterize the monopolies as the bug, not the public nature of the data

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#42

Post by walterbell »

> don’t expect the platforms to let you compete easily.

Regulatory support of interoperability and competition:

  1. EU mandated interoperability on mobile and messages.
  2. US won antitrust legal case against Google. Remedy TBD.
  3. Epic lawsuit enabled non-Apple payments and lower fees for content sale.
  4. US has mandated that banks open up payment history data to 3rd parties.
  5. US halted Facebook/Meta Libra/Diem digital currency.
  6. China halted Ant Group digital currency.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#43

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

Permit wrote: post #28

> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users…

> If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete them. If a Facebook API allows (user-approved apps) to view the names of my friends and the pages they like, this data can be used to create targeted political ads for those users[1].

Not only is this already possible (I can open up twitter and press "control-P"; I can open up Facebook and see names)*, but it's already being done by those companies. If you thought Cambridge Analytica was bad, imagine what Facebook is doing with even more user data.

That indicates that the issue isn't protecting users from that sort of abuse (since they are the abusers in that sense), but to prevent business competitors from doing the same and reduce user choice (eg users who don't want to have to have their eyes bleed to read their content on these sites).

If the goal is to keep information secret from X, disclosing it to X via 1 programmatic means while restricting it via another, fails to achieve that goal.

> So a company considering creating a public-facing API must deal with the fact that:

1. It could be helping users, which is more important to users than Facebook winning some corpo-war-on-data-access. Is it more important to Facebook et al, though? Clearly not, and therein lies the ethical failing of Facebook et al.

* - "but wait" I hear some saying, "you're just a human, you can't do that at scale!" Well: the data got on my computer screen programmatically, and it's trivial to reuse those methods to get the data you want. It's just an extra step or two that frustrates legitimate users.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#44

Post by dbreunig »

robertlagrant wrote: post #19
piva00 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate it is your employer's IP, this shim on top of SAP would be extremely valuable if you sold as another product to enable internal teams in SAP-world corporations to develop without the knowledge of SAP arcana.

Yes I would strongly recommend monetising this, even though you'd have to rebuild it from scratch. Worth filling in a Y Combinator application?

Yes, look up Winshuttle.

A very successful company with some of the happiest customers I’ve ever seen, whose entire product was a SAP hack that allowed people to enter their data using Excel. As someone unfamiliar with SAP, absolutely blew my mind.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#45

Post by bunderbunder »

skybrian wrote: post #37
Permit wrote: post #28

> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users…

Nowadays we expect popular tweets to be screenshotted, just as popular webpages are usually archived somewhere. Bluesky has decided that it’s not a bug and is not going to be fixed: you can delete a post, but someone could have saved it, and worse, it’s digitally signed.

I haven't read it in 10 years, but this used to be pretty explicitly spelled out in Twitter's privacy policy, in plain language, in a way that I really appreciated. (Not that anyone ever reads the privacy policy.)

But it really does make sense. Nothing you publicly tweet can ever be private, nor is there any real way you can reliably take it back. Because as soon as the tweet's been transferred to someone else's device, they now have every bit as much control over that content as they do over any other content that makes it onto their device.

I'm a pretty pro-privacy person, to the point where I generally avoid social media sites. But this was also my policy back when I administered an oldschool Web forum: once it's posted, it's out of your control. Period. That's really the only policy for a public forum that makes any sense at all. If that's scary to you then maybe the things you're posting should be, y'know, kept private instead of being broadcast to the entire world.

tl;dr: group chats are actually pretty cool.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#46

Post by skybrian »

pfraze wrote: post #41
skybrian wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays we expect popular tweets to be screenshotted, just as popular webpages are usually archived somewhere. Bluesky has decided that it’s not a bug and is not going to be fixed: you can delete a post, but someone could have saved it, and worse, it’s digitally signed.

We generally would characterize the monopolies as the bug, not the public nature of the data

Yeah, I don’t think it’s the wrong decision. Maybe I should have called it a design tradeoff.

Edit: editing posts is nice to have.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#47

Post by Y_Y »

veqq wrote: post #39
Permit wrote: post #28

> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users…

Precisely what kneecapped the semantic web. Why make it easier for the competition to take all of your data?

I remember when the internet was collaboratorative rather than competitive. I think then tech companies got so big that they ran out of scientists and engineers and had to hire fairground hucksters.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#48

Post by mb7733 »

Permit wrote: post #28

> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users…

> One thing I haven't seen written about much is how these APIs turned into massive liabilities for privacy. If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete them.

Is that really a privacy concern? Tweets are public. As soon as you post them, others can just save the page. No need for an API.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#49

Post by armchairhacker »

Today, an external camera can record your computer screen and audio, AI can extract the data and metadata, and a 2D contraption can physically move your mouse to interact. In the future, these will probably become more effective and cheaper (eventually the AI becoming possible to run locally, though even today it’s possible with a good GPU on simple UIs).

Lots of other comments argue for regulation mandating open APIs. I disagree, instead we should remove and prevent regulations that block scraping. We should also create alternative monetization paths for companies who charge for access or use ads, since they’ll lose those paths, and they’re already suffering from piracy and illegal scraping.

Re: The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

#50

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #34
Permit wrote: post #28

> Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users…

It does like seem there are so many inherent disadvantages that the original proponents must have been confused or intentionally ignoring realistic factors… It’s like they never even tallied up all plausible advantages and disadvantages in the first place. So how did anyone determine it was an overall net positive?

Are you proposing that interoperability is not an overall net positive? If it's getting a bad rap right now it's just because it's not always simultaneously a competitive advantage. But that line of thinking is a race to the bottom.

I mean, why not just kill your competitors? Then your product, however bad, would be the only one. Clearly a net negative, but a competitive advantage.

What has changed is that we've recently lowered the bar for how much of a net positive we plan on shooting for. Top dog on the trash heap is, I guess, now an enviable position.

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