[bigethan]

I had two thoughts while reading this.

1 - The need for the web to be profitable in some way makes 'single tools' hard to build. You have to grow users, add features, etc, etc. So even if you have an API or something useful it likely won't scale economically. Unless it's government supported or behind a foundation of some sort. The Twitter API comes to mind here.

2 - This is tricky because for the web to meet the UNIX philosophy, everyone has to agree. You can't have the team that manages the equivalent of the `ls` website decide to change their output, or strike up a deal with the `diff` team to force `diff3` out.

Once again, capitalism ruins everything fun. That's hyperbole, kinda :-)

[jshen]

> Once again, capitalism ruins everything fun

And creates everything fun.

[TeMPOraL]

Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.

[hueving]

The Internet wasn't even accessible to the general public without capitalism motivating the creation of ISPs.

[hollerith]

That's true. The free market was mostly [1] absent from the research into packet switching in the 1960s, the actual deployment in 1969 of the packet-switched network that became the internet, the invention of email, FTP, the domain name system, the mailing list, newsgroups, IRC, the MMORPG (initially referred to as a multi-user domain or a MUD), the web, webmail, the blog, the RSS feed, the wiki and Wikipedia, but, yeah, starting about 1987, profit-motivated ISPs started slowly to appear that offered access to the internet to organizations and individuals.

1: I use the qualifier "mostly" because the government did farm out most research and engineering tasks to a handful of for-profit companies (Bolt Beranak Newman, the Mitre Corporation, SRI International) that specialized in governmental contracts.

[josho]

That may be true. But, the Internet existed because of massive multi-decade investment from folks without a profit motive. All of the fundamental Internet protocols were created through those organizations.

Look at what capitalism gave us as an Internet like experience: compuserve, aol, etc. Those were all horrible closed wall systems.

[hueving]

But there are many massive investments at the academic and government research level that lead to nothing directly useful for consumers due to lack of investment interests in bringing it to market. Just look at the next generation Internet architectures that go nowhere. You can't ignore economics.

[karanbhangui]

What's the Internet you envision sans profit motive?

[TeMPOraL]

The one with free knowledge and kittens and no ads and SaaS bullshit.

[eru]

Who pays for hosting the kittens?

[jumperjake]

The same parties that hosted the old usenets and mailing lists; the users themselves.

[marssaxman]

Not so sure about that - the web has become a lot less fun since capitalism took it over.

[drumdance]

Wat. You want to go back to pre-1995, the Netscape IPO?

[marssaxman]

I'd date the actual, functional takeover somewhat later than that, but the web really was a lot more fun pre-dotcom-bubble. I'm not sure I would say I want to go back to it, exactly, but there sure is a lot that I miss.

[roel_v]

Eh, there is a lot to be missed from the 'net, yes; but from the web? Like what? I mean, even when we're generous, 'pre-dotcom-bubble' is 'pre-2000' - the web was crap back then.

[TeMPOraL]

- It was much lighter; entire websites used to weight less than a single JS file today. We've increased the size of pages by an order of magnitude (and processing expense by at least two) for no real reason except laziness.

- The SaaS/cloud model wasn't so popular, which means trying to lock you in by stealing your data, or doing absolutely ridiculous things like IoT does, wasn't something you saw.

[vdaniuk]

Love that social bonding that capitalism provides.

[ahallock]

Capitalism ruins everything fun? Not sure I follow. There are so many amazing APIs available now, which aren't as frictionless as using Unix tools -- but why would they be? Unix tools are installed locally and don't fall under the same constraints as communicating with an external system. It's apples and oranges.

I was just using an API the other day to validate addresses. It's an amazing thing, being able to hit an endpoint and not worry about the myriad of complex processes that must happen for that validation. If that's capitalism, I'd say it's pretty good.

[bigethan]

Sure it's pretty good. But can it interop with other APIs predictably forever without paying Zapier?

And the capitalism dig has to do with when your address verification endpoint decides that an API isn't profitable. Or that it's better for them to change the format of the response. Or require you to have a account of some sort. Or rate limit. Or...

In the overall picture, if you're not helping someone earn money, you're living on borrowed time with the services they provide.

[ahallock]

So what magical system did you have in mind that would suffer none of your potential problems? Even a publicly funded service is still as vulnerable. Services you run yourself still cost money and have their unique set of problems. The cost benefit to using APIs is that you're outsourcing that complexity to someone else in exchange for money so you can concentrate on your core business. It's why AWS is so popular. Yes, they could shut down, but the risk is worth it. Doing it all in house is the other risk... maybe your programmers can't develop the solution needed and your company tanks because you wasted a bunch of time and money building your own address verification service for fear the external API might shut down.

The USPS (which is quasi-private, I'll admit) offers address verification, but their service hasn't been reliable, which is why we have competitors now. Your fallacy is that because something isn't flawless that the whole system is a failure. And throwing around the word 'profit' as some pejorative, dirty word is an emotional manipulation. How else would people hire or expand if not for profit? The service I'm using (Smartystreets) now offers international address verification; I'm not sure how they would have paid for that if it weren't for profit. That extra money you bring home from your job after taxes and other expenses... that's profit. Your employer is living on borrowed time from the services you provide. What happens when you quit, change your rate, or become bored with your job? I guess it's worth the risk to them.

[doomrobo]

I think Tarsnap is an apt counterexample to your first point. It has a stable API, a very very conservative feature set, and a stable customer base.

[Sfi81]

Sure... but Tarsnap is basically Colin, serving a very niche clientele and unlikely to be worth a few billions. Almost every tool discussed in the article is targeting mass market where such considerations become important at some point.

[idlewords]

I don't follow your first point. For most web things (where there's zero marginal cost) profitability has nothing to do with scaling.

[sanderjd]

I thought the parent's first point made lots of sense and I don't really follow your point. Marginal cost for web services isn't literally zero, it is just close enough to zero that real businesses with revenue can treat it as if it is zero. But that doesn't mean that it is at all cheap in the usual sense to run a popular web service.

[jdc]

Fill your moats.

[mintplant]

What do you mean?

[jdc]

The moat metaphor is common way to talk about a business's competitive advantage. In this case I'm talking about improving or at least not actively impeding web application data interchange, and maybe even exposing smaller, more granular services.

Take Wikipedia, for example, who already offer their compiled data. Now to take that a step further they could expose the transformations they use to compile that data as separate endpoints.