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by ryanwaggoner 2754 days ago
If you own a grocery store and there's a guy on the other side of town who is cheaper, the people who come to your store because it's more convenient would love for you to be forced to just give away half your space to your competitor. Doesn't mean it's "user hostile" to refuse to do so.
1 comments
oliveshell 2754 days ago
I agree; of course that isn’t.

But being forced to give away half your physical retail space is hardly the same thing as just letting them keep using an API that you provide explicitly for such use.

Also, more broadly: one would have quite a hard time making the case that Facebook isn’t nakedly, gleefully, and rapaciously user-hostile.

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ryanwaggoner 2754 days ago
I don't agree, but it's probably not worth making the case. Facebook has billions of users. I assume you think that they want to leave, but they "can't", or that they just don't know how hostile Facebook is towards them.

I think a lot of people who hate Facebook just have a hard time believing that most people just don't care about the same things you do, or to the same degree. They're still on Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp because they see the world differently from you.

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traek 2754 days ago
> But being forced to give away half your physical retail space is hardly the same thing as just letting them keep using an API that you provide explicitly for such use.

In this case, Facebook was deprecating the API and declined to provide special whitelist access to a competitor.

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kevindqc 2754 days ago
So they just heard about Vine, and decided to deprecate the API the same day? That doesn't sound right to me. That conversation seems to indicate they just wanted to block them ASAP (same day), nothing to do with deprecation?
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traek 2754 days ago
> So they just heard about Vine, and decided to deprecate the API the same day?

No? Where are you getting this read from? The documents clearly show them discussing it from a year prior to shutting down Vine's API access, and planning on announcing it publicly ~6 months prior.

I can't find anything from a quick google search on when the API deprecation actually took effect, but assuming the timeline from Exhibit 43 is accurate, Twitter actually had whitelisted access for over 3 months before being shut down.

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