[userbinator]

The fact that people will pay for what's already possible for free (with not that much effort) says a lot about what's wrong with the state of the world today.

Around the turn of the century and before, there was no such sentiment. People just RE'd like it was completely natural, and in general weren't "afraid to read" what they had access to. As the saying goes, "no source, no problem." As a result, multiple alternative clients for IM and other services flourished.

[krisoft]

> The fact that people will pay for what's already possible for free (with not that much effort) says a lot about what's wrong with the state of the world today.

There are these places near me where they just heap up a bunch of food. You can literally walk in, grab something to eat and walk out. Nobody will stop you. Yet people for some reason queue up to pay for the food. I believe this is what is wrong with the state of the world today.

Just to spell it out: read it as sarcasm. Do you just steal stuff unless they keep it under lock and key? If usually not what makes this case different?

[userbinator]

How is it "stealing" to access a service you already have access to for free?

Go to twitter.com in a browser.

This is just a different type of browser.

Physical analogies never work right with digital data.

[xeromal]

I'm sure companies wouldn't mind if a singular person was doing singular things with the API, but when someone uses this API to behave like more than 1 person is where companies get annoyed.

To use an annoying analogy or two, take a penny leave a penny but someone shoves their hand in there and takes all of it.

It costs money to service requests and twitter et all make that money back through advertising and subscriptions. If someone uses an unauthorized API, it could use more than they've budgeted for.

[dariusj18]

Actually they'd also get annoyed if everyone just used something like this for themselves. They want to control your experience. And as usual, remember you are not the customer, you are the product.

[giancarlostoro]

> As a result, multiple alternative clients for IM and other services flourished.

Feels like a lot of RE'ing has piped down these days. The fact I can download Pidgin but none of the major proprietary clients I'd want to use on it have first party support only as third party plugins says it all imho. I miss the old days of MSN being easy to use on Linux and everyone else having it as well.

[iudqnolq]

I'm between then and now there were some significant court cases establishing that it's very very tricky to legally RE networked setvices in the USA. That had a chilling effect, especially on commercial reverse engineering.