| > Reddit offering a API only to not maintain it If they were to offer an API that's just HTML of the website (old.reddit.com specifically, not the new one) but without the cruft that makes for 90% of the markup of a human-facing page, and which exists only to hang styles and scripts off... why wouldn't they maintain it? It's literally the same as what the browser gets, but without the bullshit. > or uphold any sort of SLA uptime Do they uphold any sort of SLA uptime for the webpage itself? The simplest API would be just the meat of the website, so it couldn't possibly be less reliable than the site itself. > not worry about releasing breaking changes every week? Reddit is a stable site. Like most social media platforms, they don't release breaking changes often (they do screw with DOM element ids and CSS classes all the time, but that is to make life harder for ad blockers, which is another topic). Sure, some things may move around, be added or removed - but this is webshit we're talking about. You can't truly rely on any API to have a stable, or well-defined structure[0] - so people are already used to treating schemas as open-ended[1] and keeping up with their changes. > Having a public facing API is not trivial or cost free. Sure. But I'm trying to establish a lower bound here, and it's clear that this is much lower costs and effort than maintaining the human-facing website itself. And I mean, remember the whole "semantic HTML" and "microformats" trends of yore? Or how HTML5 came to be, with all those tags like <em> and <section> and <article>? The whole point of that was to make HTML work as both rendering markup and machine-readable API. Consider also that the alternative isn't no public API - it's scraping. So if your public API is somehow more expensive to serve or maintain than either the website itself, or a decluttered version of it, then you're doing something wrong. -- [0] - Don't get me started on the disaster that is Swagger/OpenAPI. [1] - Something Clojure coding philosophy makes explicit: you pass around maps and arrays, you read and write the keys you know about, and stuff you don't recognize you ignore and pass without changing. |