[strogonoff]

Hostility to automation is a consequence of the “free to use” double-sided market trap that have been flourishing since Web 2.0.

If you are paying for a service, which adequately charges you at least how much it costs to run + margin, the service should not care whether you are giving them your eyeballs, and you are entitled to request features like automation friendliness and APIs and e2e encryption because you can vote with your wallet by changing suppliers.

If advertisers are the ones paying, and specifically paying for your eyeballs, then naturally your interests are at odds.

(There are edge cases where the service may in fact charge you, but 1) their billing structure does not let them cover operational costs, 2) they are afraid to alienate users by raising prices or otherwise hostage to current billing structure, and 3) they are incapable of optimizing performance to turn profit with current billing structure; in those cases crippled API and automation-hostile GUI may serve as a throttle.)

[TeMPOraL]

Surprisingly, I don't believe it has anything to do with advertising. SaaS model is, by its very nature, hostile to its users - even the paying ones.

> If you are paying for a service, which adequately charges you at least how much it costs to run + margin, the service should not care whether you are giving them your eyeballs,

They may not care about your eyeballs, but their understanding of "adequate charge" is "what the market can bear". More specifically, if they allow for some automation, and that automation saves their customers a noticeable amount of money, then they'll try to capture as much of those savings as possible. This is business as usual - the entire market economy works like this. The problem with SaaS is...

> and you are entitled to request features like automation friendliness and APIs and e2e encryption because you can vote with your wallet by changing suppliers.

...that you can't actually vote with your wallet. Software resists commoditization, and SaaS companies are especially good at this. Whatever the service you use, it's highly likely there is no good alternative for it. There may be some competitors whose offering partially overlaps with what you use now, but it's highly likely there's some unique aspect that, combined with hassle of moving your data and overall inertia, will make switching service providers an act of last resort.

Those sticking points often aren't software-related at all! E.g. Netflix and HBO Max and Disney+ aren't really substitutes, because their catalogs do not overlap. Tech-wise, Spotify is mostly a shitty audio player (that gets worse every update) - their entire value was always in the deals they signed with the labels and artists. Etc.

Combine this with your typical SaaS targeting a global market, and you can see the power imbalance. They don't give a shit what you want. You ain't gonna "vote with your wallet". Hardly anyone does. And you're just one user of a hundred thousand, or a million - a rounding error. You're not worth caring about, not unless you're in a position to start a cascade of users leaving - which might happen if they try to screw you over and you're quick to Twitter, but which definitely won't happen just because they made their UI suck on purpose, or put basic automation behind a high price tier.

> 3) they are incapable of optimizing performance to turn profit with current billing structure; in those cases crippled API and automation-hostile GUI may serve as a throttle

That's a possibility in some cases, but I think that, if the "normal" mode of user interaction involves a website or a mobile app written using modern frameworks and development techniques, then it's probably a wash - increased utilization of the core service may be canceled out by reduction in the flood of requests their bloated GUI generates.

[strogonoff]

I think streaming services is an invalid example, because their value is their catalog. Perhaps it was different at the dawn of Netflix but now they mostly sell series and movies, not a web service for accessing series and movies.

All actual services are interchangeable, or should be—and if not then there is network effect and/or user lock-in due to double-sided market malpractice. In all other cases there is a niche ripe for a competitor to come in and profit!

> increased utilization of the core service may be canceled out by reduction in the flood of requests their bloated GUI generates

I think in most cases a swarm of automated requests to core service would outweigh overhead from a front-end GUI, architecture must be really mismanaged otherwise.

> You ain't gonna "vote with your wallet". Hardly anyone does. And you're just one user of a hundred thousand, or a million - a rounding error.

Why not? This is a defeatist attitude that either ignores how markets work or assumes users are ignorant and never learn.

People do vote with their wallets. Once bitten, you choose services with full export functionality, start reading ToS and looking at who runs it. Word of mouth helps people make better decisions and pick better vendors, even if those vendors are more expensive. (The only problematic ones are “free” vendors, for a customer making a jump from 0 to N is much more difficult than from N to M. So we’re back to ad-supported double-sided markets ruining everything.)

And yes, there is information asymmetry, but there is also regulation that could compensate for it. For example, the government could require services larger than certain size to provide fully featured APIs.