> Worries me that with post-smartphone technology it’s more valuable for companies to remove interoperability than to foster it.
I've been in this position before. We wanted to open up our APIs, encourage integration with 3rd-party tools, and make our product as open as possible.
Good intentions, but the unintended consequences are significant. We expected the openness to drive more sales, improve customer satisfaction, and generate more goodwill around our product.
In reality, less than 1% of our customers used the API at all. A portion of those who did were the most demanding customers we had, constantly complaining on social media that our API didn't support everything they wanted from day 1. Ironically, the most vocal API-using customers were more negative than positive for us. The extreme fringes of the DIY hacker communities can get very entitled and ugly.
Creating and maintaining the API was more work than we anticipated. With every new feature we had to make the decision to exclude it from the public API, or spend 50-100% more time integrating it into the next public API release cycle.
Overall, it doesn't make business sense to create an API if it will only be used by <1% of your customers. The only time an API makes sense is if the API will really, truly, genuinely be used by a significant portion of your customer base.
As techies, it's easy to forget that tools like IFTTT aren't mainstream outside of technical products. They're actually extremely obscure for the vast majority of the general public.
Just curious, was there any sort of poll taken of your user base prior to implementing the API to determine a rough idea of how much desire there was for it?
In my experience (B2B) nearly 50% claim API access as critical during the sales cycle, which poses huge obstacles to sales. Then of course, only 5% implement and it'll turn out their unspoken use case isn't supported. This hits home for me.
We've been there before and history is just repeating itself because people are not insisting on decentralised technology and open standards. They've forgotten (or have never known) the dangers of lock-in and are giving in to the allure of fancy web services. So we will burn ourselves again, until it becomes untenable, and then we will go into another cycle of decentralisation.
For social things, decentralization is always going to be a non-starter. I'm never going to be able to convince most of my friends to choose Mastodon over Twitter.
Things aren't sufficiently bad yet for the average person to consider doing this since the present way works well enough for them. These things happen gradually in the beginning, but after a critical mass of people have heard, considered and tried an alternative, it can become very quick.
I don't think decentralization is inherently a non-starter and I don't see a convincing argument why it would have to be. It's a matter of marketing and UX.
I actually think the hyperlink on Instagram thing is a conscious decision to limit people doing stuff like just posting news articles, and is a critical part of what makes Instagram feel very different than other platforms, in the same way people sometimes claim Twitter's decisions on short content affects its community (for better or worse). Like, I 100% agree with your point of companies limiting interoperability, but just not that example (and actually maybe also don't agree it has to do with smart phones: I bet a lot of this walled garden BS would also happen if everyone stayed on the web, and I feel was in fact already happening before apps became a thing).
It seems to me that Instagram is trying to limit automation and linking to stop it feeling businessy. While some automation platforms exists, scheduled posts break all the time, it's hard to share responsibilities for posting, and all that. You can't even upload images by logging in to Chrome unless you hack user agents or something like that. They want a one to one mapping of account to person and have you use the app when you're out and about instead of sitting in an office, for a more personalised feel. Probably because we already have Facebook for that.
Its the age old walled garden approach isnt it? Capture the market.
We aren’t the customers and we need companies that will treat us properly, but imho the root cause is providing everything for free - that will necessarily need to change.
Are you saying that "scale of spam" is a strawman? I'm stuck on this issue, because GP used the term "internet feature", and the OP claims that they can be abused: reductively this becomes, "Are links good or bad?"
If you browser instagram comments for more than 10 seconds, you have a 100 percent chance of seeing a bot or a thot. They do not give a fuck about spam. Only engagement.
I'm guessing he's talking about thotbots that go to "famous" "influencers" pictures and post comments to lure them over to said thotbot's owner and raise their magic internet numbers as well
Worries me that with post-smartphone technology it’s more valuable for companies to remove interoperability than to foster it.
Look at Instagram, you can’t even post a hyperlink because it’s more beneficial for them to prevent a fundamental internet feature.