zlacker

>>robbie+(OP)
The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept, transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and rendering the content in a native interface. As long as the user can access the HTML for free, they should be able to use any application (a browser or a special app) and render the content however they wish.

Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly, but with the recent resurgence of server-side rendering we may soon be able to get rendered HTML with one HTTP request. And then the only hurdles will be legal.

>>danije+KI
> Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly

It works the other way: with today's SPAs the API (that powers the frontend) is exposed for us to use directly, without going through the HTML - just use your browser's devtools to inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client.

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On an related-but-unrelated note: I don't know why so many website companies aren't allowing users to pay to use their own client: it's win-win-win: the service operator gets new revenue to make-up for the lack of ads in third-party clients, it doesn't cost the operator anything (because their web-services and APIs are already going to be well-documented, right?), and makes the user/consumer-base happy because they can use a specialized client.

Where would Twitter be today if we could continue to use Tweetbot and other clients with our own single-user API-key or so?

>>DaiPlu+TU
There's two reasons why they don't want third-party clients as a pro feature:

- It's a very niche thing to charge for, and merely charging for something means having to support it, so you can be underwater on support costs alone

- Users on third-party clients are resistant to enshittification

The business model of any Internet platform is to reintermediate: find a transaction that is being done direct-to-consumer, create a platform for that transaction, and get everyone on both ends of the transaction to use your platform yourself. You get people hooked to your platform by shifting your surpluses around, until everyone's hooked and you can skim 30% for yourself. But you can't really do this if a good chunk of your users have third-party clients.

This is usually phrased as "third-party clients don't show ads", but it extends way broader than that. If it was just ads, you could just charge $x.99/mo and make it profitable. But there's plenty of other ways to make money off users that isn't ads. For example, you might want to open a new vertical on your site to attract new creators. Think like Facebook's "pivot to video", how every social network added Stories, or YouTube Shorts. Those sorts of strategic moves are very unlikely to be properly supported by third-party clients, because nobody actually wants Twitter to become Snapchat. So your most valuable power users would be paying you money in order to... become less valuable users!

If social media businesses worked how they said they worked, then yes, this would actually be a good idea. But it isn't. Platform capitalism is entirely a game of butting yourself in to every transaction and extracting a few pennies off the top of everything.