[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How is it likely for Hacker News to block it...
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Ask HN: How is it likely for Hacker News to block its public API in
the future?
Following the "Reddit Vs. Apollo" saga, Reddit just joined the club
of _giants_.. I mean _locked-gates_ which includes: The Metas,
YouTube and recently, Twitter. Reddit's decision to end the free
API access to its data marks the end of the 3rd-party frontends as
we know them. As far as I can tell, the only remaining player in
the city is "Hacker News", with its free Firebase API [0]. With
their statement as " _we 're making the public Hacker News data
available in near real time_", I am wondering for how long this
will remain true? What do you think?
__________________________________ 0.
https://github.com/HackerNews/API
Author : redbell
Score : 12 points
Date : 2023-06-13 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
| [deleted]
| bifrost wrote:
| I think its likely to be zero chance that it'll block API access.
| The whole point of HN is to read and contribute, its for the
| community.
| est31 wrote:
| Hacker news is more a place that uses its property as a nerd
| watering hole to occasionally feature job ads for Y combinator
| funded companies. For this goal, it needs to be as nerd-friendly
| as possible. Reddit on the other hand targets a different
| demographic. So I'd say at the current point, it's unlikely. But
| this can always change. Reddit also once didn't have the redesign
| and once had free API access (still has for a few days). In the
| end, the cloud is someone else's computer.
| bombcar wrote:
| Hacker News isn't monetized; the whole point is to provide a
| group of people who can read the little ads for employment at
| startups.
|
| So they have no reason to try to monetize the API.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Even if they were paying Dan a million a year to moderate, it'd
| be worth it considering trailing YC returns generated by the
| talent HN pulls in for YC portfolio companies.
| [deleted]
| SllX wrote:
| I think Hacker News still runs on a single core PC, possibly
| still under someone's desk, but if Y Combinator ever needs to
| spin it off for an IPO in order to afford an Athlon 64 X2 and a
| shelf, maybe they'll charge for API access then.
| mtmail wrote:
| Stripe acquired Indihackers, then recently spun it out again.
| Indihackers now needs to monetize to pay for servers, bandwidth,
| salaries (not sure what the timeline is,
| https://twitter.com/csallen report $8k of $10k MRR reached).
|
| If the same happens to Hackernews, being spun out of YCombinator,
| I'd say some hard decisions will be taken.
|
| That said YCombinator seens HN as business expense and
| advertising. So far it looks like they're happy to pay the bills.
| HN runs on 2-3 servers, staff of 1, relatively little bandwidth
| (no images), no advertising, no sales team.
| omgmajk wrote:
| This is basically an advertising platform for startups and the
| like, it has very little cost compared to similarly sized sites
| (as far as I can tell), I don't think it's very likely that it
| would change any time soon. Shame if it did though.
| Havoc wrote:
| Shortly before it IPO's so I'm guessing never
| bifrost wrote:
| You know HN is run by a VC, right?
| Havoc wrote:
| Indeed. And if these VCs had IPO in mind for hn it would be
| run quite different
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(page generated 2023-06-13 23:03 UTC)