I think Yelp is shutting off their API for the same reason as Reddit: to ensure that AI training makes money for them. It sucks that you’re a drive-by casualty of that, and if I’d bought this app, then - same as Apollo iOS - I would not request a refund.
YouTube already uses Widevine for movies. they will never use it for regular videos, because it will kill their website. widevine is a resource killer, for both client and server.
> To wit, there is exactly one business strategy: When you are small, be nice. When you are big, pull that ladder up behind you.
I'd add a "in venture capital and big capital" after "business strategy". When you don't have VCs or the stonk market breathing down your neck all the time, incentives massively change.
IMHO, there is only one solution left... once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust that has a clear mandate to run its companies in a way beneficial to society at large. That way the government doesn't have to spend taxpayer money on countless r&d experiments, VC investors have a perspective to payout, and the world gets kept from utter bullshit like API games.
Well if small capital doesn't pay good, I have no incentive to run a small business at all!
> once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust
Interesting, haven't heard that one. I'll say maybe. I'd rather have Facebook not exist at all than have it be an *official* arm of the NSA
> the government doesn't have to spend taxpayer money on countless r&d experiments
If you expect the government to make a tender offer on the largest market-cap companies, they sure as heck _are_ paying for r&d indirectly. And a lot more!
I think it's quite different. It involves money, but QE is all about monetary supply and interest rates alone. Buying entire companies comes with a lot more implications, like decision-making power over the organization. You want that for API keys, but do you want that across the board? Seems like regulation would be much cheaper.
Thanks for replying, today I corrected a misunderstanding i had about QE. I had previously believed they were buying and selling stocks (I misunderstood their usage of "Securities")
Why? The problem at the core is the mantra of the WSB et al groupthink: stonk only go up.
Of course when WSB makes jokes about it and catapults a junk stock like GME to ridiculous heights, squeezing shortsellers dry, it's pretty funny to watch. But it gets problematic when just about everyone's pension is tied to "stonks go up" as well. That leads to all sorts of perverse incentives.
Just look at Boeing and how far they've fallen. Twice in recent years, literally and not just proverbially, with hundreds dead as the inevitable consequence of stonk market games.
I think the GP had a visceral reaction to your intentional misspelling of "stock" as "stonk".
I tend to agree, though I don't think I'd go so far as to think someone saying "stonk" has "lost all credibility"... but to me, it's like Republicans deliberately mispronouncing Kamala Harris' first name, because they can, and because their base eats it up. It's a cheap shot, and it feels childish, like you don't have a real argument, so instead you act like an elementary school kid on the playground calling the other kid names.
> It's a cheap shot, and it feels childish, like you don't have a real argument, so instead you act like an elementary school kid on the playground calling the other kid names.
This has been one [unintended?] consequence of AI promulgation. A direct disincentive toward the kind of open access that so used to be common and provided a lot of low-hanging fruit for independent developers trying to increase interoperability within their favorite niches.
So now not only is AI filling the web with garbage that poisons future model development[1], it provides incentive to further close and wall off access to (user-provided!) data.
Yes. We're entering a new era of web applications, whether we want to or not. Companies used to be able to gate their data behind UIs, because the search results had more value than the raw data.
Things are starting to flip. Increasingly, people would rather have access to the raw dataset to pipe into an LLM. The question, as always, is how to control this access and charge people accordingly.
I think you're right. API strategies are being reviewed because AI training data.
That said... I think API policies are also vestiges of a defunct idea set that prevailed circa 2009.
At that time, "twitter is a protocol." APIs and openness were going to be the new worldwideweb. Social media was going to be an ecosystem of independent apps and services with complex interactions mitigated by protocols.
YC even did an "rfs" recruiting startups to build off the twitter API.
That didn't happen, but APIs intended to enable it were already in the wild.
As API access becomes strategic again (because AI), "why do we even have this?" is likely to come up.
