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Comment by hw | Hacker News Reader

My experience with Twitter API has been horrible to say the least. Plenty of API errors, service over capacity, and instability. So now I have to pay to get access to an API that's stable?

Step 1 - build a product. make sure it has lots of bugs and is unstable.

Step 2 - roll out a premium product that's the same product, just stable, and less buggy.

Profit.

How is charging for an API not a finger to the developer community? Facebook for example doesn't charge for their API access. They charge for the products that the API has access to. If I have access to a product, I shouldn't need to be charged for the APIs to access that product

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Interesting. I found Twitter to be vastly better than other social media companies. Far better documentation (though weird complicated auth where I get 4 pieces of info for some reason). Far more stable and understandable. Twitter returns a ton of data in each response so there's no need to go making multiple requests.

Compare to FB which is just a nightmare of trying to guess and figure things out. It's so bad. If it reflects their underlying model at all, their main codebase must be very difficult to work on.

Charging is a welcome improvement over the previous situation: Deal with Gnip or other data brokers. They're "Enterprise". Get no information, have to deal with a long sales cycle and sales team, have to wade through tons of BS to figure out what you need. It sucks.

In terms of documentation I do agree with you, although I suspect that's just due to the complexity of Facebook and its vast array of products, vs Twitter.

My bad experiences have to do with the actual API calls themselves which aren't stable and occasionally times out or errors out.

If anything I wish they would improve their API infrastructure as a whole instead of offering the improvements only on paid accounts. I can see charging for rate limits but not for system stability.

Facebook is horrible. But Twitter was even better at some point. Compared to their v1 or even v2, v3 is a complicated mess

On the other hand, Facebook randomly silently gimps their APIs. I did a demo of the friendship paradox (https://alone-togetger.firebaseapp.com) for a tech demo. The paradox would have been better demonstrated by Facebook where friendship is symmetric, but their API was silently gimped years ago to only return graph information for friends who have also added the app.

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