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Comment by Crespyl | Hacker News Reader

It's really not that RSS couldn't handle (/be extended to handle) this use case, it's that the parties publishing this information do not want you to have that much control over the feed.

See how much effort Netflix puts into making their catalog hard to browse, to obfuscate the actual size of the catalog and promote specific things they need to show a large return on, or all the sponsorships/ad-deals/promotions that inevitably begin to clutter almost any commercial news feed.

We have the technology, but publishers will fight tooth and nail to keep control over the platform away from the end user.

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Remember the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all had almost open access to their 'social graphs', allowing people to grab content from one place, post to another, build connections using tools like Yahoo Pipes? I sometimes long for simpler days when companies were more open with their data. Didn't Netflix even have a more open api back in the day that you could rank and sort, and see new release dates, etc?

You realise what the most successful thing built on top of that open social graph was, right?

Cambridge Analytica.

The issue there was collection of massive amounts of public data by Facebook. Open data APIs can be used to build nice things, if the data isn't user information.

No, it was Cambridge Analytica using the old FB social graph API ("Open Graph") to build a network of people that they could make predictions on.

The app "This is your digital life" let people do a psychological profile linked to their FB profile. The Open Graph API then gave Cambridge Analytica to (some of) their friend's data as well,

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica...

https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-th...

https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/

The problem here is that we don’t really have a consensus on what should happen if people share the information they know about you with others without asking you, not that we should not have API access to our own content on social networks.

No particular argument there - just noting that the original comment was calling for return to "the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all had almost open access to their 'social graphs'".

Turns out that wasn't a great idea. Disappointing because it's what I wanted too.

But Netflix is different from a gigging band, venue and cinema, whose financial models are based on actual ticket sales not whatever the hell Netflix's is. It takes so much labour and money for them to get eyeballs filtered through social media and paper ads and to attract customers to their sites. So for them this would simply be almost a free extra way to drive traffic.

I think you're making a valid point about Netflix, but not seeing how it applies to more traditional financial models?

The parties in that case would be the venues, cinemas, concert halls, etc. They don't to control any platform, they want that information to be freely available. They want lots of sites to show case them (remember, comoditize your complements).

This is it exactly. Realtors sued Zillow for essentially publishing MLS data. They lost, thank god.

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