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> One thing I haven't seen written about much is how these APIs turned into massive liabilities for privacy. If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete them.

Is that really a privacy concern? Tweets are public. As soon as you post them, others can just save the page. No need for an API.

Data brokers don't care about easy APIs anyway. They'll save that tweet even if it takes a dozen engineers, a global bot net, and millions in cloud spend to do it at scale

Nowadays we expect popular tweets to be screenshotted, just as popular webpages are usually archived somewhere.

Bluesky has decided that it’s not a bug and is not going to be fixed: you can delete a post, but someone could have saved it, and worse, it’s digitally signed.

We generally would characterize the monopolies as the bug, not the public nature of the data

Yeah, I don’t think it’s the wrong decision. Maybe I should have called it a design tradeoff.

Edit: editing posts is nice to have.

> Yeah, I don’t think it’s the wrong decision. Maybe I should have called it a design tradeoff.

How would you design Bluesky to prevent analog holes?

There's no way to do that, but it doesn't mean that people give up on privacy.

We could contrast Bluesky with the Fediverse: a maze of independent websites with uneven distribution and no systematic search or archiving. So, if you don't have much of a following and you delete a post, it's possible that nobody saved it. Some people prefer it that way.

Are you saying the phenomenon is different on Twitter than on bluesky?

I haven't read it in 10 years, but this used to be pretty explicitly spelled out in Twitter's privacy policy, in plain language, in a way that I really appreciated. (Not that anyone ever reads the privacy policy.)

But it really does make sense. Nothing you publicly tweet can ever be private, nor is there any real way you can reliably take it back. Because as soon as the tweet's been transferred to someone else's device, they now have every bit as much control over that content as they do over any other content that makes it onto their device.

I'm a pretty pro-privacy person, to the point where I generally avoid social media sites. But this was also my policy back when I administered an oldschool Web forum: once it's posted, it's out of your control. Period. That's really the only policy for a public forum that makes any sense at all. If that's scary to you then maybe the things you're posting should be, y'know, kept private instead of being broadcast to the entire world.

tl;dr: group chats are actually pretty cool.

> Bluesky has decided that it’s not a bug and is not going to be fixed:

It's called an "analog hole". It's very difficult to prevent analog holes. By difficult I mean: impossible.

Precisely what kneecapped the semantic web. Why make it easier for the competition to take all of your data?

I remember when the internet was collaboratorative rather than competitive. I think then tech companies got so big that they ran out of scientists and engineers and had to hire fairground hucksters.

Yes and no.

The internet was collaborative when it was very small. You still had islands like AOL and Compuserve and such.

Then as it got bigger the big islands like AOL broke, and the views started going to larger and larger websites (think things like news sites). These sites had to work with vendors (Microsoft/Apache) to be able to support the load without crashing. While this is occurring hardware got a lot faster and databases more performant (along with things like K/V caching).

This lead to the last 'social media' wave where just a few large companies could host enough servers to serve everyone on the internet (within reason). These companies sucked a lot of wind out of the smaller companies that were successful. You could wake up one day and find out Google had implemented your entire business model and is giving it away for 'free'.

But free was never free. Those big companies need your eyeballs. They need your attention. And they will do anything regardless of the ethics to keep it (what are small fines between friends). There was not much more room to expand in to, you're only expanding into other companies. You take over/replace the ones that give their data away and 'compete/fight with' the ones that don't.

The amish are still laughing at us and it just keeps getting more embarresing.

Big tech companies are full of extremly competent people who for the most part cant get shit done. A hand full of cooperating people armed with curiosity and the desire to make something useful can do things tens to thousands of times better.

What are these websites they make that need hundreds of requests to show a bit of text? I cant view source without repeatedly screaming from laughter.

Maybe the answer to the riddle is to force the pattern and make usefulness as well as asking for help requirements for participation.

... alas that was fundamentally "borrowed time". Since our culture did not change (to a radically open cooperative supportive one) as more and more of our life has became online more and more the Internet became like our society.

More precisely, one of several things that kneecapped the semantic web.

> If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete them. If a Facebook API allows (user-approved apps) to view the names of my friends and the pages they like, this data can be used to create targeted political ads for those users[1].

Not only is this already possible (I can open up twitter and press "control-P"; I can open up Facebook and see names)*, but it's already being done by those companies. If you thought Cambridge Analytica was bad, imagine what Facebook is doing with even more user data.

That indicates that the issue isn't protecting users from that sort of abuse (since they are the abusers in that sense), but to prevent business competitors from doing the same and reduce user choice (eg users who don't want to have to have their eyes bleed to read their content on these sites).

If the goal is to keep information secret from X, disclosing it to X via 1 programmatic means while restricting it via another, fails to achieve that goal.

> So a company considering creating a public-facing API must deal with the fact that:

1. It could be helping users, which is more important to users than Facebook winning some corpo-war-on-data-access. Is it more important to Facebook et al, though? Clearly not, and therein lies the ethical failing of Facebook et al.

* - "but wait" I hear some saying, "you're just a human, you can't do that at scale!" Well: the data got on my computer screen programmatically, and it's trivial to reuse those methods to get the data you want. It's just an extra step or two that frustrates legitimate users.

It does like seem there are so many inherent disadvantages that the original proponents must have been confused or intentionally ignoring realistic factors…

It’s like they never even tallied up all plausible advantages and disadvantages in the first place. So how did anyone determine it was an overall net positive?

Are you proposing that interoperability is not an overall net positive? If it's getting a bad rap right now it's just because it's not always simultaneously a competitive advantage. But that line of thinking is a race to the bottom.

I mean, why not just kill your competitors? Then your product, however bad, would be the only one. Clearly a net negative, but a competitive advantage.

What has changed is that we've recently lowered the bar for how much of a net positive we plan on shooting for. Top dog on the trash heap is, I guess, now an enviable position.

Privacy, reputation risk, etc., seem like huge disadvantages… so it’s not clear at all if it’s a net positive overall.

Someone has to actually do that analysis in the first place. It doesn’t just automatically become true.

What are the privacy and reputation risks for me as a user, if I'm able to access my data via API?

If you're referring to 'net positive [for facebook]' rather than [for users] or [for society], then the point is conceded that facebook can make more profits abusing their users versus being more considerate of them.

How is this relevant? The user isn’t the one making the decision to implement it or not.

In general there are more users than implementers, so their experience is more relevant to whether it's an overall net positive.

More relevant than the people who make the decisions… according to who? Is there some arbiter that can overrule the decision makers?

If so… then we should discuss those instead.

No just the opposite, each person gets to decide whether something is good or bad, and when we sum across those perspectives we end up with a net positive or negative.

Going against that grain might be advantageous in certain cases but ultimately you have to live in the world that you create so its usually not a great long term strategy.

This doesn’t even make sense… unless you think all opinions out there carry roughly the same weight?

Did you mean something else by "overall"? Over... shareholders perhaps?

No… I meant overall.

But since the opinions of people aren’t anywhere near the same value… comparing it your way is nonsensical.

> How is this relevant?

How is it relevant to what? We were discussing "net positives" as in net positives for society, but it sounds like you're referring to net positives for Facebook alone, at the expense of all others.

> The user isn’t the one making the decision to implement it or not

This is true. Here is another difference between them: Facebook isn't the one being harmed by cutting off approved API access to 3rd parties.

It seems like we both agree that Facebook and users are different groups, in different circumstances, with different things to gain and lose from different decisions made here.

With that shared foundation of understanding: Why should we care about what Facebook wants, more than we care what users want? Why should we care about Facebook wanting to stifle startups and other competitors, more than we care what users want? Why should we care about Facebook's profit margin, more than we care what users want?

Of course Facebook is free to do what is good for them and bad for users, and they indeed chose (and continue to choose) to do so. Here we see the predictable result: Users criticizing them for it.

We are all smart and can comprehend Facebook's purely-economic "fuck the users, we wanna make money" decision criteria just fine, but we don't have to respect it.