HACKER Q&A
📣 moose_man

Have we reached the point that anti-monopoly people were warning of?


With the loss of APIs from major companies, are we in the endgame that we were warned about for a decade? Is tech now so powerful that we are totally captured? The whole argument that it wasn't hurting consumers is that they gave away so many services for free, what is the justification now?

  👤 scarface_74 Accepted Answer ✓
Only on HN would two companies that are losing millions be considered a “monopoly”.

Neither Reddit or Twitter are in any form shape or fashion a “monopoly”.

👤 WheelsAtLarge
Companies and people aren't going to be so quick to give away the data they control. AI companies have shown that they need tons of data to create their products but they aren't too quick to share the results and they are bound to make billions.

Twitter and Reddit are just looking to get a share of the AI profits. Is it a monopolistic move? Maybe, I don't see where else the AI companies will be a able to get good structure data. The move is pointed towards the AI companies, specially new companies, not users. Since limiting user input will destroy the business model that sells data for AI companies. Going forward structured quality data will always have a price.

I expect for AI companies to buy twitter and/or reddit in the future so they aren't kept away from the data they need.

The alternate move is for AI companies to create their own products that they can use as a data pipe similar to twitter and reddit.

👤 cratermoon
They were never giving away service for free. Though they weren't charging end users cash, they were collecting their data, preferences, contributions, and numerous other details. They were correlating that data with other datasets to de-anonymize people. You might have never seen a single dime charged to your credit card, the costs to you were adding up over time.
👤 mytailorisrich
If you have Twitter and Reddit in mind then the first thing is to understand that both are largely irrelevant. At least Twitter has become the de facto platform for instant, short "press releases" but that's about it.

So what happens to them or their APIs is not important and they are not powerful in any real sense.

In comparison, Standard Oil was a real, powerful monopoly that controlled a key resource.

In the "tech world", I'd say Google is the one that matters because it has become the gatekeeper of the Web and Google ranking is critically important.