[harshitaneja]

My memory of the recent history of the web isn't as cynical. I am not denying the perverse incentives involved but at least for Facebook & Instagram(maybe) we had the Graph API which was accessible and provided a decent amount of functionality and access but was curtailed post public backlash from misuse like with Cambridge Analytica. Similar for twitter where it provided decent APIs which wouldn't exhaust easily for end consumers and even the year(or two) before the Musk purchase they even provided academia with API access equivalent to their enterprise offerings for free. But there too bots and all were at least used as the public justification for curtailing many features.

Now none of this is meant to excuse the behaviour of all these large platforms for all the terrible practices they engage in. But at the same time, we never figured out how to safely deal with the power exposed by these APIs.

[bonoboTP]

And recently API access has been a way to obtain AI training data, which user-content sites don't want to allow, since they want to sell it for money. See the Reddit API fiasco too.