HN Explorer

Ask HN: How is it likely for Hacker News to block its public API in the future?

21 points by redbell ↗ HN
Following the "Reddit Vs. Apollo" saga, Reddit just joined the club of giants.. I mean locked-gates which includes: The Metas, YouTube and recently, Twitter.

Reddit's decision to end the free API access to its data marks the end of the 3rd-party frontends as we know them.

As far as I can tell, the only remaining player in the city is "Hacker News", with its free Firebase API [0].

With their statement as "we're making the public Hacker News data available in near real time", I am wondering for how long this will remain true? What do you think?

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0. https://github.com/HackerNews/API

17 comments

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bombcar
Hacker News isn't monetized; the whole point is to provide a group of people who can read the little ads for employment at startups.

So they have no reason to try to monetize the API.

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toomuchtodo
Even if they were paying Dan a million a year to moderate, it’d be worth it considering trailing YC returns generated by the talent HN pulls in for YC portfolio companies.
mtmail
Stripe acquired Indihackers, then recently spun it out again. Indihackers now needs to monetize to pay for servers, bandwidth, salaries (not sure what the timeline is, https://twitter.com/csallen report $8k of $10k MRR reached).

If the same happens to Hackernews, being spun out of YCombinator, I'd say some hard decisions will be taken.

That said YCombinator seens HN as business expense and advertising. So far it looks like they're happy to pay the bills. HN runs on 2-3 servers, staff of 1, relatively little bandwidth (no images), no advertising, no sales team.

FeetYeet
In comparison, Reddit has 2,000 staff.
Havoc
Shortly before it IPO's so I'm guessing never
bifrost
You know HN is run by a VC, right?
Havoc
Indeed. And if these VCs had IPO in mind for hn it would be run quite different
bifrost
I think its likely to be zero chance that it'll block API access. The whole point of HN is to read and contribute, its for the community.
omgmajk
This is basically an advertising platform for startups and the like, it has very little cost compared to similarly sized sites (as far as I can tell), I don't think it's very likely that it would change any time soon. Shame if it did though.
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est31
Hacker news is more a place that uses its property as a nerd watering hole to occasionally feature job ads for Y combinator funded companies. For this goal, it needs to be as nerd-friendly as possible. Reddit on the other hand targets a different demographic. So I'd say at the current point, it's unlikely. But this can always change. Reddit also once didn't have the redesign and once had free API access (still has for a few days). In the end, the cloud is someone else's computer.
SllX
I think Hacker News still runs on a single core PC, possibly still under someone’s desk, but if Y Combinator ever needs to spin it off for an IPO in order to afford an Athlon 64 X2 and a shelf, maybe they’ll charge for API access then.
dang
Not likely. But we do eventually plan to replace the Firebase API with a different one that will be more usable and run on our own servers.
graymatters
All it takes is a narcissistic CEO that has half brain.