A brief history of 3rd party social apps
Hi frens,
If you’re a reddit user, you may have noticed the subreddit blackout. It all started from Reddit rushed to raise API price, so a few 3rd party apps will cease to exist. Like the beloved “Apollo for Reddit”.
I’ve learned in my early career that, to best safeguard your creation, you have to hold the power.
In that sense, any 3rd party app relying solely on a single platform will most likely doomed.
Even if the users, developers, and platform have all worked together to create a great community, the platform holds the asymmetric power.
Since I’m old enough to recall some of the history…
Twitter
In 2006, Twitter was founded.
In 2007, the first popular app “Twitterrific”, created the word “tweet”.
In 2010, Twitter acquired a popular 3rd party app “Tweetie” by Loren Brichter, renamed it as official app, and soon released the impressive “Twitter for iPad”, with 3-column design and fluent scrolling experience. But Twitter eliminated the design 5 years later.
In 2011, another iconic 3rd party app “Tweetbot” was born. People were crazy about it.
Besides, Twitter acquired another 3rd party app “TweetDeck”.
In 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter.
In 2023, Twitter killed 3rd party apps, with high pricing of API.
Reddit
In 2005, Reddit was founded.
In 2014, Reddit acquired a popular 3rd party app “Alien Blue”, and renamed it as official app.
In 2023, Reddit is killing 3rd party apps, with high pricing of API.
Extremely similar history, right? Someone built a great app for the service. You either get acquired or you live long enough to see yourself get squeezed."
What’s the big deal?
As a regular user, there’s no big deal because you may have chose the official app.
As a “power” user, it’s likely that your beloved 3rd party apps will no longer working, again.
And we have no equally powerful alternatives. That’s sad.
What should we do?
Towards a federated future
Some web2 people are moving to federated solution, Mastodon. So do I. Here’s my English Mastodon and 中文長毛象.
But web3 people are sticking to Twitter (which is really ironic). So it’s really hard to stop using existing platform.
History repeats itself. For centuries, we’ve seen mainstream human politics changing from empire to democracy. Hopefully in the next few decades, people would learn faster to switch from a large empire platform to federated kingdoms.
Imagine all the people. Sharing all the world.
As web3 is evolving, web1 is still here to stay. Using you email to subscribe my letters, is still the best way to stay connected.
Your friend,
Denken