This Video Has 77,321,815 Views

Tom Scott · 77.3M views · 2020-04-06 · 10:39

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Overview

Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.

On Hacker News

The go-to citation for why free, open APIs get shut down and for the fate of services like Yahoo Pipes.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Tech industry & business models Web development Internet culture & memes

What people said

Sophira · 2022-03 · Recommendation
Tom Scott made a wonderful video a while back about open APIs, and about how they (mostly) died out[0]. It's currently called "This Video Has 51,973,714 Views", and I personally believe it's a great watch. [0] [VIDEO]
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iamahackerguy · 2022-03 · Recommendation
Tom Scott made a wonderful video a while back about open APIs, and about how they (mostly) died out[0]. It's currently called "This Video Has 51,973,714 Views", and I personally believe it's a great watch. [0] [VIDEO]
Read the original HN comment ↗

allwashedup · 2026-06 · Reference
How is it any different than a centralized social media service then? Merely the fact that you can get a firehose from the website in a standard format? This was already the case with HTTP. The problem is that websites can leverage their power to make a locked-in ecosystem. see [VIDEO] twitter, etc once had a much more open API. so did reddit. This was just the first stage of their penetration strategy. The decentralization is totally irrelevant due to the way it's implemented. The problem is that Apps are sticky, so app developers have undue power to control their users. The "content hosts" "moderators" etc need to be completely cut out of the picture to be at the same level of censorship resistance as an RSS-shared blog. I can host a blog on my own computer, and you can subscribe to it without that many intermediaries.
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Sources

Video by Tom Scott, played through YouTube.

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Data and selection notes

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