Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true? I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn’t seem to be one of them.
I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and decided the opposite, because they don’t have strong market share with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a legitimate strategy. Don’t know who wins.
I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here. What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I don’t think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code. Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to compete to be the cheapest commodity model.
But there are specific subreddits and communities who did, /r/linux and related being the biggest ones, who moved to Lemmy.
As for Twitter blocking the API, they just killed all of the fun bots people made (two of mine) - the actual goverment propaganda troll-bots never went away, they just paid the $10 for the checkmark to get top of everyone's replies and kept running as-is.
Reddit was an also-ran to Digg for half a decade. They literally were not the first mover. Meanwhile, Claude Code very much has a first mover advantage that Anthropic is trying to entrench and capitalize on.
> Plus its product utility scaled with user count.
Which should mean it’s more impactful for Reddit to lose a set of engaged users. The value that Reddit brings to its customers is directly proportional to how many customers maintains. The same is not true for Anthropic.
Digg (or Slashdot before it) wasn't Reddit in the same way that HN isn't Reddit: aggregators vs community discussions. 2/4chan or BBSs would have been the previous alternatives.
What was the scaled pre-existing topic-divided community-moderated discussion space?
It's difficult to say Claude Code has first mover advantage when these discussions are littered with people talking about their alternative preferred toolchains.
> The value that Reddit brings to its customers is directly proportional to how many customers maintains. The same is not true for Anthropic.
I'd question Anthropic's ability to fund Claude Code engineering vs their peer competitors, should they slip user count.
Digg and Reddit were basically the same product addressing the same market. When Digg imploded, their user base largely moved to Reddit. HN was also explicitly created as a Reddit clone.
Reddit did not have community discussions originally. That came later (but before the Digg exodus).
Why would they need to make an announcement? Their subscription plan is for their products only. Other companies were hacking it to use it. It's not surprising they would shut it down.
Agreed. People are trying to pretend that they’ve changed the deal, but Anthropic never included “cheap model access for competing products” in the deal. It only ever worked because OpenCode pretended to be Claude Code.
It’s totally valid that people who used OpenCode with Claude would be annoyed, but less valid to act shocked.
I think Anthropic took a look at the market, realized they had a strong position with Claude Code, and decided to capitalize on that rather than joining the race to the bottom and becoming just another option for OpenCode. OpenAI looked at the market and decided the opposite, because they don’t have strong market share with Codex and they would rather undercut Claude, which is a legitimate strategy. Don’t know who wins.
I feel like Anthropic is probably making the right choice here. What do they have to gain by helping competitors undercut them? I don’t think Anthropic wants to be just another model that you could use. They want to be the ecosystem you use to code. Probably better to try to win a profitable market than to try to compete to be the cheapest commodity model.