Which platform's API/scraping restrictions have burned you the most?
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Building an API that pulls data across 13 social platforms, and the thing that's eaten the most engineering time isn't the scraping itself, it's how differently every platform breaks. Rate limits that change without notice, auth flows that expire silently, structured data one week and a wall of JS the next.
Curious what's bitten other builders here. Which platform has been the worst to depend on, and what did you end up doing about it?
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i had biggest issue with Facebook because authentication suddenly failed even when nothing changed in my code. Keeping detailed health checks exposed problems earlier. Would separate monitoring for every platform save more time than shared alerts?
Running distribution for a consumer app across three platforms taught me the spread. Bluesky's AT Protocol does everything through the public API, likes, reposts, search, notifications, it just works. Threads technically posts and replies but every useful read sits behind another OAuth scope you have to re-consent your way into. Instagram is the worst, there is simply no API for engaging anyone else's content, a human in a browser or nothing. I stopped fighting it: automate discovery everywhere, act by hand where the platform demands a human.
LinkedIn and X are usually the hardest because the rules, rate limits, and enforcement patterns can change quickly, and the business risk is higher when customers depend on that data operationally. The best mitigation I have seen is being very clear about data freshness, source reliability, and failure states. For customers, predictable degradation is much better than a black-box API that silently breaks.
I did not know I could find a thread that spoke so deeply to me. Building products that rely on Social Platforms are a true pain. Constantly evolving and undocumented changes.