Deprecation of Create and Delete Follows API Endpoints

[JoshBuildsABiz]

@bastimeyer

any “solution” which would require a workaround, like for example making the user visit your website in their web browser just to follow/unfollow users/channels (and games) would be an incredibly bad user experience for basically every 3rd party application, and is thus not a “solution”.

I agree with this 100%. Users are accustomed to seeing a and being able to favourite/unfavourite , follow/unfollow, bookmark/unbookmark profiles and listings from AirBnB and similar apps. Having to open a new tab to leave the platform to accomplish the same thing not only breaks the user experience but as a developer makes it not worth trying to include the feature to begin with, no matter how much it may benefit smaller streamers in particular.

As a case in point, I had plans on developing such a feature that would allow users to easily follow streamers of interest, that I am sure would have benefited hundreds and hopefully thousands of smaller streamers, but as I saw here that the endpoint was being deprecated I sadly moved that user story to the icebox.

@bastimeyer

What you should’ve done instead […] is either whitelisting trusted devs or rate-limiting follow/unfollow endpoints with entire client-IDs, so that registered applications can’t abuse the endpoints. Since you should have enough data about which client-IDs are abusive and which are not, whitelisting/approving legitimate developers sounds like a no-brainer. Maybe even implement different levels/tiers of trust for devs which will unlock certain features. This would also help with bots which are distributed over multiple client-IDs.

If whitelisting apps for enhanced API endpoints like follow/unfollow is off the table, I think rate-limiting by app (App Token) or by user (OAuth), or both, is a very sensible suggestion that ought not to lend itself to abuse in the same widespread way that led to the concerns with these two API endpoints to begin with.