venmowned
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tags: programming, cursed
Every year, the internet closes off a little more. Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X. APIs deprecated, endpoints locked down, rate limits tightened. Platforms that once encouraged building on top of them now treat access like a liability. The web we used to extend, remix, and play with has become a walled garden of official integrations and paywalled APIs.
When access disappears, so does expression. The tools we build don’t just function, they say something. And when the underlying access is revoked, so is the ability to speak in that medium. It’s harder to experiment, harder to make something just because it’s funny, or annoying, or beautiful.
This project isn’t new. I built it almost a decade ago, a simple CLI tool to send my friends pennies through Venmo, each with an unsolicited cat fact. I wrote it mostly to amuse myself, and maybe irritate them a little. What surprised me is that it still works. The API hasn’t changed. The token still authenticates. The endpoints, still listening.
It feels rare now. Every year I expect it to stop working, to get shut off in some quarterly cleanup. But it hasn’t. And in a small way, that matters to me. It reminds me there’s still space, narrow, undocumented, fragile; for a little bit of fun. A little bit of expression.
Not everything we build needs to scale. Not everything needs to be productized. Sometimes it’s enough to make a tool that annoys five people and quietly survives in the corner of a system that’s otherwise moving on without us.