Products · Broad category
REST APIs
Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2011–2024), in 11 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
People raised many different problems with REST APIs, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 12 complaints
- Fetching related data needs many waterfall requests, hard to use2024-05-30
- Response format changes with query parameters, so clients must handle many response types2023-11-01
- Developer unsure whether errors go in 200 body or 40x codes; ambiguous conventions2023-04-29
- Separate endpoints force clients to handle object consistency, so atomic creates are impossible2022-03-12
- Noun-only URLs feel unintuitive, so people must map their actions onto a few verbs2021-05-26
- Non-CRUD operations are awkward to model as state representations, making APIs unpleasant to use2018-07-19
- Programmatic clients must traverse discovery links, making calls inefficient, annoying and verbose2018-07-19
- Simple operations need thousands of API calls and there is no easy way to make them transactional2016-09-12
- REST forces many HTTP calls for one page, which is slow on mobile networks2015-11-04
- Can't share a link to delete a resource because DELETE requires more than pasting a URL2014-02-08
- Keeps uncovering hidden extra requirements, so correct REST design is hard to reach2012-02-24
- Putting HTTP verbs into URLs makes the API confusing for developers2011-07-04