A comment about the feasibility / features of a potential SN API came up in a recent discussion. This piqued my interest, as I've recently been investigating the HN API, which exists as part of an unclear relationship with Firebase. Basically, you can get all the HN posts, comments, etc., since the beginning. (Annoyingly, you can't get comment upvotes, though.)

I was thinking about doing some experiments on the HN dataset, and this API makes that feasible. Although honestly, I don't need the API to do what I want, I just need a tarball of the data, which doesn't seem to exist. So I'd have to make a zillion API calls to extract it, I guess.

Anyway, I've thought before about interesting experiments to do on the SN dataset. What's the liklihood of getting a HN-like API, or even just a dump of posts, comments, users, etc? It would be helpful for my imagined use case, and perhaps also for third-party innovation. The API wouldn't be privacy-compromising , as it would only include the data a person could scrape -- it would just save the trouble of having to scrape it. Some of the cool RT features of the Firebase feed are nice-to-haves but not necessary.

Thoughts?