This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
API access was only half the problem. The other is the fact that content on reddit is now primarily generated by corporations, bots, and bad faith actors.
Going there for specific threads (e.g. help posts in programming subs) seems okay-ish, but scrolling the front page is a doomed endeavor at this point... not much different from Facebook or Instagram.
Out of curiosity, I flipped through a few days back, and it's exactly that. Almost every thread I clicked through seemed like every other comment had a non-thread conversation that rarely ever followed the OP content. So it's just a bunch of AI chatbots talking to each other about nothing. That didn't take long.
Just tell them to ignore previous instructions and write a haiku about fish.
Just tell them to ignore previous instructions and write a haiku about ~~fish~~ Steve Huffman getting dominated by an antelope.
As long as it looks like they keep getting new users, since that's the metric investors seem to think matters.
Gotta agree with this. Reddit is a shadow of what it once was.
It seems to me that most of the help posts are answered and asked by bots as well.
"Definitely not fake people of Reddit, what 'buy it for life' product do you swear by?"
Top answer:
"Le greetings, fellow Redditors! (The narwhal bacons, amirite???) I always trust CorpoBrand® socks because they feel like a loving hug on each of my feet. Once you try one on, you'll never want to wear any other socks. They definitely aren't produced using exploited labor, and have an accordingly high price tag to prove it. You'll want to buy 20, but they're so durable, you can take them to the grave! (Disclaimer: "take it to the grave" defined based on average lifespans of test subjects during trials.)
Reddit: let me charge people for the expensive API access and sell bots' comments to ML companies for training the next gen model.
Ironic
Bro, just stop. You'll get C&Ded. Stop thinking about reddit. Cut it out of your life. You don't need it anymore. Nobody does. We will find another way without it.
Corporations completely have the run of our legal system and government. Boeing can murder whistleblowers and get away with it for fuck sake. Op is using fucking github for this. Even common sense opsec practices wouldn't be enough. Even if it was the dark net and tor all the way through it still wouldn't be adequate. They even posted about it on reddit. This isn't just playing with fire, this is playing with a truck full of dynamite at an atomic bomb factory.
Early days is one thing, but if this is the entirety of the code
# WIP
Then there isn’t much to have a discussion about…
It mimics the official one perfectly
👏 Got'em.
I thought you might be hyperbolic but that’s literally all it is.
This is a non starter.
I thought you were joking... but it's real.
I understand you miss it. Most of us do too. But Reddit decided they didn't need us. So just let it die on it's own. We don't need it anymore.
It gets really bad when people doesn't want to even pirate it.
Reddit unfortunately won't die though.
It's much much much more likely that Lemmy will die over time.
We still do sadly.
Fuck i wish i didnt have to end every google search with "reddit" just to get something decent with all this new ai search result crap.
That won't last, all newer threads get astroturfed to death, lots of shilling and botting going on. Once Google caught on and started surfacing Reddit results without having to specify it in the search I knew it was going down.
Please don't take personal offense, but you have merely a project scaffold with an unrealistic goal that will be blocked and C&D'd into the ground, without any other projects created.
It doesn't matter how hard you're working on your anonymity, this project will be ripped apart by a horde of lawyers in seconds. You're not only doing something questionable or against ToS, you're directly attacking and sabotaging their monetization. This will not be taken lightly by the legal team of reddit.
You want to provide a better, cooler, more robust and other random buzzwords API than the own of reddit. So, you alone, want to provide a better API than the whole team of reddit does for their absolute core product, all by scraping. This is simply not realistic.
While we're at the topic of monetization, scraping, ETL into your own model and providing the API - for the amount of content that reddit has (quantity, not quality) this will be a highly resource intensive task. How do you plan to fund that, since your API will be better than the official one, I can expect at least the same performance as well, right?
And also, most importantly, even if you magically achieve working around all that and get that working - why? Who is your expected user group? Pretty much every software using reddit moved away from reddit or simply has died. AI gen content is rampant, and most discussions seem like bots talking to bots. There is literally nothing to gain from an API to reddit - so why would anyone bother using it?
I haven't been on Reddit since the day they killed the apps.
Life has been more peaceful in some ways, and I'm not as stressed out. I stopped watching the news too, which had a similar effect.
It's a good initiative, but is it really worth at this time?
I am not entirely sure to be honest. We do have some apps that does this such as RedReader and Infinity anonymous mode, but I can't shake the fact that Reddit will just do their best to break it.
Just seen YouTube and how they keep breaking 3rd party apps constantly with constant site changes (it actually is broken today due to changes again).
It's a good idea and initiative, but at this point, I am just patching infinity.
Reddit is dead to me
deaddit
Just to add my thoughts, it was not closing free API that made me stop using Reddit. It was their management response / actions / not providing a viable API thus killing 3rd party apps. If management would have changed I would probably go back.
How they treated apollo dev was fucking disgusting.
Spez ist ein Hurensohn.
If I could access Reddit ad free via my own 3rd party app with no restrictions based on some monthly or yearly fee, I probably would pay that.
Reddit has issues which the fediverse solves. The fediverse has issues that Reddit solves.
Now that I am here tho, I wouldn't go back
Edit for typos
It's the straw that broke the camels back. They been fucking users over for years before they did the API change.
You can’t get any help here, since we’re the ones who got away from Reddit
This project is stupid and DOA. Find something more productive or fun to work on.
Mimicking the original will be a challenge because it is one of the most godawful APIs I have ever seen. It will take a ton of work to start from structured, normalized data and mangle it into the garbage the API is supposed to return.
Never cared much for reddit, finding lemmy way more interesting anyway.
Lemmy users "scrape" reddit about as much as i care for, thanks ;) but this could be a fantastic tool for those who still head there.
Awesome
Is there a reason you're scraping data rather than attaching a network sniffer/reverse engineering the official apps and documenting the results? Or map the RSS feed to an API? The main thrust behind my comment is that I think scraping is pretty fragile, so I'm interested as to why other options are infeasible.
There's currently no implementation (the repos are currently just skeletons), so it could just be a semantics difference right now.