Totally agree. I was ready to pay for Reddit access in some shape or form but after my favorite client (Apollo) shutdown, understandably, and after I saw how Reddit treated the developer and the community I decided it was time to leave.
It was/is incredibly hard to do so, it was a near-daily habit for well over a decade but there has to be a line somewhere and Reddit barreled right past it and never looked back.
I'm the same but using Reddit is fun on Android, taking it as an opportunity to reduce my screen time although I would have been happy to pay for an API key to use the client I wanted.
Yup Apollo shutting down broke my Reddit habit finally. I’m not downloading another client. My screen time is down 25% already and I’m doing things with that time that I’d meant to do for a while.
I exercise more, I spent more time engaged with my kid, I started reading books I have been putting off and just started to focus on my life again.
I know realize how much non-sense there was on reddit and that all the comments just kept me engaged without adding much value to my life(most of the time). Some comments and subreddits were extremely valuable.
That was the hidden value of Reddit: not the big firehose feeds, but specific communities. Want to discuss some geeky topic? If the subreddit wasn't there, you could create it just like that.
But, putting all your eggs in one basket doesn't work out well when the basket owner starts cutting holes in it.
The problem: discoverability. You need one starting point that everyone can find. We're already finding that search engines inevitably follow the same trajectory, so they aren't necessarily the answer. Maybe go back to curated indexes? Yahoo could become relevant again if they play their cards right, though I'm not holding my breath.
Hopefully, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. can avoid turning into the next Tweddit.
I thought leaving was going to be a hard habit to break. Turns out it wasn’t. I started going down the road of checking out Lemmy but… I don’t actually miss pissing around on reddit.
There a couple of communities I miss (mostly small ones) like my city/state subs and a few games but yeah, I'm surprised at how quickly I flipped off that switch. I've played with Lemmy some but there just isn't much content there (that I care about). I followed the "memes" "subreddit" (literally no idea what they are called) to see more content and then very quickly remembered why I had purged my Reddit subs of stuff like that a long time ago.
Same experience here. I still find myself googling with site:reddit to find real answers to questions, but I did manage to break the mindless scrolling habit.
Uninstalling the Sync app and leaving an empty gap where the shortcut used to be on my home screen was eye opening. I tapped that empty void multiple times a day at first.
Seeing how much the general discussion has deteriorated since, as well as the amount of mindless scrolling I have spent there, I honestly don’t mind leaving.
Tildes is a great (or arguably even better) replacement for the quality discussions I liked on Reddit, while I can absolutely do without the doom-scrolling. Lemmy might actually be a good replacement for the latter if someone really needs it, but it is also a great place for the few subreddits that moved there entirely.
Surely it's just a sign of the network effect? Reddit is several things, but one of them is a set of communities that provide value to people. I'm an NFL fan, but I'm in the UK so my community of people to discuss NFL with is on Reddit.
This network effect is what Reddit management is banking on with these changes (or at least, I assume so!). It definitely exists, but management seems to underestimate the long term effects of user hostile behaviour.
Indeed, you can't simply pretend that there's no value in these platforms for end users. As awful as reddit may be, it has many users and a lot of valuable information.
I don't think that things like this client (or e.g. nitter) are desirable end states, but they can be incredibly important for users who still need/want to work with the "old" platforms while more open/friendly replacements emerge.
I totally agree. Also, this is a thankless task. The app will break every other week when they change webpage (if it's using web scraping) or when they change their internal API because the client was updated. (if it's using the reversed-engineered official app's API)
Would you mind using HN in the intended spirit? It's not in your interest to keep degrading the conversations here—it just contributes to making this place nasty and boring. I'm sure you wouldn't dump trash in a city park or trample public flowerbeds or spill used motor oil in a nature preserve. Why do the equivalent here?
I do something similar with a different user hostile website with lots of user generated content: scraped all the content, and built a viewer. I would love to not have to, but the contributors I follow are still on the site instead of the less user hostile alternatives. Running a web scraper is easier than convincing all the users to change to a different site, and the (user-generated) content is good enough that I'm willing to spend the time to do it.
Browser extensions (either bespoke or existing content blockers) could be another way to deal with user-hostile sites. Unfortunately, with either approach, it becomes a cat-and-mouse game the second the extension or scraper becomes popular.
The site I'm scraping will also just deny users access to the content regularly. It's not even a per-user rate limit, but seems to be site-wide. Unless you pay. They've recently also started banning too many requests, so a simple refresh script I used to use no longer works.
So what I need isn't just a simple content blocker, but also an auxiliary database, and maybe a browser extension to pull data from that source instead.
The difference between YouTube and Reddit is so drastic they are basically incomparable.
YouTube is a humongous monster with their own network backbone and video storage boxes co-hosted by countless ISPs. Multiple major governments would like to unseat YouTube, but they simply can't. YouTube's competitors are Netflix and (to lesser extent) classic TV networks.
Reddit is a web forum hosting platform, that can be wholly bankrolled by a single upper-class US citizen (assuming that your drop their awful video-hosting). Reddit's competitors are WordPress and phpBB.
One of them is somewhat of necessary evil. Another hardly deserves to have it's own custom clients to begin with.
I mean there never will be if people don’t move. ActivityPub-based alternatives Lemmy https://join-lemmy.org/ and Kbin https://kbin.social/ are growing fairly rapidly at the moment.
No alternative now. Not gonna be an alternative if someone (which may or may not be "we/us") doesn't start fostering one. Reddit year one wasn't a Digg alternative either.
I'm using Tildes to replace most stuff, HN for more technical news, and then a few gaming news site and animation youtubers for entertainment news. And then tryig to keep an eye on and support some very alpha sites I've found over the weeks. Still myabe 70% replaced, but it's a lot more than the last time I said I'd quit reddit in like, 2017.
Reddit still has millions of people (tens? 100+?) who choose to use and submit content to the site. That's millions of people you can share Jesus Christ with, show love to (esp encouragement / counseling), learn from, collaborate with, and market to. There's so much good happening over there!
To see Reddit as having no value, a person's ideology would have to outweigh all those benefits. If it's a bad business, then all of that value it provides for all of those people wouldn't be worth whatever Reddit asked in return. Most still accept Reddit's terms for what the site offers them in return.
Much of the turmoil was about API fees. I'm happy to pay their fee to do more good for people. It might not have acceptable cost-benefit for everyone's use, though. I can definitely imagine better ways to do it for sure. That might include free blocks of or discounted calls to the API for OSS developers, academics, and Reddit Gold members (even if only 100-1000 for personal use). As an I.P.O.-focused startup, I accept that they're going to do what's good for their bottom line.
Let's say you want the situation to improve. For such companies, you can try to propose to decision-makers suggestions like above that increase value to everyone (including them!) with low or no extra cost. That's speaking their language. For avoiding harmful lock-in, people can (a) avoiding putting critical data in for-profit services or (b) keep backups of their data off-site in form OSS software can easily host. You can get a free copy of your Reddit data, too, at the link below:
>To see Reddit as having no value, a person's ideology would have to outweigh all those benefits.
Not quite, the downsides simply have to outweight the benefits. Value is relative, but even before this drama I've simply started valuing reddit less and less. It's harder for me to find actual conversation and I need to filter out more and more noise, toxicity, and outright spam to do it. It's become too much work, and that says a lot given that I browse Youtube and 4chan comments as well.
>If it's a bad business, then all of that value it provides for all of those people wouldn't be worth whatever Reddit asked in return.
Given recent valuations from places like Fidelity, that may in fact be the case. And that's who Reddit is trying to appeal to, not the actual users beneitting from the value of community.
>Much of the turmoil was about API fees. I'm happy to pay their fee to do more good for people.
And I'm sure others do too. However Reddit made it clear next month that they don't want 3rd party devs to divert costs to the users. Which sends a message that they do not want to work with 3rd party devs on their terms.
I don't want to swing this back to that drama, but that example is very endemic of how Reddit has operated for at least 7 years. There are compromises users would like to make but reddit doesn't allow nor make time to make becasuse the focus isn't on user satisfaction.
Maybe others will continue asking. But I'm simply done. The time I spent trying to improve reddit could have honestly been spent finding and fostering a new community who will listen.
Yeah, there’s lots of noise and toxicity. It reflects the values of those generating it. You gotta find subs with values that produce different things. Two I’m often on are below: one high signal to noise; one whose signal is worth the noise. Hope you find good community.
Recent actions have been to make profitable companies pay for API access. That isn't hostile to users. It's hostile to parasite companies who make a profit from your product while taking away from your revenue.
There are a select group of users who decided to vandalise the site in response. They were allowed to do so for a small period of time. In fact, some hardcore groups are still vandlaising the site. People are constantly asking why it's happening. The fact they were allowed to vandalise the site seems the opposite of hostile to users.
- Can't use web version without getting the mobile version banner forced down your throat every other interaction.
- Actively making the non-app version worse than the mobile, for no reason other than engagement metrics.
- Not able to view "NSFW" posts (of which everything is just false labeled as that) without logging in; even though it shows you the image on the timeline (the entire "NSFW" part) - a dark pattern / cheap tactic to drive sign up.
And this is just to name a few, dark patterns are a plenty across their site.
I won't go into the API side of things as others have said it better, and it seems you've already made your mind up there.
That's not hostile. That's wanting you to use one version over the other. The fact you think if they don't support your desired version of using it over any other then it's hostile to you.
The things you've mentioned aren't even dark patterns. One of them could be considered just a figament of your imagination. And one "Oh they make me log in to see porn" like really? Really?
It's the very definition of user hostility. They are forcing me to install the app for no good reason other than increased engagement. I don't want to use the app and all the rubbish that comes with it, the website has worked fine for the last 10+ years, and continues to on desktop.
> "The things you've mentioned aren't even dark patterns. One of them could be considered just a figament of your imagination. And one "Oh they make me log in to see porn" like really? Really?"
I see you decided to completely ignore what I wrote and twist it into something else, to repeat;
- NSFW posts are majority NOT porn but normal posts
- They already show you the image on the timeline - so stopping the post from loading after clicking, and instead showing sign up CTA's is nothing but a dark pattern / cheap trick to drive sign ups.
Again, dark patterns / cheap tricks are user hostile.
you cant be serious. I literally can no longer browse reddit, a uncomplicated web forum, on my ipad. I used to be able to. Its performance really is that bad. Actively making your webpage worse for mobile is not user hostile?
That doesn’t seem to be literally true because I’m on my iPad and have Reddit open in another tab. Sometimes I use the narwhal app and sometimes I use the official Reddit app as well.
You may not like using Reddit on your iPad but that’s a you problem.
I literally just booted up my iPad to check it out. It didn't force me to the app. It didn't even prompt me to use the app. It responded in a reasonable time. old.reddit.com worked and so did the new site.
All I can take away from that is you're either very fussy to the point you complain about minor things like they're major problems. Or you just can't use a website on your iPad.
There is no actively making a webpage worse. It's all in your head. "I don't like this so it's worse".
> People don't seem to recognize that someone replying so negatively and provocatively isn't engaging in good faith.
People can disagree with you and be in good faith. It's a common tactic to say someone who disagrees with you but you can't prove wrong is engaging in bad faith.
Let's have a solid look at this interaction.
* Someone says Reddit is user hostile.
* I claim it's not.
* Someone claim's they're actively making the website worse. A claim that can't be backed up.
* Same person claims requiring people to login to acces to content marked for 18+ is hostile. This is an absurd claim. A website shouldn't have any measure to ensure a user is old enough to access the content they're legally required to ensure they're old enough to access?
* Someone claims that they can't use the website on their iPad. I boot up my cheap iPad and use it quite easily. I didn't even get prompts I expected to get that would tell me to use the app. I used both new and old versions. I assume the person isn't lying and that if they're unable to use it it's because their hardware oboslete.
* Various people claim trying to get people to use your app over a website is hostile. Really, having a preferred way to use your site is hostile? All the other methods are available even old.reddit.com which should be discontinued. So while continuing to provide multiple user interfaces and supporting older ones to make users happy. They claim they're hostile.
The reality is, the evidence doesn't back up the claims. To claim I'm either an idiot or a troll engaging in bad faith really is the height of bad manners.
Reddit isn't hostile to it's users. It has users that are hostile to it. People who feel so entitled to a free site that they think any attempt to make it better for users who aren't them is hostile. Absolute entitlement. The tech community is one of the most entitled communties I've seen.
The problem lies partially in the fact that you haven't defined what "user hostile" means. (In fact, neither of you have. And you could try to [disingenuously] argue that the burden to define it lies with the person you're responding to and that you don't have any such burden, but that would be a junk argument—provably wrong, since the claim that it's not user hostile is as strong of a claim as claiming that it is.) So, a simple litmus test to see if you're acting in good faith: simply state which definition of "user hostile" you're using. Place the goalposts.
What is a definition of the phrase that, if it were observed/shown/proven, you would concede that the subject of the discussion is guilty of acting in a user hostile way?
> * Someone claim's they're actively making the website worse. A claim that can't be backed up.
I have a few examples I can observe myself. It's not documented, so it may not be considered "backed up", but it makes me avoid Reddit as much as I can, no matter how valuable it may be
1. The mobile interface of Reddit used to have option "Ask to Open in App" (it defaulted as checked), which prompts many banner about downloading app almost every click. Right now, the option disappeared; only Dark Mode remains.
2. At some point, visiting the main page of a particular subreddit on mobile will be blocked with "This community is available in the App". Later on, Reddit claimed (or the moderator of subreddit may claim) that the topic is mature and can only be viewed by 18+ users, when the subreddit or the topic isn't really something mature (I recall seeing it in a subreddit that operates as a de facto support forum of an Android app I use) and that it forced me to download the app, even though the app is seriously sluggish, to put it mildly
Sure, both of these examples may be resolved by switching to desktop mode or use the old.reddit, but doing so means I will have significant difficulty to scale the content to match the size of the small screen. For some, it may not be considered worse, but for me, the inability to read it the way it used to be means they are sabotaging it for the worse
You can blame a slow hardware device for the performance it delivers.
Complaining that your iPad 2 can't load a morden website is unreasonable. It's not that they've activity made their website worse it's that you've not got standard hardware to operate it. As we move forward in today's technogly things require more CPU and memory to run as they do more and more things. Complaining about that and blaming a specific site for your lack of investment in hardware is unreasonable!
The application is trash, doesn't display proper formatting standards, and is inferior to even the most basic of third party apps. If ending support and not improving your awful application isn't hostility, what is?
Also if you try to avoid it with the browser on mobile, it runs like trash still has issues and the UI for new reddit is trash as well so you use old reddit but that will likely die eventually knowing their pisspoor management.
>That's not hostile. That's wanting you to use one version over the other
user hostile:"A play on the common term "user-friendly", a user-hostile design is one that is, deliberately or accidentally, difficult or cumbersome for the intended user."
Yes, I would consider disabling all controls on the mobile page to turn a simple webpage of comments into an ad for the app as "user hostile". A deliberate one, even.
>And one "Oh they make me log in to see porn" like really? Really?
If they had proper NSFW filters that separated porn from violence from "oh the post had the word 'fuck' in it" from "not even NSFW but the movie is rated R so may as well be safe", I may be inclined to agree. Alas, proper NSFW granularity is another feature long ask for and never given.
> That conveniently glosses over the fact that users provide all the content for free, that these “vandals” then moderate 24/7 for free.
>
> To say “well, I’m not going to do it if you take away my tools” is entirely fair imo.
No other social platform allows users to moderate. Complaining because a social platform gives you a feature you want but doesn't pay you for using the feature you want is really silly.
Then to stop doing it. It's like going to a shop helping them out and then when they decide to stop giving stuff away and try and make a profit you smash up their shop. It's not an acceptable way to act.
It’s not a feature, it’s absolutely essential for any forum, otherwise every second comment would be shitpost. Come on, at least don’t double down if you have zero idea about what does a forum entail.
There is nothing wrong with asking for money for the API use, if it is a reasonable amount. (Still a bit questionable, as reddit is literally leeching on user-generated content, they themselves provide very little in the equation) But these were clearly meant to stop third-party apps completely — compute is ridiculously cheap, especially when you mostly serve easily cache-able textual data.
It’s a shame because it wouldn’t have been hard to make shitton of money while simultaneously riding the good-will of people by offering a subscription-based reddit premium for a few dollars at most for third-party API use.
There's also the dishonesty of Reddit's explanation for the money-grab.
They claimed it was to curb the large-scale harvesting of content for AI models, but then they abruptly demanded everyone everywhere pay excessive fees regardless of identity or purpose or usage patterns.
In contrast, the big and significant actors in that space could have been dissuaded by a terms of service change combined with some rate limits.
There is the users that Reddit have, and the users they want. There is an overlap of those two groups, but Reddit seems completely happy to chuck out a subsection of their users, if that means being able to jam more ads down the throat of the remaining users.
I think what has happened is that Reddit have looked to Imgur, TikTok, Shorts, Instagram and other social media sites and noticed that Reddit wasn't facilitating doom scrolling in the same way. Reddit users are engaged with the site longer, I'd assume, but see fewer ads, because they remain on the same post. Management would very much like to change that. It's sad, because it shows zero engangement with the site and the users, it just an audience. They're taking their existing product at transforming it to just another scroller app, using the existing users as a means to get the ball rolling.
> It's hostile to parasite companies who make a profit from your product while taking away from your revenue.
Reddit literally profits from other people's content, both user-submitted content and links to 3rd party websites. Reddit as a company provides exactly zero of the content that attracts users.
Reddit has been _user_ hostile for over a decade. There's nothing particularly hostile about charging for API access, but that breaks Apollo, which _moderators_ love, which is why we're suddenly actually seeing a backlash.
You can do the opposite: take the Reddit apps that aren't working anymore, do a one line change [1] (to use https://api.rings.social) and you're now able to use a Reddit client to browse Rings [2][3] - a Reddit API compatible content-voting platform licensed as AGPLv3.
Surely the lesson from Reddit (and Twitter and every other commercial social media entity) is that we shouldn't put our trust in a single organisation?
if you're going to take the "pain" of moving away from the network effect of your existing walled garden, surely it would better to move to something with a better governance model, like a federated solution? Lemmy is far from perfect but I have found it to provide a lot of what I looked for in Reddit's absence.
[I only really use Reddit on mobile, and so with the absence of decent mobile apps Reddit is effectively shut down for me]
Which is sort of also what you're doing with federated platforms. Just look at what's happening with Meta's Threads and Mastodon. In the end you'll always have someone in the driver seat deciding for you who's going to see what (by not federating with threads.net for example).
In a similar fashion, the code is AGPLv3 so you can run your own instance in both cases
A cool variation of this would be a Reddit API to ActivityPub bridge which would make it compatible with Lemmy, Kbin etc. I saw a project for this a while ago but can't remember what it's called.
Activity seems to have died down now that some larger Reddit apps have announced they're building dedicated Lemmy clients. Connect for Lemmy is pretty good already, Sync is coming out with an app in a few weeks, and there are other apps out there as well.
All the subs I follow remain highly active. From my POV the "migration" was a vocal minority that is largely still there for want of a single viable alternative.
i'm still looking for a replacement to the r/python community that was [tyrannically] taken down by mods who hid a poll to do so under some vaguely named sticky post
that was the most useful place to find new python projects on the internet and i'm still peeved that the mods didn't propose any new place for the users to go
that was the first post, they shut down the re-opened
when they re-opened only mods could post, and it was a daily discussion thread
then there was a sticky, a poorly named one, where apparently there was another poll about what to do with the sub.
next comes a day when they plan to shut the sub down and the comment section is filled with people saying they didn't know this was happening and that the sticky was vaguely named.
I'm not sure they were hiding anything; maybe you just missed it among the thousands of other posts collectively across thousands of subs about the blackout protest. There was also:
* June 11: 'r/Python Will Black Out on June 12 at 00:00 UTC'
* June 12: 'By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout'
* June 16: 'An Update about our Community' (text started with links, 'Here is a summary of the changes which prompted the recent Blackout. Here's our announcement for doing the Blackout....' and then 'Hence we wish to take another poll of community feedback...'
* June 28: 'By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout'
Looks like the volunteer r/python mods were doing their best to keep everyone involved in the decision-making and informed of the outcomes while also juggling that volunteer activity for a for-profit company with their paying jobs and real-world responsibilities.
> * June 16: 'An Update about our Community' (text started with links, 'Here is a summary of the changes which prompted the recent Blackout. Here's our announcement for doing the Blackout....' and then 'Hence we wish to take another poll of community feedback...'
i'm confused about your post, is this 4 topics? was this all one long title? what was this except exactly as what i described it as?
and that's my point, it wasn't as transparent as it should have been
and if they want a blackout, so be it, but propose another place for people to aggregate. why destroy a community over this pettiness that's all but gone away since it happened? why does the same end result that happened in CrossValidated need to happen there too? what good does this do in the world?
its all passive aggressiveness when communication can literally solve everyones problem, especially when this was the issue with the reddit admins to begin with! why are they acting like the reddit admins by refusing to communicate properly? its all so ridiculous
>i'm confused about your post, is this 4 topics? was this all one long title? what was this except exactly as what i described it as?
It was one of many posts that the r/python volunteer mods made, giving everyone a chance to vote and discuss. Was it "hidden" as you say? I don't know - I don't think so, it was a vote-by-comment instead of reddit poll to reduce fakery, and it required some context so everyone knew what they were voting on.
Good luck in your search for a new community. Perhaps drop in the discord server and see if anyone has suggestions for you. Link is on the sidebar of the archived page.
right, the topic title isn't called "vote here", its not direct
and if you archived the post later to include all the comments on the post that came after, you'd see all the comments saying they didn't even know this was coming
and i probably won't need to find another community i'll just wait until these mods are dethroned by the admins
its bad form to hide a poll inside a vaguely named sticky
then when an announcement was made about them shutting the sub down (post blackout), the thread was filled with people complaining that this wasn't a fair poll and that most weren't even aware it was there
Rings gives an API compatibility layer for Reddit that should make the transition from Reddit to Rings easier - if the app developers decide to switch their app endpoints.
Neat. I wasn't aware that there's an endpoint you could use to retrieve JSON data without an API key.
If this project were to gain more traction, I suppose they would interfere with that, right?
It's sad to see that every free Reddit client is forced to be a browser nowadays.
> Neat. I wasn't aware that there's an endpoint you could use to retrieve JSON data without an API key.
Call me naive but in fact I always thought that's what the apps were using. One thing that took me by surprise in the whole fiasco was that the apps were actually using their own API keys -- I always thought I was just logged in to reddit in my own account. I figured it might be using some backend service for storing some app metadata but I didn't realize it was needing to communicate with reddit using the app developer's account on my behalf.
Based on folks using ReVanced to patch the shut down apps, it's an oauth client id that was specific to an app. Communication was with reddit's API directly.
The JSON endpoints are pretty neat, you can just take any reddit page, be it subreddit, submission comments or username, and append `/.json` to the URL and tadaa, JSON data. Although like you said, I'm pretty sure they will axe it at some point, and I'm honestly surprised that they didn't already.
I can imagine however, that old.reddit.com scraping/parsing layers will pop up left and right as soon as that happens (and those in turn could be the final nail in the coffin for old.reddit.com)
I think spez completely forgot about the fact they had a way to export data as JSON everywhere. That's basically 80% of what a reddit client needs and basically all an LLM model needs for training.
So this thing is advertised as a "Reddit client without using their API", but then it uses the reddit API for everything. The JSON endpoints are part of the API. It's how all apps get the content of subreddits, comments, etc. It's odd that they're still open for unauthenticated access, but I expect that to change.
They can just turn off the .json endpoints for unauthenticated requests. Their own clients use a non-public GraphQL API that (supposedly, I haven't checked) uses elaborate fingerprinting to stop outside access. When I said "all apps" I should probably have clarified that it's all 3rd-party apps.
I imagine that over time they’ll update their 1st party clients to use authentication, and if they’re really motivated they could implement some kind of token binding.
It would surprise me if this isn’t in their near term plans given the apparent urgency they have to shut down the APIs.
My understanding is that they’re still hitting API endpoints.
What I’m getting at is that it’s theoretically possible to start locking down the APIs such that only Reddit’s own clients including the web view can continue to call those APIs.
Clients that are calling the unprotected endpoints would be forced to start circumventing the new API security, setting up an avenue for Reddit to go after such clients.
Something like this [0]. The point would be to force clients to deliberately circumvent the restrictions, which I believe would give them more standing to go after 3rd party clients that attempt this.
Worth noting that most browsers don’t support token binding yet, but this has been in the works for awhile, so I’m mentioning it here for illustrative purposes. They could theoretically implement something less airtight but with the same general goal.
Both Apple and Google will remove apps from their store if they access a 3rd party API without consent. Not to mention that if using non sanctioned APIs you will likely face lawsuits from whatever service you are implementing a 3rd party client for.
It's a game of cat and mouse, it's like anticheat, or user agent spoofing. All reddit have to do is make it "difficult" enough to dissuage the majority of users for it to be worthwhile.
I believe this endpoint is the only way to retrieve json with posts from Reddit, so every single app would use it. Even Apollo used it, although it used OAuth for that. See this line:
Yeah I guess it's an API, but it's using public endpoints that don't require registering an application and creating an API key, or being subjected to the same rate limits.
Yeah, I'm not giving reddit any more content or metrics and thus I'm simply not using it anymore. Why use a shitty service that I hate when I can help make the fediverse a little bit better? It's large enough for my needs and lemmy / jerboa is really good.
Tangentially related, but what happened to the protest? Did all the mods just fold after the threat of being replaced? For something that was pushed so hard for a couple of weeks on Reddit’s front page, it’s bizarre how forgotten the protest seems to be after the changes were put into effect.
Welcome to hearing absolute noise from the vocal minority.
The only people who complained were third party client/tool developers, some of whom were making money off of them, and mods who at this point are infamous for their desire for power and authority. Reddit squarely targeted one and then the other, and they won because the silent majority (aka the vast majority of users) didn't care.
With regards to the mods specifically, it could even be argued the silent majority sided with Reddit simply from how down in the dirt the reputation of mods is.
Put another way, what you witnessed was the digital equivalent of those socio-political protests, attended purely by crowds of high school and college students, while the rest of society continued on paying no heed.
I don't get how much of a big deal this API thing is. I don't get how much effort is put to have yet another client app. I don't get all of this. This is... Reddit!
There is arekeady the "gedit" (g-edit) text editor provided in GNOME-based distros. I alwaysa pronounce it in my head as "geddit" just like this client.
CORS is a browser security measure to protect users from malicious sites. This is an app and not a web browser and is therefore allowed to send HTTP requests to any URL it wants and to parse the HTTP responses as it deems necessary.
Silly question, what would stop someone from using this technique from scraping the biggest subreddits, and then cross posting to say mastadon, and then allowing people to claim their cross posts, by using reddit's login api lol
Nice thought, but the reason apps like Apollo were popular had to do with functionality that you could only get through the API, like auto-banning users who interacted with specific subs. You can't emulate that through screen scraping.
