I am making a Unofficial Reddit API, which mimics the official one.
Its early days, but I would like to have a discussion here about it since my post was blocked on reddit(of course).
Let me know what you think of the project, if you have any input, let me know.
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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.
Reddit unfortunately won’t die though.
It’s much much much more likely that Lemmy will die over time.
Why do you think that?
Because Reddit gets an insane amount of use, whereas Lemmy doesn’t?
I like it here, but let’s not pretend that people aren’t still using Reddit. Most people don’t care about regressive policies, they just want to look at stupid memes and chat shit online.
Of you want to see an even more extreme example, look at how many people are still using Twitter despite all the shit getting pulled over there. Reddit’s shenanigans look tame by comparison.
For one thing, half the active users don’t want the platform to grow and retain more users. That’s not going to work. We need new users to keep the flow of content and discussions. People will inevitably leave, die, post and consume less and less as their lives change etc. If we don’t get new users we won’t be around long term.
The other problem though is that the lack of an algorithm turns off a lot of people who can’t find anything. Lemmy isn’t easily searchable, content is hard to find again if you don’t interact with it the first time you see it by commenting saving etc. the search function isn’t refined enough to allow you to find things quickly across instances or even just in one instance. Add to that that you don’t get a whole curated feed based on the things you do interact with, and the lack of one to one communities to equivalent subreddits and you’ve got a major problem.
Niche communities won’t show up here unless they have a community behind them and a community needs people.
Plus the toxic minority here is very loud just because there’s not that many users in comparison to literally most other mainstream social media.
Reddit cannot die unless their management does some insane thing that affects majority of user base. Killing 3rd party apps impacted a small minority so it was largely nothing. It is way too popular and useful to die at this point.
As for Lemmy, will be interesting to see how eventual operational cost problems will be resolved. Lemmy (Activity Pub?) is also pretty inefficient and does a lot of data duplication due to being decentralized. Centralized systems like Reddit are much more efficient.
Because reddit still has a huge userbase compared to Lemmy and that brings content, engagement and revenue, they are an institution of the internet at this point. Reddit posts are part of google results while Lemmy does not, when people have a problem they find old reddit threads for help, guides and tech support, not so with Lemmy. I would say 95% of reddit userbase doesn’t even know that Lemmy exists. One fuck up will not kill reddit as it currently is, they are too massive, one fuck up might kill Lemmy, if it just doesn’t slowly waste away. Reddit would have to fuck up constantly over a long period of time, kill communities, put features behind paywall, get caught in spying of the users, etc. And each time Lemmy would have to be advertizing itself in every twist and turn to get those users and not alienate them and be able to support the growing userbase and gain some benefit from them and them not just be a cost sink of lurkers.
It gets really bad when people doesn’t want to even pirate it.
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.
And the worst part is that lemmy isn’t great to search due to its federated nature.
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?
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.
Which YouTube app is broken now? Revanced still works fine for me.
Newpipe
The issue is the API costs money, and people don’t want to have to pay to use their favorite reddit client, plus, this might help future advancements, like a migrator tool from reddit to lemmy, that does not cost money to use. that could help lemmy adoption.
Redreader uses the official API, they have an exception from paying (for now) because they have accessibility features that most apps including the official one lack.
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.
Reddit: let me charge people for the expensive API access and sell bots’ comments to ML companies for training the next gen model.
Ironic
Gotta agree with this. Reddit is a shadow of what it once was.
I can digg what you mean.
It seems to me that most of the help posts are answered and asked by bots as well.
I’m not sure this is a change. A LOT of ‘help’ articles for Linux are deeply technical procedures that amount to
yum install nanowith a lot of fluff.“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.)
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 not thread conversation that rarely ever followed the OP content. So it’s just a bunch of AI chatbota 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
fishSteve Huffman getting dominated by an antelope.Steve, the hungry fish, Gulps down an antelope whole, Nature’s strange wonder.
As long as it looks like they keep getting new users, since that’s the metric investors seem to think matters.
It’s wild how true that is. Wilder still that it seems only veteran redditors even notice it.
I wonder how much of the engagement is authentic vs. farmed or not. So much old content is being dug up and presented as fresh or OC.
Why?
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.
How was it compared to the Lemmy API?
Reddit is dead to me
deaddit
Just leave that network behind
Don’t.
Youre on the wrong platform. This is lemmy
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
i wonder if fatbird would use this…
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.
Same here
I have been, but only on browser, and only for specific subs. I go way less often than I used to, and no longer browse the front page.
I made the mistake of actually making a comment with effort. Got trolled by dozens.
Yeah… won’t miss Reddit
Why would you lose time with reddit?
Basically you want to write scraping solution specially for Reddit, it would be great if you started with scraping Frameworks like python scrapy framework
