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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Early days is one thing, but if this is the entirety of the code
# WIPThen there isn’t much to have a discussion about…
It mimics the official one perfectly
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 beg to differ, its in the planning stages at the moment, as such i am here to collect ideas for its development. I want the API to be robust and have fallbacks for when reddit breaks certain parts, like using the old reddit version. This is a big task, and it needs to be planned right.
“My science-based, 100% dragon MMO is already under development.”
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.
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.)
Gotta agree with this. Reddit is a shadow of what it once was.
I can digg what you mean.
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
fishSteve Huffman getting dominated by an antelope.
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.
We still do sadly.
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 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.
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.
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.
We already have a way. Lemmy, lemmy is the way
Lemmy? Never heard of it.
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
Reddit is dead to me
deaddit
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
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.
You can’t get any help here, since we’re the ones who got away from 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
Now, if only to get their auto bots to stopping banning accounts for little to no reasons. If you disagree with the wrong mod or they don’t like what to you say, they ban you.
My 12yr old account got banned. I’m not worried about the link karma and comment karma.
Why would you lose time with reddit?
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.
Pretty cool of you to do this! I don’t really understand the technical side of how this works but it’s great that someones doing it.
Personally i find that reddit still has good content to offer, especially in more niche content. Sure anything on r/all is 90% bots but other stuff isn’t.
Good luck
Thanks, i very much appreciate the kind words. (:
