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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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
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 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.)
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.So it’s like cooking recipes but for programming. I hope they at least add some useless background info about their Nana using DOS or what have you.
Gotta agree with this. Reddit is a shadow of what it once was.
I can digg what you mean.
Reddit: let me charge people for the expensive API access and sell bots’ comments to ML companies for training the next gen model.
Ironic
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.
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.”
You’ll be begging alright when reddit’s legal team finds you
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
And SmartTV or whatever is. Basically the same but for Android tv.
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.
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
Reddit is dead to me
deaddit
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?
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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. (:
Never cared much for reddit, finding lemmy way more interesting anyway.
I don’t think Lemmy will end up being much more different than Reddit. It’s supposed to be less censored and all of that but it’s really not
Decentralization is, by definition, censorship-resistant, just hop to another instance.
There is censorship, but i think it’s on par with reddit. Were i to post some of the stuff i post here on lemmy on mastodon instead i’d have my account banned. Speaking from experience.
Decentralization is, by definition, censorship-resistant, just hop to another instance.
or roll your own instance, with blackjack and hookers
I’ve gotten banned from places on here for simply stating facts that certain people don’t like and yes, you can move to another instance but there are only a few instances where you can reach a decent sized audience.
Reddit is a dumpster. Mods with no oversight can die in a fire.
No.
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.
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This is likely to be C&D’d as well if it ever reaches the point where it does anything useful (remember, reddit doesn’t need grounds that would hold up in court to send a C&D).
Don’t worry, it won’t be a problem. I have taken reasonable measures to ensure my anonymity. and also you can’t really kill free/libre software easily anyways.
I suspect that any of the methods proposed here would be prone to a C&D, but IMO the safest legally would probably be the RSS method (not a lawyer though). Reddit’s RSS feeds are public, documented, and available without the need for private APIs, authentication, or an API key, so I don’t see how they could claim that a wrapper is unauthorised/illegal. Documenting their private API however seems like a gray area. Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. found that APIs are copyrightable, but this use may constitute fair use.
Because we need to retain the breadth of functionality the API has, if you want to just scrape posts, APIs for that already exist, but i am aiming for something more.
About reverse engineering, they can change that part at any time too, and may be even more fragile as they can change that without breaking the UX, if they change the front page CSS selectors or layout for example, it will effect the UX more as it changes the expected output, not the middle end that is just raw data.
Thats my reasoning, I appreciate the input though (:
Why would you lose time with reddit?
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.
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.
This project is stupid and DOA. Find something more productive or fun to work on.
