6 ms·

Reddit banned Reddiw's (alternative API) subreddit and author's Reddit account

99 points by davikr 3y ago

KingLancelot 3y ago
Fuck reddit.
KMnO4 3y ago
Does the site still work? I can’t determine that from the article. Only that the corresponding subreddit was banned and the docs greyed out. FWIW, I thought this was a really cool (and bold) idea
- kobayashi 3y ago
  Yes, it still works. The desired reddit API call is made to reddiw instead of reddit which acts like a relay
  - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
    i couldnt get it to work, can you share an example link?
dgwight 3y ago
Did this scrap the website / how did Reddit stop it from working?
- joecot 3y ago
  Since it was a read-only api, I'm assuming they used the readily available json endpoints that require no authentication. reddit blocked it in any of the ways you can block a good faith actor -- by user agent or IP address.
coconut08 3y ago
imagine how much money reddit will save on api calls when they piss everyone off so much that they stop going there.
esun 3y ago
Cannot believe I am close to deleting my 15-year-old account. This is a case study in how to fail at managing your community. Gross.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  I deleted my long term account a few months back for other reasons (too much time on there, becoming toxic is weird ways). But, it is astounding just seeing how poorly they are handling this. It seems like they are willing to do anything to try and contain any form of resistance with the thinking that others will never find out or tell others. It is a very juvenile way of handling criticism and feed back. They simply cannot accept that they have handled this API thing poorly and have completely doubled down on it despite all the negative feed back.
  - esun 3y ago
    My top post all time is an Elite: Dangerous locker room joke but I was a part of a community and they blew it up for money so fuck /u/spez .
    - NovaDudely 3y ago
      Mine was the dumbest throw away thing ever about cow tipping. Simply that cows don't like strangers coming up to them and that it is difficult to tip a cow because 1 ton of cows is not a lot of cows. Such insight!
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
    i have a theory. Remember many many years ago when reddit had that donate button and everyone was expected to complete it to 100% on a daily basis to make sure reddit had enough funds to host the whole thing? people around the world made sure, everyday that reddit could be up so that they themselves could enjoy it. along comes VC funding and a dream of IPO, afterall, if facebook, google, reddit and others could do it, why the heck not reddit. first they brought video and photos which astronomically increased hosting costs, then they started enshittifying their app with slow feature decay for third party apps. at this point, the playbook was set. reddit was to follow twitter who used the generosity of third party developers to make people get hooked to the "twitter" and then decided to dump them. today, only twitter app works. reddit wants that. reddit is claiming "costs" but if not for these third party apps, there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON FOR REDDIT TO EXIST. Its not like we have friends and family and sacred photos and memories there. Its memes and flame wars. here is my predictions, 1. any/all of reddit's TPA's will re-emerge with a lemmy/kbin backend and people will use it as they were earlier. 2. there will be slight issues with federation and searching for communities across fediverse but browse.feddit.de has already solved that bit pretty nicely so all they have to do is introduce that in the app in the search. 3. you can see, unlike mastodon that needs USERS, and hashtags, a community, say technology on lemmy.ml can be reached by anyone searching for technology on browse.feddit.de and the same people can reach other subs so it shouldn't be much difficult to restart from where they left on reddit. 4. if reddit thinks it can just shove the whole thing under the rug, well, these people leaving are NOT coming back, regardless of who they bring as new mods. The "TRUST" wont be there.
genocidicbunny 3y ago
> "for breaking reddit." That seems like an awfully personal permaban reason.
- clowd 3y ago
  And not a true one, either. I don't know what the hell Reddit is doing the past couple of weeks but they seem determined to completely destroy themselves, and quickly.
steeler_train 3y ago
I wish a reddit terminal interface still worked. Everyone I try is broke or near broken. Then reddit gets nada from me and I don’t need a browser to read shit from them and their shit ui
smashah 3y ago
Not to derail this conversation but there is an extremely concerning pattern of big companies restricting programmatic access. Elon with the Twitter changes and kneecapping third party clients. Reddit with this situation. WhatsApp with their systematic elimination of OSS API alternatives by sending legal threats/C&Ds to maintainers. API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 and it's being robbed from us. We need to start thinking about our human Right to Automate. If the companies don't want to give people reasonable access then it should be our right to make alternatives. Solidarity with the maintainers of Reddiw.
- joecot 3y ago
  The point is to kill third party applications. Social media companies watched Facebook do it with little outrage, and quite a bit of upside -- they completely control the user experience, all by squeezing out 3rd parties slowly and without fanfare. Twitter and reddit want to benefit from that as well, but don't have the political savvy to pull it off without protest. But the goal is the same, complete control of the user base and how they access the site. API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 up until a company realizes it's more lucrative to lock their users in harder.
  - smashah 3y ago
    True. This is only going to get worse unless technical people in these companies put a foot down. Maintainers do not have the resources to pay for a legal defence (companies know this), the community has shiny-object-syndrome and so it's up to internal employees to show resistance to these immoral policies.
    - joecot 3y ago
      I think it's moreso that we need stronger decentralized options to be adopted. Google embraced both email with Gmail and jabber with Google talk. With Google talk they eventually reached a high enough usage rate that they closed it off, and effectively killed jabber, because there wasn't a large other service using it. With email though, they couldn't do that. They've slowly made it harder to interact with Gmail from outside Gmail. But email lives and can't be locked down. I think the protocol needs some work, but I think ActivityPub and the fediverse, with Mastodon and Lemmy and the like, are the way forward. Centralized sites will always have this problem, because they spend VC money for growth, and eventually those investors expect their money back. If a site is just one part of a large ecosystem, investors can't push the site to close off like this for a profit and control.
klipklop 3y ago
All the companies are cutting off access so others can’t build chatGPT-like AI models from their “content.” The internet is going to be less open and less searchable going forward. Go look at google image search these days. Useless. Mostly to cut off access to millions of images to build models.
- oilchange 3y ago
  > Go look at google image search these days. Useless. Mostly to cut off access to millions of images to build models. I think that was mostly due to copyright laws. The past few years, media companies, publishers, etc have been using copyright laws to paywall, hide or restrict more content - books, images, news articles, videos, documents, etc.
  - klipklop 3y ago
    You can assume those groups feel the same way. Lock it down so bots cant mass crawl your watermarked thumbnails. If AI companies can hoover up all of Shutterstock’s photos their business is in real trouble. Do we know if google deleted all their cached GIS images? I doubt they did…
hu3 3y ago
Funny that when clicking the post link, Chrome warns me that I might have wanted to enter https://www.reddit.com https://www.reddit.com instead of https://api.reddiw.com https://api.reddiw.com Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/2j8SkqB.png https://i.imgur.com/2j8SkqB.png When I click learn more it redirects to: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/99020?visit_id=618221365020902814-4066381091&p=safety_tip&rd=1#safety_tip https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/99020?visit_id=6182... What makes Chrome show this warning for a legitimate site?
- millzlane 3y ago
  they explain it here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/security/lookalikes/lookalike-domains.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs... Chrome attempts to detect these lookalike domains by comparing the URL you visited with other URLs that are either very popular, or that you have visited previously. These checks all happen within Chrome -- Chrome does not communicate with Google to perform these checks.
zenapollo 3y ago
If Reddit wanted to make more money they should have invested in search. A few months ago there were many articles about how Google’s search was deteriorating and people had started going to Reddit. They could have easily had a slice of Google’s pie. Especially because the thing people really want most is recommendations (products, content, resources) - with everything changing so fast, Reddit was the place to see what real users were saying. This is the most monetizable kind of search. Now with users shredding their accounts and subs going private, they may have missed their chance.
albertopv 3y ago
I'm a sw eng, but at university I attended a pair of economics courses, more than 10yo. I remember teacher talked about the API economy, how everything would connect and flow through APIs, and I thought why a company would have given their data away for free and keeping the burden of the API infrastructure. Now API crackdown is real, green walled gardens are everywhere.
6bb32646d83d 3y ago
Is the source of this project (or something similar) available anywhere? They can easily ban a single website, but it would be harder if everybody who wanted "API" access could self host this translation layer
tibro 3y ago
I'm a sw eng, but at university I attended a pair of economics courses, more than 10yo. I remember teacher talked about the API economy, how everything would connect and flow through APIs, and I thought why a company would have given their data away for free and keeping the burden of the API infrastructure. Now API crackdown is real, green walled gardens are everywhere.

99 points by davikr 3y ago

Fuck reddit.

Does the site still work? I can’t determine that from the article. Only that the corresponding subreddit was banned and the docs greyed out. FWIW, I thought this was a really cool (and bold) idea

kobayashi 3y ago
Yes, it still works. The desired reddit API call is made to reddiw instead of reddit which acts like a relay
- 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
  i couldnt get it to work, can you share an example link?

dgwight 3y ago

Did this scrap the website / how did Reddit stop it from working?

joecot 3y ago
Since it was a read-only api, I'm assuming they used the readily available json endpoints that require no authentication. reddit blocked it in any of the ways you can block a good faith actor -- by user agent or IP address.

coconut08 3y ago

imagine how much money reddit will save on api calls when they piss everyone off so much that they stop going there.

esun 3y ago

Cannot believe I am close to deleting my 15-year-old account. This is a case study in how to fail at managing your community. Gross.

NovaDudely 3y ago
I deleted my long term account a few months back for other reasons (too much time on there, becoming toxic is weird ways). But, it is astounding just seeing how poorly they are handling this. It seems like they are willing to do anything to try and contain any form of resistance with the thinking that others will never find out or tell others. It is a very juvenile way of handling criticism and feed back. They simply cannot accept that they have handled this API thing poorly and have completely doubled down on it despite all the negative feed back.
- esun 3y ago
  My top post all time is an Elite: Dangerous locker room joke but I was a part of a community and they blew it up for money so fuck /u/spez .
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    Mine was the dumbest throw away thing ever about cow tipping. Simply that cows don't like strangers coming up to them and that it is difficult to tip a cow because 1 ton of cows is not a lot of cows. Such insight!
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
  i have a theory. Remember many many years ago when reddit had that donate button and everyone was expected to complete it to 100% on a daily basis to make sure reddit had enough funds to host the whole thing? people around the world made sure, everyday that reddit could be up so that they themselves could enjoy it. along comes VC funding and a dream of IPO, afterall, if facebook, google, reddit and others could do it, why the heck not reddit. first they brought video and photos which astronomically increased hosting costs, then they started enshittifying their app with slow feature decay for third party apps. at this point, the playbook was set. reddit was to follow twitter who used the generosity of third party developers to make people get hooked to the "twitter" and then decided to dump them. today, only twitter app works. reddit wants that. reddit is claiming "costs" but if not for these third party apps, there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON FOR REDDIT TO EXIST. Its not like we have friends and family and sacred photos and memories there. Its memes and flame wars. here is my predictions, 1. any/all of reddit's TPA's will re-emerge with a lemmy/kbin backend and people will use it as they were earlier. 2. there will be slight issues with federation and searching for communities across fediverse but browse.feddit.de has already solved that bit pretty nicely so all they have to do is introduce that in the app in the search. 3. you can see, unlike mastodon that needs USERS, and hashtags, a community, say technology on lemmy.ml can be reached by anyone searching for technology on browse.feddit.de and the same people can reach other subs so it shouldn't be much difficult to restart from where they left on reddit. 4. if reddit thinks it can just shove the whole thing under the rug, well, these people leaving are NOT coming back, regardless of who they bring as new mods. The "TRUST" wont be there.

genocidicbunny 3y ago

> "for breaking reddit." That seems like an awfully personal permaban reason.

clowd 3y ago
And not a true one, either. I don't know what the hell Reddit is doing the past couple of weeks but they seem determined to completely destroy themselves, and quickly.

steeler_train 3y ago

I wish a reddit terminal interface still worked. Everyone I try is broke or near broken. Then reddit gets nada from me and I don’t need a browser to read shit from them and their shit ui

smashah 3y ago

Not to derail this conversation but there is an extremely concerning pattern of big companies restricting programmatic access. Elon with the Twitter changes and kneecapping third party clients. Reddit with this situation. WhatsApp with their systematic elimination of OSS API alternatives by sending legal threats/C&Ds to maintainers. API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 and it's being robbed from us. We need to start thinking about our human Right to Automate. If the companies don't want to give people reasonable access then it should be our right to make alternatives. Solidarity with the maintainers of Reddiw.

joecot 3y ago
The point is to kill third party applications. Social media companies watched Facebook do it with little outrage, and quite a bit of upside -- they completely control the user experience, all by squeezing out 3rd parties slowly and without fanfare. Twitter and reddit want to benefit from that as well, but don't have the political savvy to pull it off without protest. But the goal is the same, complete control of the user base and how they access the site. API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 up until a company realizes it's more lucrative to lock their users in harder.
- smashah 3y ago
  True. This is only going to get worse unless technical people in these companies put a foot down. Maintainers do not have the resources to pay for a legal defence (companies know this), the community has shiny-object-syndrome and so it's up to internal employees to show resistance to these immoral policies.
  - joecot 3y ago
    I think it's moreso that we need stronger decentralized options to be adopted. Google embraced both email with Gmail and jabber with Google talk. With Google talk they eventually reached a high enough usage rate that they closed it off, and effectively killed jabber, because there wasn't a large other service using it. With email though, they couldn't do that. They've slowly made it harder to interact with Gmail from outside Gmail. But email lives and can't be locked down. I think the protocol needs some work, but I think ActivityPub and the fediverse, with Mastodon and Lemmy and the like, are the way forward. Centralized sites will always have this problem, because they spend VC money for growth, and eventually those investors expect their money back. If a site is just one part of a large ecosystem, investors can't push the site to close off like this for a profit and control.

klipklop 3y ago

All the companies are cutting off access so others can’t build chatGPT-like AI models from their “content.” The internet is going to be less open and less searchable going forward. Go look at google image search these days. Useless. Mostly to cut off access to millions of images to build models.

oilchange 3y ago
> Go look at google image search these days. Useless. Mostly to cut off access to millions of images to build models. I think that was mostly due to copyright laws. The past few years, media companies, publishers, etc have been using copyright laws to paywall, hide or restrict more content - books, images, news articles, videos, documents, etc.
- klipklop 3y ago
  You can assume those groups feel the same way. Lock it down so bots cant mass crawl your watermarked thumbnails. If AI companies can hoover up all of Shutterstock’s photos their business is in real trouble. Do we know if google deleted all their cached GIS images? I doubt they did…

hu3 3y ago

Funny that when clicking the post link, Chrome warns me that I might have wanted to enter https://www.reddit.com https://www.reddit.com instead of https://api.reddiw.com https://api.reddiw.com Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/2j8SkqB.png https://i.imgur.com/2j8SkqB.png When I click learn more it redirects to: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/99020?visit_id=618221365020902814-4066381091&p=safety_tip&rd=1#safety_tip https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/99020?visit_id=6182... What makes Chrome show this warning for a legitimate site?

millzlane 3y ago
they explain it here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/security/lookalikes/lookalike-domains.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs... Chrome attempts to detect these lookalike domains by comparing the URL you visited with other URLs that are either very popular, or that you have visited previously. These checks all happen within Chrome -- Chrome does not communicate with Google to perform these checks.

zenapollo 3y ago

If Reddit wanted to make more money they should have invested in search. A few months ago there were many articles about how Google’s search was deteriorating and people had started going to Reddit. They could have easily had a slice of Google’s pie. Especially because the thing people really want most is recommendations (products, content, resources) - with everything changing so fast, Reddit was the place to see what real users were saying. This is the most monetizable kind of search. Now with users shredding their accounts and subs going private, they may have missed their chance.

albertopv 3y ago

I'm a sw eng, but at university I attended a pair of economics courses, more than 10yo. I remember teacher talked about the API economy, how everything would connect and flow through APIs, and I thought why a company would have given their data away for free and keeping the burden of the API infrastructure. Now API crackdown is real, green walled gardens are everywhere.

6bb32646d83d 3y ago

Is the source of this project (or something similar) available anywhere? They can easily ban a single website, but it would be harder if everybody who wanted "API" access could self host this translation layer

tibro 3y ago