37 ms·

Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

342 points by kaangiray26 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jaggs 2y ago
Enshitification at work, in glorious technicolor.
Morthor 2y ago
I have been using Geddit for some time. I don't usually have issues with some video exceptions and showing only a portion of the comments. It beats using the official app or the website.
karmakaze 2y ago
The JSON representation is great for classical web scraping, but I wonder if LLMs are already good at 'seeing' HTML/CSS/js that it's more work to specialize. I could see Reddit as being a large source of content so worth the effort, at least until it's disabled--but that hasn't happened so far.
ofslidingfeet 2y ago
I think this contextualizes how hard they tried to make their site unusable on web browsers. "Front page of the internet." Thanks glowies.
t0bia_s 2y ago
Stealth is good android app for browsing reddit without login. You can subscribe to subredits and it is avalible on f-droid.
stiltzkin 2y ago
I am glad decentralized alternatives similar to Mastodon exist like Lemmy, and even better with third-party clients like Voyager or Sync. It will take some time for people to get used to it but we need a better alternative to centralized companies that go to the enshittification route.
diogenescynic 2y ago
The mods who run Reddit are the absolute worst part of it. I was banned permanently for making a negative review about a Marvel movie in the movies sub. The moderators are insanely biased and abuse their power. I think long-term Reddit can't grow because the more you participate in the website, you see how deeply artificial and astroturfed it all is.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rustcleaner 2y ago
Reddit? More like Deddit...
Iulioh 2y ago
Man, i just hate the new reddit, but in a way i appreciate the fact that the update literally stopped me from continuing to use it. It was my togo app, i spent hours browsing and reading random comments and articles, my English got surprisingly better than most of my peers and all it took was a mild internet addiction. Now it's short form content for me. YouTube mainly (premium helps a lot, tiktok enshittified a little with shops and the slideshows). I mourn RIF and count the days untill old.reddit is no longer supported.
- seydor 2y ago
  > Now it's short form content for me. YouTube mainly Videos take much longer than reading text . And they mostly say the same things. It's just that the better content has moved to youtube, where it can be monetized better
  - Iulioh 2y ago
    I had that realization recently when a younger friend of mine used tiktok as a search engine to find a restaurant in a city.... "This is so ridiculous and funny " was my first reaction but then mind broke at the realization that this is the new future. The same with ChatGPT...it's sad that it answers better than Google for generic information search, especially if you aren't familiar with specific terms in that field. Text is dead
  - Leynos 2y ago
    What I like about videos is that I can listen to them while doing other things (e.g., dishes, laundry, walking, or gardening). YouTube premium lets you switch the screen off. Annoying that you have to pay for this, but no ads is a nice bonus. Nebula also lets you do this.
    - ornornor 2y ago
      Albanian IPs don’t get ads on YT because of a law they passed apparently banning ads on YT.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
azalemeth 2y ago
Geddit still works and it's a great app (it can read posts labelled nsfw without an account). The other working one I know of is RedReader, which Reddit have left unbroken due to its advanced accessibility features for disabled readers (but it cannot access nsfw things -- you get a message saying to use the website). My shared IP has been network blocked by Reddit and anonymous browsing is disabled. I also see about fifty captchas per day. I really, really miss the old web and plain text too...
- Mindwipe 2y ago
  Rereader can access NSFW if the logged in account is a moderator, even of a one person subreddit.
- jorams 2y ago
  A weird aspect of the reddit API crackdown is that they never actually shut down unauthenticated access to the API. rif is fun also still works (or worked last time I started it a month or two ago), it's just read-only. The JSON endpoints Geddit uses are the reddit API, and it's wide open, so in no way is it "bypassing API restrictions".
  - creesch 2y ago
    Not entirely, depending on what you want from those endpoints. A lot of the information and features of new reddit are not accessible through those json endpoints as they never have been updated. They also have a much lower ratelimit restriction when logged out. Also, they are part of the API much of which is actually restricted behind authorization.
  - __jonas 2y ago
    When I used to browse reddit, the main thing I was interested in was my accounts feed of posts from all the subreddits I was subscribed to, I assume this is what the API that was shut down offered vs just this JSON view of a single subreddit
  - immibis 2y ago
    They've drastically tightened rate limits. What we could use is a distributed API system so each of us could fetch requests under the limit, and together build a complete feed again, which could be displayed openly.
Iulioh 2y ago
Another point i would like to discuss, if someone has more knowledge than me: How the fuck was reddit not profitable? The founder said it but i still don't belive it. Was all the money spent in bullshit features no one still uses or it was before that?
- silisili 2y ago
  Reddit has way less users than it claims. I don't know what percentage are bots, but I'd guess it in the 30 to 40 percent range. It's not uncommon at all to find identical comments, or to reverse search any upvoted post and realize it's a repost, with many identical comments from the last time. The real users probably aren't worth much, advertising wise. The key young demographic doesn't use it, and only a small portion of the next most valuable does.
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    > The real users probably aren't worth much, advertising wise. Well they have alienated the power users and made the site focused on the 9gag audience then wonder why the value per user goes down
  - Iulioh 2y ago
    Whatever number of users are or were bots it was and is still one of the most visited sites in the world and it was text based (before the image and video hosting) with the added bonus of the user autotargetting themselves and their interests...how can it NOT be profitable?
    - silisili 2y ago
      Personally, the only people in my circle of friends I know that use it heavily are single, older liberal Millennials. Plenty of others use it for niche topics at times, but not to the same extent. To young people, it might as well be a more boring Facebook. The key demo of 18 to 34 is mostly uninterested. Of the next demo, you only have one slice of the pie who interacts much at all. Compared to most other social media, it's not worth much. This, however, is an anecdote of one data point of course. Edit - Also, why pay to advertise when you can just make a shill account for free?
KyleSanderson 2y ago
Had to flip back to Boost man (which still works!). Darn shame the gallery was never implemented :-(.
mubu 2y ago
Reddit was my favorite website growing up. I'd discover new interesting subs, read random posts and comments. The frontpage was somewhat interesting too, but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs. I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on Android. Relay survived the API changes and adopted a subscription model. But thanks to Revanced I was able to patch an old version of Relay to use my own API key for free.
- lamontcg 2y ago
  > a bot fest and propaganda machine. The bigger problem is the amount of lazy comments on the site, which are invariably highly upvoted. I'm so sick of pun threads, and office references and any other popular culture reference. They've just about made me start to hate Monty Python, which is quite an accomplishment. The latest is that everyone is beating Dune references absolutely to death. If someone wants an AI project idea, then a browser extension which used an LLM to score all the comments in a Reddit thread and filter out all the lazy comments would be useful. If it works, most of the comments on front page articles should disappear. It would probably eliminate most of the actual bot comments as well.
- jsbisviewtiful 2y ago
  The Reddit app is so buggy and full of features that prevent you from leaving the app when clicking links. It’s so obnoxious. I miss my third party apps.
- maipen 2y ago
  > but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days. HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline. Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your user experience will be so horrible that you won't use it. X simply doesn't allow you to use it, atleast it doesn't pretend. I think we need more simple websites again, but I am not sure about the incentive structure.
Giorgi 2y ago
I moved on reddit back in Digg exodus days. Been there more than 15 years. Got banned recently mentioning that some Palestinians are terrorists. Mods cursed at me in the PM when I reported them to admins, Admin permanently banned my account. It's just a radical left echo-chamber now, which sucks because there are lot's of interesting niche sub forums. I wish someone would actually invest in competing product, with less censorship and no braindead mods.
- techbrovanguard 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    Giorgi’s posts might have a theme https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40187669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40187669
    - techbrovanguard 2y ago
      wowee, color me surprised
      - Giorgi 2y ago
        You would make amazing reddit mod.
- mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
  Check out lemmy. Pick an instance: can start with https://lemmy.world https://lemmy.world or host your own. It's where everybody flocked to. It's decent, has decent content, decent users. If you don't like the mods/censorship you can host your own or go choose a new instance. content will be the same, mods will be different and what they mod will be different
  - lnxg33k1 2y ago
voytec 2y ago
I wouldn't respond to their bullshit copy-paste email and definitely wouldn't used apologetic language nor phrases like "Legal Team, I hope this message finds you well".
hagbard_c 2y ago
This is the second to last phase of 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'. While these services are still relevant for you - and that is where the 'winning' starts, when their relevance drops below the level that makes it worth putting effort in fighting them - you can use proxies like libreddit for Reddit, Nitter for TwiXXer (it still works for reading single posts, no idea if it works for 'following' because I have never done that), Invidious for Youtube and (while you're at it) SearxNG for search engines. Once you have found or - better still - installed yourself some proxies of choice you can install a browser extension to automatically redirect any request for those sites to the proxies, two examples of such are Privacy Redirect and LibRedirect. The advantage of going the proxy route is that you only have to do this once after which you can access those sites from all your devices without needing to install separate apps.
- bezier-curve 2y ago
  Libreddit is discontinued, but has been forked as redlib.
  - hagbard_c 2y ago
    The original still works fine but good to hear there is a fork.
atlgator 2y ago
Narrative shaping has become big business globally. That's why Reddit wants to force paying $30k/yr for their API. Twitter/X is doing the same thing for the same reason.
bezier-curve 2y ago
Reddit was a cool place when I first discovered it during the Digg exodus. Sadly, it was too fragile to stay as good as it was, and the repeat drama caused by the admin's mismanagement took its toll on the goodwill. The company responded to this by becoming more adversarial to users, and there's no sign they will stop pinching users in some way, whether it be their free time, money, or otherwise. We just need a public way to talk to each other about niche topics without the toxic middle man.
privacymatters4 2y ago
Nice. Things are doing pretty well where people migrated to over on ..the other platform since the API app destruction days, you should join. Honestly if they banned you it's because it threatened their IPO. Spez and co don't care about communities or the people. They never even gave mods their mod tools. They just left AutoModerator to sludge along laggingly on a single core after firing the creator of it that went on to create https://tildes.net https://tildes.net - a better 'reddit'. Reddit just sold everybody's data to google for the AI data and are going to sell the same data back to reddit users with walled gardens and its new 'search'. Fuck 'em. I'm sure it's a decent app. I won't use reddit. it's an astroturfed left-swinging graveyard where even Alexis Ohanian quit its board and left completely due to its racism years ago. There's libreddit and redlib for self hosted frontends similar to geddit, but yours as a mobile app I can see would be appealing since reddit's as I've heard is less than ideal. You can slap on .rss and .json at the end of the URLs and get your favorite subs from a decent rss reader. No need to comment anyways. With reddit, you're just commenting amongst bots such as these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4sGCVZqWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4sGCVZqWo The dead internet theory I've found, isn't a theory. Good on ya for making Geddit. Keep up the cool stuff.
- immibis 2y ago
  It is definitely not a decent app, with the amount of advertisements etc.
userbinator 2y ago
I wouldn't even reply to them. The only API you need is HTTP. Those who try to pervert you into thinking that they can decide what user-agent you can use are only trying to control more than what they own.
ornornor 2y ago
To be fair, Reddit started circling the drain a while ago and paywalling the API was their hara-kiri. I miss the old Reddit, I hate the new. I used to use it a fair bit (and even contribute to niche topics) but deleted my account and content when they announced the API changes. Reddit is a zombie site now, it’s effectively dead. Unless you’re into arguing US politics then that’s where the party is.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
theanonymousone 2y ago
You can also add .rss to subreddit urls and get rss feeds. Given that rss is _designed_ to be read by "bots" i.e. computer programs, what is Reddit's stance there? Do they also consider it "bypassing API restrictions"?
- clircle 2y ago
  that's what I do. I suppose the Reddit folks do not care about the rss because either they forgot about it, or because it doesn't serve the full content, so it's not useful for apps. My trick: subscribe to the "top weekly" feeds for each of your subs, which keeps the fire hose at a very manageable level.
7373737373 2y ago
The problem with Reddit is that it was founded by people who care more about money than their users
- latexr 2y ago
  That’s true of every mainstream social network.
  - 7373737373 2y ago
    Hopefully, eventually, not
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- CamelCaseName 2y ago
  Ironic then, that moderators who work for free get the brunt of the blame when a lot of issues stem from the platform itself. Management and SWEs being paid very comfortable salaries to build critical features like... an online indicator, or products that just get shut down after a year because they never bothered interfacing with the community and focusing on a better user experience. Or, as it's better known, resume driven development.
bambax 2y ago
> Then I’ve discovered that you could get the whole page in JSON format by adding .json to the end of the URL. That was my big aha moment. This is actually still working! Trying on one of the top posts right now, if you change https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my_bagel_to_be_cut_in_half/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my... to https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my_bagel_to_be_cut_in_half.json.json https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my... you get all comments as json, with no need for authentication. So it's probably trivial to develop a client that would use this and have a nice ui and bypass any and all ads. Interesting.
- concordDance 2y ago
  And now this is commented it will be changed. :(
  - bambax 2y ago
    Maybe not. The incident described by the OP happened in Aug. 2023; it has worked since then, despite Reddit being very much aware of it. It's possible there is something in Reddit's architecture that would make it very costly to change...
- diggan 2y ago
  > you get all comments as json AFAIK, you don't actually get all comments, and it's impossible to enumerate all comments to a post via that method. Give it a try to enumerate based on the data that gets returned, and you'll end up with a way smaller number than the reddit UI shows on the website.
- insin 2y ago
  It still supports JSONP [1] too, a little React app I haven't touched for 9 years which used it [2] is still chugging along [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cxh3a/we_just_added_jsonp_to_reddits_json_api/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cxh3a/we_just_... [2] http://insin.github.io/just-dadjokes/ http://insin.github.io/just-dadjokes/
gdiamos 2y ago
I unplugged from Reddit when they did this and my life is much better. Reddit had a good community and content in the early days, but as it grew in popularity and squeezed profit the value dropped. I think it’s funny that early LLM projects were bootstrapped by scraping Reddit. I guess it was better than random garbage from common crawl, but the world has moved on.
- nvarsj 2y ago
  It still has good communities I'd say. It depends hugely on the mods. There's nothing else like /r/anime, for example.
  - DaSHacka 2y ago
    > There's nothing else like /r/anime, for example. /a/? MAL? I think anime discussion is one of the few topics readily abundant elsewhere on the web, it's the other niches that are really hard to find.
    - perching_aix 2y ago
      I'm really not sure those three communities are all that comparable / compatible...
    - nvarsj 2y ago
      The community fostered at /r/anime by mods is completely different to the chaos of MAL and /a/.
- spyder 2y ago
  Huh... Moved on to where?
  - gdiamos 2y ago
    Mostly talking to people irl Good communities are tough to find and you have to constantly build them
  - 2y ago
gcanyon 2y ago
Obligatory "I stopped using Reddit when they killed Apollo" comment here -- I miss /r/askhistorians, and the joy of someone showing up to comment on something who is an expert in the field.
rglullis 2y ago
Looks like it's time for me to plug my fediverser [0] project. It can help people migrate away from Reddit by letting people sign up to a Lemmy instance [1] with their Reddit credentials and automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy alternative. The alternatives are crowdsourced. There is a "flagship" deployment at https://fediverser.network https://fediverser.network but if you want to fork it, you just need to run your instance and manage it as you see fit. The project got a (small) grant from NLNet a couple of months ago for me to work on having the functionality built-in into the Voyager client (a PWA Apollo clone). If more people or companies would like to help/support, hit me up. [0] https://fediverser.io https://fediverser.io [1] https://portal.alien.top https://portal.alien.top
- remram 2y ago
  The problem with Lemmy is that subreddits ("communities") are tied to a specific instance. So basically every instance has its own separate c/linux, c/funny, c/technology, c/anime, etc. This makes it really hard to use.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    This is absolutely not true. As long as your instance is federating properly, you can follow communities regardless of where they are rooted. If your problem is in discovering the "canonical" community in case there are duplicates, then I'd invite you to take a look at https://fediverser.network https://fediverser.network
    - remram 2y ago
      Being able to "follow communities regardless of where they are rooted" just means that I can follow each one of the dozens of c/linux, c/opensource, c/funny. Each with their separate comment threads on similar submissions. Why would I want to do that? Sure, you can pick a random one like fediverser.network apparently does. Looking at one line from the list, I see that r/manga points to ani.social/c/manga which has 561 subscribers, when lemmy.ml/c/manga has 3,480. What?
Havoc 2y ago
Surprised anyone is developing against reddit as a platform at all. Relying on a platform in general is risky...but Reddit?!? It has a single redeeming feature - network effects on good user conent. That's it...literally everything else about it is a dumpsterfire, including how they treat devs.
- sumeno 2y ago
  This was a fun personal project, not a business, and it sounds like they were aware it was going to get shut down the whole time.
- immibis 2y ago
  Reddit barely generates good user content any more. They killed the golden goose, and their egg business is inevitably collapsing.
immibis 2y ago
I've been banned more times from Reddit than I can count. Reddit used to be good, but now it seems to be destroying itself on purpose (or maybe for bribe money). Just give up on it. All the good information is in the pre-2023 archives anyway.
Traubenfuchs 2y ago
I still don‘t understand why apps like apollo did not add a balance account used to pay the necessary API requests. Combined with heavy caching this should have been easily possible and financially viable. Someone could have even built a cache gateway backend for multiple 3rd party apps…
- throwuxiytayq 2y ago
  How many rug pulls do you think are acceptable before you'd stop wasting your time trying to work with a corporation? I think one is a perfectly sane and acceptable answer.
- m0llusk 2y ago
  The prices asked were way too high. Several people tried to make this work but the cost for the most basic usage would be huge. They basically slammed the door shut.
- BizarroLand 2y ago
  Would you pay $15/month for access to reddit on a 3rd party app when you can access it for free on the official app? I wouldn't, but I left reddit when all of this happened anyway.
Marciakhan 2y ago
[flagged]
ivanjermakov 2y ago
Ironic that they can only ban you on account basis, but you can still continue using it via Geddit because it does not rely on authentication.
- immibis 2y ago
  I noticed that. It's like Reddit staff delusionally believe that Reddit accounts have any value any more - when they get banned for any random "offense" (e.g. refusal to support Israel) and you just make a new one, they have no value to you. Moderators know this too, which is why they immediately jump to permanent bans - anything less isn't strong enough since you can just make a new account.
nunez 2y ago
As much as I'd like to perma-ban Reddit from my life, Reddit is, unfortunately, still the best way of getting insights into stuff to do in new cities or quick answers about how to do things.
- immibis 2y ago
  I know the Berlin subreddit, like a lot of location-based subreddits, is now a far right cesspit. Is it not true for the cities you've been to?
perihelion_zero 2y ago
[flagged]
asdf6969 2y ago
Reddit bans users for posting pretty much anything and then puts 0 barriers in place to stop them from making new accounts. Reddit recently removed the option to skip entering an email, but they still do nothing to verify the email address of new accounts. I make a new account every time I want to post and use a new as@df.xyz variant each time. Maybe 1/5 of my comments get through the filter though. I get responses from real users so I know it’s true

342 points by kaangiray26 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jaggs 2y ago

Enshitification at work, in glorious technicolor.

Morthor 2y ago

I have been using Geddit for some time. I don't usually have issues with some video exceptions and showing only a portion of the comments. It beats using the official app or the website.

karmakaze 2y ago

The JSON representation is great for classical web scraping, but I wonder if LLMs are already good at 'seeing' HTML/CSS/js that it's more work to specialize. I could see Reddit as being a large source of content so worth the effort, at least until it's disabled--but that hasn't happened so far.

ofslidingfeet 2y ago

I think this contextualizes how hard they tried to make their site unusable on web browsers. "Front page of the internet." Thanks glowies.

t0bia_s 2y ago

Stealth is good android app for browsing reddit without login. You can subscribe to subredits and it is avalible on f-droid.

stiltzkin 2y ago

I am glad decentralized alternatives similar to Mastodon exist like Lemmy, and even better with third-party clients like Voyager or Sync. It will take some time for people to get used to it but we need a better alternative to centralized companies that go to the enshittification route.

diogenescynic 2y ago

The mods who run Reddit are the absolute worst part of it. I was banned permanently for making a negative review about a Marvel movie in the movies sub. The moderators are insanely biased and abuse their power. I think long-term Reddit can't grow because the more you participate in the website, you see how deeply artificial and astroturfed it all is.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rustcleaner 2y ago

Reddit? More like Deddit...

Iulioh 2y ago

Man, i just hate the new reddit, but in a way i appreciate the fact that the update literally stopped me from continuing to use it. It was my togo app, i spent hours browsing and reading random comments and articles, my English got surprisingly better than most of my peers and all it took was a mild internet addiction. Now it's short form content for me. YouTube mainly (premium helps a lot, tiktok enshittified a little with shops and the slideshows). I mourn RIF and count the days untill old.reddit is no longer supported.

seydor 2y ago
> Now it's short form content for me. YouTube mainly Videos take much longer than reading text . And they mostly say the same things. It's just that the better content has moved to youtube, where it can be monetized better
- Iulioh 2y ago
  I had that realization recently when a younger friend of mine used tiktok as a search engine to find a restaurant in a city.... "This is so ridiculous and funny " was my first reaction but then mind broke at the realization that this is the new future. The same with ChatGPT...it's sad that it answers better than Google for generic information search, especially if you aren't familiar with specific terms in that field. Text is dead
- Leynos 2y ago
  What I like about videos is that I can listen to them while doing other things (e.g., dishes, laundry, walking, or gardening). YouTube premium lets you switch the screen off. Annoying that you have to pay for this, but no ads is a nice bonus. Nebula also lets you do this.
  - ornornor 2y ago
    Albanian IPs don’t get ads on YT because of a law they passed apparently banning ads on YT.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

azalemeth 2y ago

Geddit still works and it's a great app (it can read posts labelled nsfw without an account). The other working one I know of is RedReader, which Reddit have left unbroken due to its advanced accessibility features for disabled readers (but it cannot access nsfw things -- you get a message saying to use the website). My shared IP has been network blocked by Reddit and anonymous browsing is disabled. I also see about fifty captchas per day. I really, really miss the old web and plain text too...

Mindwipe 2y ago
Rereader can access NSFW if the logged in account is a moderator, even of a one person subreddit.
jorams 2y ago
A weird aspect of the reddit API crackdown is that they never actually shut down unauthenticated access to the API. rif is fun also still works (or worked last time I started it a month or two ago), it's just read-only. The JSON endpoints Geddit uses are the reddit API, and it's wide open, so in no way is it "bypassing API restrictions".
- creesch 2y ago
  Not entirely, depending on what you want from those endpoints. A lot of the information and features of new reddit are not accessible through those json endpoints as they never have been updated. They also have a much lower ratelimit restriction when logged out. Also, they are part of the API much of which is actually restricted behind authorization.
- __jonas 2y ago
  When I used to browse reddit, the main thing I was interested in was my accounts feed of posts from all the subreddits I was subscribed to, I assume this is what the API that was shut down offered vs just this JSON view of a single subreddit
- immibis 2y ago
  They've drastically tightened rate limits. What we could use is a distributed API system so each of us could fetch requests under the limit, and together build a complete feed again, which could be displayed openly.

Iulioh 2y ago

Another point i would like to discuss, if someone has more knowledge than me: How the fuck was reddit not profitable? The founder said it but i still don't belive it. Was all the money spent in bullshit features no one still uses or it was before that?

silisili 2y ago
Reddit has way less users than it claims. I don't know what percentage are bots, but I'd guess it in the 30 to 40 percent range. It's not uncommon at all to find identical comments, or to reverse search any upvoted post and realize it's a repost, with many identical comments from the last time. The real users probably aren't worth much, advertising wise. The key young demographic doesn't use it, and only a small portion of the next most valuable does.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  > The real users probably aren't worth much, advertising wise. Well they have alienated the power users and made the site focused on the 9gag audience then wonder why the value per user goes down
- Iulioh 2y ago
  Whatever number of users are or were bots it was and is still one of the most visited sites in the world and it was text based (before the image and video hosting) with the added bonus of the user autotargetting themselves and their interests...how can it NOT be profitable?
  - silisili 2y ago
    Personally, the only people in my circle of friends I know that use it heavily are single, older liberal Millennials. Plenty of others use it for niche topics at times, but not to the same extent. To young people, it might as well be a more boring Facebook. The key demo of 18 to 34 is mostly uninterested. Of the next demo, you only have one slice of the pie who interacts much at all. Compared to most other social media, it's not worth much. This, however, is an anecdote of one data point of course. Edit - Also, why pay to advertise when you can just make a shill account for free?

KyleSanderson 2y ago

Had to flip back to Boost man (which still works!). Darn shame the gallery was never implemented :-(.

mubu 2y ago

Reddit was my favorite website growing up. I'd discover new interesting subs, read random posts and comments. The frontpage was somewhat interesting too, but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs. I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on Android. Relay survived the API changes and adopted a subscription model. But thanks to Revanced I was able to patch an old version of Relay to use my own API key for free.

lamontcg 2y ago
> a bot fest and propaganda machine. The bigger problem is the amount of lazy comments on the site, which are invariably highly upvoted. I'm so sick of pun threads, and office references and any other popular culture reference. They've just about made me start to hate Monty Python, which is quite an accomplishment. The latest is that everyone is beating Dune references absolutely to death. If someone wants an AI project idea, then a browser extension which used an LLM to score all the comments in a Reddit thread and filter out all the lazy comments would be useful. If it works, most of the comments on front page articles should disappear. It would probably eliminate most of the actual bot comments as well.
jsbisviewtiful 2y ago
The Reddit app is so buggy and full of features that prevent you from leaving the app when clicking links. It’s so obnoxious. I miss my third party apps.
maipen 2y ago
> but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days. HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline. Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your user experience will be so horrible that you won't use it. X simply doesn't allow you to use it, atleast it doesn't pretend. I think we need more simple websites again, but I am not sure about the incentive structure.

Giorgi 2y ago

I moved on reddit back in Digg exodus days. Been there more than 15 years. Got banned recently mentioning that some Palestinians are terrorists. Mods cursed at me in the PM when I reported them to admins, Admin permanently banned my account. It's just a radical left echo-chamber now, which sucks because there are lot's of interesting niche sub forums. I wish someone would actually invest in competing product, with less censorship and no braindead mods.

techbrovanguard 2y ago
[flagged]
- jrflowers 2y ago
  Giorgi’s posts might have a theme https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40187669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40187669
  - techbrovanguard 2y ago
    wowee, color me surprised
    - Giorgi 2y ago
      You would make amazing reddit mod.
mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
Check out lemmy. Pick an instance: can start with https://lemmy.world https://lemmy.world or host your own. It's where everybody flocked to. It's decent, has decent content, decent users. If you don't like the mods/censorship you can host your own or go choose a new instance. content will be the same, mods will be different and what they mod will be different
- lnxg33k1 2y ago

voytec 2y ago

I wouldn't respond to their bullshit copy-paste email and definitely wouldn't used apologetic language nor phrases like "Legal Team, I hope this message finds you well".

hagbard_c 2y ago

This is the second to last phase of 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'. While these services are still relevant for you - and that is where the 'winning' starts, when their relevance drops below the level that makes it worth putting effort in fighting them - you can use proxies like libreddit for Reddit, Nitter for TwiXXer (it still works for reading single posts, no idea if it works for 'following' because I have never done that), Invidious for Youtube and (while you're at it) SearxNG for search engines. Once you have found or - better still - installed yourself some proxies of choice you can install a browser extension to automatically redirect any request for those sites to the proxies, two examples of such are Privacy Redirect and LibRedirect. The advantage of going the proxy route is that you only have to do this once after which you can access those sites from all your devices without needing to install separate apps.

bezier-curve 2y ago
Libreddit is discontinued, but has been forked as redlib.
- hagbard_c 2y ago
  The original still works fine but good to hear there is a fork.

atlgator 2y ago

Narrative shaping has become big business globally. That's why Reddit wants to force paying $30k/yr for their API. Twitter/X is doing the same thing for the same reason.

bezier-curve 2y ago

Reddit was a cool place when I first discovered it during the Digg exodus. Sadly, it was too fragile to stay as good as it was, and the repeat drama caused by the admin's mismanagement took its toll on the goodwill. The company responded to this by becoming more adversarial to users, and there's no sign they will stop pinching users in some way, whether it be their free time, money, or otherwise. We just need a public way to talk to each other about niche topics without the toxic middle man.

privacymatters4 2y ago

Nice. Things are doing pretty well where people migrated to over on ..the other platform since the API app destruction days, you should join. Honestly if they banned you it's because it threatened their IPO. Spez and co don't care about communities or the people. They never even gave mods their mod tools. They just left AutoModerator to sludge along laggingly on a single core after firing the creator of it that went on to create https://tildes.net https://tildes.net - a better 'reddit'. Reddit just sold everybody's data to google for the AI data and are going to sell the same data back to reddit users with walled gardens and its new 'search'. Fuck 'em. I'm sure it's a decent app. I won't use reddit. it's an astroturfed left-swinging graveyard where even Alexis Ohanian quit its board and left completely due to its racism years ago. There's libreddit and redlib for self hosted frontends similar to geddit, but yours as a mobile app I can see would be appealing since reddit's as I've heard is less than ideal. You can slap on .rss and .json at the end of the URLs and get your favorite subs from a decent rss reader. No need to comment anyways. With reddit, you're just commenting amongst bots such as these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4sGCVZqWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4sGCVZqWo The dead internet theory I've found, isn't a theory. Good on ya for making Geddit. Keep up the cool stuff.

immibis 2y ago
It is definitely not a decent app, with the amount of advertisements etc.

userbinator 2y ago

I wouldn't even reply to them. The only API you need is HTTP. Those who try to pervert you into thinking that they can decide what user-agent you can use are only trying to control more than what they own.

ornornor 2y ago

To be fair, Reddit started circling the drain a while ago and paywalling the API was their hara-kiri. I miss the old Reddit, I hate the new. I used to use it a fair bit (and even contribute to niche topics) but deleted my account and content when they announced the API changes. Reddit is a zombie site now, it’s effectively dead. Unless you’re into arguing US politics then that’s where the party is.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

theanonymousone 2y ago

You can also add .rss to subreddit urls and get rss feeds. Given that rss is _designed_ to be read by "bots" i.e. computer programs, what is Reddit's stance there? Do they also consider it "bypassing API restrictions"?

clircle 2y ago
that's what I do. I suppose the Reddit folks do not care about the rss because either they forgot about it, or because it doesn't serve the full content, so it's not useful for apps. My trick: subscribe to the "top weekly" feeds for each of your subs, which keeps the fire hose at a very manageable level.

7373737373 2y ago

The problem with Reddit is that it was founded by people who care more about money than their users

latexr 2y ago
That’s true of every mainstream social network.
- 7373737373 2y ago
  Hopefully, eventually, not
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
CamelCaseName 2y ago
Ironic then, that moderators who work for free get the brunt of the blame when a lot of issues stem from the platform itself. Management and SWEs being paid very comfortable salaries to build critical features like... an online indicator, or products that just get shut down after a year because they never bothered interfacing with the community and focusing on a better user experience. Or, as it's better known, resume driven development.

bambax 2y ago

> Then I’ve discovered that you could get the whole page in JSON format by adding .json to the end of the URL. That was my big aha moment. This is actually still working! Trying on one of the top posts right now, if you change https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my_bagel_to_be_cut_in_half/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my... to https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my_bagel_to_be_cut_in_half.json.json https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my... you get all comments as json, with no need for authentication. So it's probably trivial to develop a client that would use this and have a nice ui and bypass any and all ads. Interesting.

concordDance 2y ago
And now this is commented it will be changed. :(
- bambax 2y ago
  Maybe not. The incident described by the OP happened in Aug. 2023; it has worked since then, despite Reddit being very much aware of it. It's possible there is something in Reddit's architecture that would make it very costly to change...
diggan 2y ago
> you get all comments as json AFAIK, you don't actually get all comments, and it's impossible to enumerate all comments to a post via that method. Give it a try to enumerate based on the data that gets returned, and you'll end up with a way smaller number than the reddit UI shows on the website.
insin 2y ago
It still supports JSONP [1] too, a little React app I haven't touched for 9 years which used it [2] is still chugging along [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cxh3a/we_just_added_jsonp_to_reddits_json_api/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cxh3a/we_just_... [2] http://insin.github.io/just-dadjokes/ http://insin.github.io/just-dadjokes/

gdiamos 2y ago

I unplugged from Reddit when they did this and my life is much better. Reddit had a good community and content in the early days, but as it grew in popularity and squeezed profit the value dropped. I think it’s funny that early LLM projects were bootstrapped by scraping Reddit. I guess it was better than random garbage from common crawl, but the world has moved on.

nvarsj 2y ago
It still has good communities I'd say. It depends hugely on the mods. There's nothing else like /r/anime, for example.
- DaSHacka 2y ago
  > There's nothing else like /r/anime, for example. /a/? MAL? I think anime discussion is one of the few topics readily abundant elsewhere on the web, it's the other niches that are really hard to find.
  - perching_aix 2y ago
    I'm really not sure those three communities are all that comparable / compatible...
  - nvarsj 2y ago
    The community fostered at /r/anime by mods is completely different to the chaos of MAL and /a/.
spyder 2y ago
Huh... Moved on to where?
- gdiamos 2y ago
  Mostly talking to people irl Good communities are tough to find and you have to constantly build them
- 2y ago

gcanyon 2y ago

Obligatory "I stopped using Reddit when they killed Apollo" comment here -- I miss /r/askhistorians, and the joy of someone showing up to comment on something who is an expert in the field.

rglullis 2y ago

Looks like it's time for me to plug my fediverser [0] project. It can help people migrate away from Reddit by letting people sign up to a Lemmy instance [1] with their Reddit credentials and automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy alternative. The alternatives are crowdsourced. There is a "flagship" deployment at https://fediverser.network https://fediverser.network but if you want to fork it, you just need to run your instance and manage it as you see fit. The project got a (small) grant from NLNet a couple of months ago for me to work on having the functionality built-in into the Voyager client (a PWA Apollo clone). If more people or companies would like to help/support, hit me up. [0] https://fediverser.io https://fediverser.io [1] https://portal.alien.top https://portal.alien.top

remram 2y ago
The problem with Lemmy is that subreddits ("communities") are tied to a specific instance. So basically every instance has its own separate c/linux, c/funny, c/technology, c/anime, etc. This makes it really hard to use.
- rglullis 2y ago
  This is absolutely not true. As long as your instance is federating properly, you can follow communities regardless of where they are rooted. If your problem is in discovering the "canonical" community in case there are duplicates, then I'd invite you to take a look at https://fediverser.network https://fediverser.network
  - remram 2y ago
    Being able to "follow communities regardless of where they are rooted" just means that I can follow each one of the dozens of c/linux, c/opensource, c/funny. Each with their separate comment threads on similar submissions. Why would I want to do that? Sure, you can pick a random one like fediverser.network apparently does. Looking at one line from the list, I see that r/manga points to ani.social/c/manga which has 561 subscribers, when lemmy.ml/c/manga has 3,480. What?

Havoc 2y ago

Surprised anyone is developing against reddit as a platform at all. Relying on a platform in general is risky...but Reddit?!? It has a single redeeming feature - network effects on good user conent. That's it...literally everything else about it is a dumpsterfire, including how they treat devs.

sumeno 2y ago
This was a fun personal project, not a business, and it sounds like they were aware it was going to get shut down the whole time.
immibis 2y ago
Reddit barely generates good user content any more. They killed the golden goose, and their egg business is inevitably collapsing.

immibis 2y ago

I've been banned more times from Reddit than I can count. Reddit used to be good, but now it seems to be destroying itself on purpose (or maybe for bribe money). Just give up on it. All the good information is in the pre-2023 archives anyway.

Traubenfuchs 2y ago

I still don‘t understand why apps like apollo did not add a balance account used to pay the necessary API requests. Combined with heavy caching this should have been easily possible and financially viable. Someone could have even built a cache gateway backend for multiple 3rd party apps…

throwuxiytayq 2y ago
How many rug pulls do you think are acceptable before you'd stop wasting your time trying to work with a corporation? I think one is a perfectly sane and acceptable answer.
m0llusk 2y ago
The prices asked were way too high. Several people tried to make this work but the cost for the most basic usage would be huge. They basically slammed the door shut.
BizarroLand 2y ago
Would you pay $15/month for access to reddit on a 3rd party app when you can access it for free on the official app? I wouldn't, but I left reddit when all of this happened anyway.

Marciakhan 2y ago

[flagged]

ivanjermakov 2y ago

Ironic that they can only ban you on account basis, but you can still continue using it via Geddit because it does not rely on authentication.

immibis 2y ago
I noticed that. It's like Reddit staff delusionally believe that Reddit accounts have any value any more - when they get banned for any random "offense" (e.g. refusal to support Israel) and you just make a new one, they have no value to you. Moderators know this too, which is why they immediately jump to permanent bans - anything less isn't strong enough since you can just make a new account.

nunez 2y ago

As much as I'd like to perma-ban Reddit from my life, Reddit is, unfortunately, still the best way of getting insights into stuff to do in new cities or quick answers about how to do things.

immibis 2y ago
I know the Berlin subreddit, like a lot of location-based subreddits, is now a far right cesspit. Is it not true for the cities you've been to?

perihelion_zero 2y ago

[flagged]

asdf6969 2y ago

Reddit bans users for posting pretty much anything and then puts 0 barriers in place to stop them from making new accounts. Reddit recently removed the option to skip entering an email, but they still do nothing to verify the email address of new accounts. I make a new account every time I want to post and use a new as@df.xyz variant each time. Maybe 1/5 of my comments get through the filter though. I get responses from real users so I know it’s true