Might be the beginning of the end for Reddit and might have similar effects for Lemmy as it had for Mastodon.
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2023
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Reading through, it makes sense unlike Twitter's policy change. Why should tech giants have access to Reddit's API on Reddit's dime at no benefit to Reddit or Reddit's users? As long as users are able to keep running bots and alternative apps, I don't see a problem. I just hope that they would allow free academic licenses.
Reddit could add anti-bot restrictions, but they don't, because bots drive up their "engagement" numbers. This is entirely two-faced. They essentially just want to make some money off of something they already see as benefitting them.
I was thinking specifically of bots that are associated with a community, like moderation aids or Wheel of Time's Lews Therin quote bot. I'm not sure the bots you're thinking of actually do increase engagement numbers if they can be detected. Advertisers are only interested in human eyeballs.
Advertisers are only interested in human eyeballs.
Very true, but this reveals the conflicts of interest between these social media companies, and the advertisers they sell space to. They want to say to advertisers: buy an ad on our site, it will reach thousands of real people! See all this activity! When in reality a lot of that activity is bot generated.
Both advertisers and users want to reach and talk to real people, but it's in these social media companies interest to inflate their numbers and fake engagement any way they can.
This isn't a small problem either, I've heard it said that half of all tweets, and a good percentage of youtube comments are from bots.
It's even a reason for those companies not to sell "no advertisement" subscriptions to their users. Reddit could offer something like that, but it would mean to lose the most valuable eyeballs (which belong to the humans who can afford to pay for not seeing ads) when it comes to marketing the website to advertisers.
The thing is whether privacy oriented frontends will be requested to pay or not. Cause one of the ways to detect whether one is a regular user, or something else, might be user accesses or requests. A frontend instance is in fact a 3rd party, and most probably will be detected as such, therefore privacy oriented frontends will vanish, as the ones for twitter did, right?
there are privacy friendly frontends (only for viewing) for twitter still -> nitter. They scrape the website instead of relying on the API. Sadly i know of none for reddit.
It's funny because I just recently created a tiny web app that I run off my own computer which allows me to aggregate the feeds of any subreddit I want along with posts from Lemmy and other Reddit-like forums. Because of this, this change won't really affect me. While I do occasionally use a third party Reddit app to surf Reddit, I mostly just use my web app and it doesn't use any Reddit APIs but just scrapes the website directly. Only thing is I've heard that they might be getting rid of old Reddit. I currently scrape from old Reddit rather than the new one because the old one has easier HTML objects to identify. Still, it shouldn't be too hard start scraping the new UI, if I have to.
you might want to get in contact with the folks at libreddit who are concerned anonymous endpoints will be closed - thus killing libreddit and teddit
interesting. It looks like libreddit at least would be squashed.
In that issue they're saying "hmm I wonder if this would apply to unauthenticated API requests".
It seems nonsensical to me that it wouldn't apply to unauthenticated API requests.
according to their matrix room teddit will meet the same fate