Megathread for Reddit News & App Shutdowns

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Technology@beehaw.org – 82 points –

if you want to post links or discuss Reddit over the next while, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy, thanks! (a more formal body may be forthcoming, but that'll come in the morning if so)

101

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

Relay appears to be attempting to reduce API calls and stay open.

Edit: I just found this patch to use our own API key if Relay gets taken down.

Why bother honestly

There are three possibilities.

  1. The developer thinks maybe they can make this work. Maybe there's a combination of a lower limit of API calls and an upper limit of what people are willing to pay for their app that will let them keep going.
  2. The developer's lawyer recommended that to sue reddit for destroying their livelihood they would need to demonstrate that they had tries with the new system and it wasn't feasible in order to make their case stronger
  3. The developer wants to take advantage of the third party landscape being just them now

Personally I think the first one is the most likely. It seems naive and bound for failure. But its also the least conspiracy theory and doesn't assume malice

The developer’s lawyer recommended that to sue reddit for destroying their livelihood they would need to demonstrate that they had tries with the new system and it wasn’t feasible in order to make their case stronger

Not sure how you get a cause of action for someone else's business decisions messing with your business, as a general rule. How would that work? I'm legitimately curious.

I agree, I’m OK to let that website die. We really are ready for decentralization and we just need to deal with the growing pains. But it will happen eventually.

Doesn't matter, paid will due shortly after people realize there's no NSFW content. Not just porn, everything flagged NSFW won't show up at all. Everything from AMA to TV show discussions will be impacted.

I'm pretty sure reddit said explicitly that everything marked NSFW will not be filtered out.

They also said they won't force subs to reopen

Yeah, that's fair. And they also said earlier this year that they won't change anything about the API in at least a few years.

Spez has already said that doing this {when talking about Apollo} is “not allowed”, so likely this method will get blocked or your account will get banned. You’re here now so IMO it doesn’t matter

Why wouldn’t it be allowed? They don’t want to deal with billing a bunch of people?

Because the goal was to ban third party apps and they don't want people trying to dodge it. u/spez seems to be personally offended by their existence and wants them gone.

There's also a patch for Sync for reddit, apparently you can use your own API key and app name. I'll give it a look once sync stops working tomorrow.

Now we just need someone to find the api key used by the official app …

Well the official app uses a new internal (graphql iirc) API, so that would be nice but it wouldn't really work as easily as that.