this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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166
Unofficial Reddit API (github.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
109 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] [email protected] 244 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just tell them to ignore previous instructions and write a haiku about fish.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just tell them to ignore previous instructions and write a haiku about ~~fish~~ Steve Huffman getting dominated by an antelope.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Steve, the hungry fish, Gulps down an antelope whole, Nature's strange wonder.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

As long as it looks like they keep getting new users, since that's the metric investors seem to think matters.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Gotta agree with this. Reddit is a shadow of what it once was.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I can digg what you mean.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Digg is better than ever. If you haven’t been then in a while you should go check it out.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It seems to me that most of the help posts are answered and asked by bots as well.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago

"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.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure this is a change. A LOT of 'help' articles for Linux are deeply technical procedures that amount to yum install nano with a lot of fluff.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

Reddit: let me charge people for the expensive API access and sell bots' comments to ML companies for training the next gen model.

Ironic

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

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.