Archive your Reddit data before it's too late
xavd.id
xavd.id
I think that sites really shouldn't have guidance on this sort of thing, because nobody would follow it anyway. If you only have upvotes and downvotes, people are just going to upvote stuff they like and downvote stuff they don't like, and any individual will have different rules about what "like" or "doesn't like" means to them.
Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful", "Funny", "Off topic", etc.
Even that got abused, as comments people didn't like would be modded off-topic or troll.
Then again if given a choice between "I disagree" and "you're a moron for saying that", people would just pick second if it is a disagreement about something they feel strongly about
When my comments get downvoted, sometimes I can figure out why. It's frivolous, off-topic, just plain wrong, etc.
But quite often, I have no idea whatsoever, and I'm always curious about what the issue was. I think potentially valuable information and personal learning is lost.
If the urgency bus drive too fast, will you downvote ?
If he playing music too loud under the rain, will you downvote ?
...
It’s a humorous commentary on how fickle HN karma can be
In practice : Pure jellyfish-brain embrace/reject reaction. A gaggle of flatworms with keyboards
They are points!
At least in theory. In practice it's utterly useless because it's based on incorrect (or possibly outdated) assumptions about the nature and goals of HN's userbase (which I've decided to call the "good hacker" fallacy.)
except HN of course
Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.
What's the point to get your "2c" heard in Reddit? Redditors are the minorities.
Arguably, Hacker News is a lot of an echo chamber too.
What’s the point to get your “2c” heard on Hacker News? Hacker News users are even more of a minority than Redditors.
Archiving helps me know more about myself. Primarily, I use forums as a way to archive my viewpoints and how I have reasoned them. It's spectacularly rewarding when discussions devolve into an argument and I know specifically how and why I came to a certain conclusion, because I can reference thoughts that I reasoned before. Rarely, I find my views challenged in a constructive way that informs and changes the mind of one party or the other...if only on tangential topics. That's always nice.
It's also handy to listen to the echo chamber to get ahold of the zeitgeist of that particular group, which is useful when interacting with other people in real life that espouse particular aligned views. Now you can have an interesting conversation, you might not have had otherwise, which is a practical benefit.
I don't have any affection for Reddit itself, but there are a couple of subreddits where I guess the small but critical mass of folks for a hobby somehow ended up there, and I hope they land somewhere else as Reddit commits suicide.
Imo: there's too much stupidity in the popular subreddits, sharing a space with that is too much to ask
It literally started as a result of the founders taking money from YC and pivoting away from their original idea and to Reddit at Paul Graham's request.
Hear the story here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-huffman-co-found...
Everywhere can be an echo chamber, even here.
Reddit is nice for the small subs/communities where you can talk about something niche so you don't have to go register in some archaic phpbb forum that might go away.
The bigger the sub, the more likely it will echo. Much like the bigger the story here the same effect will happen. I think that's just humanity. It is very easy to identify and move on/not follow those subs.
And that is not a snide, snarky question - it is a sincere inquiry. Why is interacting in subreddits with karma gates important to your life?
If you’re trying to have a technical discussion, you’d be locked out.
The more karma/age/posts they require, the more likely the place is a cesspool of some sort.
The whole idea is utterly stupid because it is far too easy to get on popular low effort subreddit and get some points for posting absolute garbage, then go and bother people in niche subreddit.
If you have to wait 2-3 days to comment the moment as they say has passed and very few would read it.
The risk is very low but the consequence is high if you get targeted online in various ways (someone has a grudge and doxes you, or you are the target of a social media pile-on)
Things haven't changed that much.
In general though I just think the fear is way overblown. The damage to society of everyone selling Fear Uncertainty and Doubt is real & heavy, is a burdensome tone. The damage of so many people jumping into the black hole is real. And most of us are not going to be targeted people, and our transgressions even at their worst online are really nowhere near a real danger to us.
But having an online existence, being part of the written/online universe is a risk. Yes. Opting out & becoming nothing is a very easy available way to get rid of risk.
I still think it's a farce of high degree how much fear are swallowing. I think it's colossally disproportionate to the risk. We also don't get to societally wrestle with questions of grace & mistakes & maturation if we insist on the supreme personal security of having said nothing.
Oh, sure, I agree. I just think they aren't as great as some people think.
> But having an online existence, being part of the written/online universe is a risk.
This is true, and is why I've never used my actual, real-world identity in any online fora. Instead, I have a handful of alternate (but persistent) "personalities".
It's the only way I am OK with saying what I really think about anything. If I were readily identifiable, I wouldn't participate in any public online discussions. The risk is just too great.
and archives on different sites arent used to link to a current digital trail
Like if you were running for political office, nobody is going to start with the archive to try to match to an unknown current user that they further want to link to the candidate. They’ll start with the candidate and try to link to a current username and then maybe extend that to archives of related usernames.
But if you really nuke and start over you’re fine, people just aren’t that motivated. Your own witness protection program.
I rotate all my accounts every year or so, same with this one.
For Reddit specifically, if I needed to, I would look up old comments in Pushshift if I could remember enough information to locate them - keywords, approximate date, subreddit, username. It's somewhat annoying that this service no longer exists. Though there are dumps, and backups of those dumps, so hopefully someone will release a similar search tool for these, eventually. Perhaps also including the data scraped by Archive Team. Maybe I'll have a crack at it myself as a side project.
[0]: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
It runs client-side in the browser and has filter & export functionality if you want to retain anything.
If you can build an app (or clone what someone else has built) that contains your key, you can proceed. This is fairly high friction for mobile apps, like building/patching an .apk and side loading it.
Last night I wiped my old and well used account with Android App "Redact": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.redact.app
If you do, that's a fairly nasty and thoughtless thing to do and I would strongly encourage you to revise your approach to commenting and/or privacy.
Reddit had the privilege of hosting user comments, and they squandered the trust they built. Social networks live and die by the good will of their users, creators/users taking back what they made is the consequence of acting in a way that users don't like. Deleting all my comments out of every conversation I had on reddit and destroying all the value is the point, I don't want Reddit to have that value.
So, "if I can't have it, no one can"? That's something parents typically try to teach toddlers _not_ to do.
The content people have created for free on reddit is literally the only form of leverage they have aside from actually going to the site.
Sure some lost soul could use that tidbit of info, but they'll only have Reddit to blame.
> Sure some lost soul could use that tidbit of info, but they'll only have Reddit to blame.
No, reddit isn't making anyone delete all their content. The person deleting all their content is to blame. They could just walk away, but instead, they're purposefully making reddit worse for everyone.
Yes, specifically because of Reddit's actions. Specifically because Reddit made decisions that made them no longer want to contribute to the site's success and (incidentally) also because Reddit offers no way at all for people to opt-out of furthering the company's commercial interests and no way at all for people to refuse to reinforce the network effect keeping the site afloat without also damaging the community.
You seem to be making a good case for just living with bad corporate decisions for somehow that being a greater, or worthy good.
That is legit, but I see a large percentage of users do not agree.
They get to do that.
If someone becomes suspicious that they know an account holder, watching recent posts can lead to doxing. Deleting can be a safety mechanism.
I like how HN allows deletes for some time. At multiple occasions I have deleted some comment that was flame or stupid after 10s and saved others the trouble of reading it.
Just like when you contribute a brick to build a house only to yank it out later on because "it's yours". Yeah, you can do it, but it's a selfish move disrespectful of other contributors.
> OP: Posts a question
> Anon: [deleted by shreddit/PowerDeleteSuite/whatever]
> OP: Thanks, that solved my issue!
It's a modern version of https://xkcd.com/979/ !
It’s becoming increasingly frustrating to read old Reddit threads about technical issues where someone went back and deleted all of their posts. Trying to guess what was discussed by reading every other comment is a frustrating experience.
So yes, it's acknowledging that you can't take back the scraped data, but you can at least poison the well for others who would use it.
And yes, it would harm current users of reddit. That's kind of the point, because I don't think reddit makes any significant changes unless they get significant pushback from the thing they're trying to sell -- #s of users.
Yeah, that's the point. Users are clawing back the value they gave to Reddit because they are angry with the decisions the company has made.
Particularly in the context of the current API decisions, the thing Reddit is doing is closing off access to that data. A user saying, "fine, but if you're not going to allow open access then I'll stop treating my content like it's open access and I'll remove it" is I think a pretty reasonable response (both for the user and for society). The alternative is Reddit gets to lock down that data, but because it hasn't gone all the way yet and completely locked it down, everyone is still obligated to let them keep that data? It just doesn't make sense.
It was brought up above, but Reddit archives exist. So it's not necessarily like the content is entirely lost. But it's less convenient to access, and that's purposeful, because it's bad for society if we allow commercial gatekeepers in front of communities to guilt users into making it easier for them to lock down and commoditize that data. It can be a difficult line to draw, but there are situations where it's worth just ripping off the band aide and saying, "if a site is not being a good steward of its community, then the site doesn't get to keep using that community's stuff as a way to attract users to the site."
No, I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe that being a doormat is less of a net-negative for the world than doing the only thing of actual consequence.
Deleting my comment history is activism against a corporations which has decided to flex its muscle in a way I don't like.
Sure wish there was a better way to advance things.
I would prefer short-lived anon accounts but have been too lazy to write a script to transfer those myself.
It's a lot easier than deleting all your comments before deleting the account, and as others have said, it preserves the conversation for future people.
I'd much rather learn what a bunch of deleted accounts thought about in a thread from 10 years ago than getting only a partial conversation.
Not just mass archival / reads, but also database writes from Shreddit usage, etc.
Be careful. Shreddit does not get rid of all reddit comments, only the ones on your profile. Reddit stores a list of the last 1000 comments and posts you've made to your profile and that list is what Shreddit and 99% of reddit 'deletion' tools use. To truly remove all your comments and posts from reddit, look into reddit-shreddit [0]. Despite the similar name, it is completely different and leverages all your posts and comments from a reddit data request to delete all of your reddit posts and comments. It is infact the only method I have found, except for perhaps a GDPR deletion request, that is truly a complete deletion.
However, this only covers the deletion from reddit itself. There have been periodic reddit archivals ever since it was created. Up to 2015 they were done yearly, ever since they have been done monthly. Since they have always been up for download, all of your reddit data will still be out there, however you can remove your data from the main source of these archives called pushshift. I haven't done it personally but I've seen it said on reddit, you can email the dev of pushshift or dm him on reddit and he will remove your information from his archive.
For example I just recently went searching for a solution to a problem, and found 3 reddit posts with what must've been solutions because there were "awesome, works great!" responses, but I'll never know what those solutions were because the user had deleted their posts.
I mean, we could all just use Signal with disappearing messages enabled I suppose, that would keep anyone from utilizing "our data"... I fear we'll just doom ourselves to asking the same questions over and over and over and over if we can't build lasting, searchable, repositories of knowledge.
The lesson here is that it is fundamentally impossible to build lasting repositories of knowledge on a proprietary platform owned by some entity.
The only solutions that can stand the test of time for the long haul are decentralized systems built on open standardized protocols which are not owned by anyone.
I think that's the intent. If Reddit turns evil, users can choose to punish the platform for that.
Much like the SO incident, it just makes me increasingly hesitant to contribute to any future platform where the only method of redress the users have is self-harm. Seem some good suggestions in this thread though, so maybe we can come up with something new.
Shreddit looks like a good tool for this, just have to tweak it so it doesn't actually remove the data, just replace and leave it.
Would be fun to also build a tool for restoring the content should reddit reverse its idiotic API decision. But why bother doing that when they wont...
https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
I sent in a request and a few days later had a bunch of .csv files containing everything I've done with my account.
OK, CSV isn't JSON - but it's pretty easy to parse or import into a database of your choice.
> it's pretty barebones - only the plaintext of the comment, the subreddit name, the timestamp, and weirdly, the number of awards
Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684
Which has also been shut down by Reddit as part of this whole fiasco. I think March is the last month of archive data available.
>Pushshift will come back online for mod tools within two weeks; we are creating an approvals process to avoid impersonation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...
Which, assuming Reddit isn't paying them, seems pretty much like "We have decided to allow you to do a bunch of unpaid labor for our profit-making benefit as long as it's not useful to anyone else". No idea what they're getting out of it.
you'll have to digg for reddit
FTFY
None of the online communities are necessary to live a happy life, not even HN.
Absolutely. Though I think we go back to individual sites/forums (like HN is for startup/tech basically) instead of centralized platforms like reddit.
I actually don't mind the reddit charging for their APIs and making money for this convenience of single sign-on, cross searching, discoverability, moderation, user rating, etc...
People should just use the regular apps, which work plenty fine, and move on with their life. Or, pay the third-party apps so they can afford the api usage.
[1] https://avsforums.com/ [2] https://www.home-barista.com/ [3] https://www.roadbikereview.com/forums/
I don't think Reddit has that same vibe, I barely 'know' anyone on the subreddits I frequent as the nature of it is transitory, at least for the topics I'm interested in, people will stop by to ask a question and leave or lurk.
That's not to say I don't enjoy using Reddit, it's just not the same as forums.
you can find visible and recognized posters just like you would any online forum in smaller subreddits centered around a thing like writing, programming, music.
check out r/zen for example where there is absolutely an infamous user: ewk and quite a few other regs who engage him in healthy (and perhaps.. toxic, depending on your worldview) discussion(s).
I will agree youtube is super useful though.
That said, I remember the earlier days of reddit with lots of novelty accounts. I think these days the only surviving novelty accounts I've seen are Shitty Watercolor and Poem for Your Sprog.
When people say this I wonder, what planet are they from? When my wife and I are away from one another we get a kick out of sharing Reddit posts with each other. YouTube is one of the best ways to learn new subjects. Both platforms are a great way to stay involved in a hobby.
Hacker News is great, but it's pretty much a glorified subreddit. There's almost no difference.
And for those suggesting there are better alternatives than Reddit, what are they? Facebook? (Barf.) Reddit is doing something very annoying with their APIs, but for what it does it's pretty much the only game in town for now. I might look at browser plugins to make their website easier to use.
The issue is that all tech companies treat their products as all-or-nothing options. It is not theoretically impossible for YouTube to exist without terrifying levels of data-harvesting, unfair creator monetization, and the weird shit they do with kids.
i think you stopped using reddit in 2009 or something, hn is akin to what reddit's tech subreddits USED to be.
HN has such an insane depth of talent that I am surprised I haven't seen a few ShowHN posts that read something like:
"Hi guys, I was bored last weekend so I thought it would be fun to build a reddit clone as a single Rust binary with an imbedded bespoke graph database. It uses a fine tuned LLaMA model for optional auto-moderation. So far it's handling sustained 1.6M / posts sec on my 2015 MacBook Pro. If I have some time this next week I will add distributed mode with Raft or CRDTs. Hope you guys like it."
Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that.
"Most people" will take notice when the people who made Reddit worth looking at leave. It might linger for a while, with rehashed posts from bots and the like, but it's walking dead right now.
it was early days when audience consisted of internet geeks. Today its also a lot of casual users who may not care about api drama much.
> The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.
The people who want to run something that's like Reddit.com, shouldn't, sure.
I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user expectations.
I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just StackExchange!)
Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"? That is, it was a single-subreddit fork — I believe the only one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture — of the proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream", so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit project.)
"Reddit - Dive into anything". You will kill the UX with such separation.
- a collection of independent niche communities that are just using Reddit for hosting, whose members don't think of themselves as visiting "Reddit" but rather as visiting those specific community forums. This is the valuable part of Reddit, that generates and gathers original content and novel discussions that can't be found anywhere else on the Internet. This is the part everyone's rushing to preserve/archive or migrate elsewhere.
- a Usenet-like set of generic default-subscribed "category" subreddits, that just act as content aggregators to bubble up the "least controversial" stuff in each category from across the Internet. Nobody cares much about this (other than Reddit's investors), since it's just another view on the same content that gets surfaced through every other social network one way or another.
If you think of Reddit as just the valuable part, and forget about the junk, then you can reinterpret the Reddit UX like so: Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts. But 1. this isn't crucial to how users engage with these communities; and 2. you could preserve this property anyway, by having a shared SSO system (like how WordPress.com works) and by making Reddit-the-software federate its posts through ActivityPub. Then a "Reddit client" would actually just be a fancier kind of RSS reader that also knows how to post to individual communities' servers. But each server would still be "sovereign" over its own administration, being able to ban or approval-queue users, etc.
I disagree with the "just happens to have" part of this. The single-pane view is the killer feature of Reddit for me. I've tried to engage in smaller forums before, and small, niche communities have valuable but infrequent content. Being able to see which of the small communities have fantastic posts today is valuable, and encourages me to participate in some of the less headlining posts.
For a good example, consider /r/ultralight, which is a backpacking community focused on keeping weight off your back. 90% of the posts are "Help me shave weight! (The 10 pound lead weight I carry is sentimental and non-negotiable.)" Slightly more interesting are new product reviews, and the best are overviews of product categories.
I would not visit a standalone forum for once-a-month interesting content. But I'll definitely follow the sub, which leads me to 1) see all of the most interesting posts, and 2) engage with newcomers occasionally when I'm on reddit and nothing else is catching my attention. ("You really don't need the lead weight - just carry a picture of it for sentimental value.")
Tumblr "just happens to have" a dashboard, but that doesn't really matter, because each blog also has a web subdomain that serves both the blog's posts, and serves a (public, unauthenticated) RSS feed for said posts. Which means that I can just subscribe to all the Tumblr blogs I care about through my RSS feed reader of choice (which is a single-pane-of-glass I control, and one which muxes together many other posts-once-a-month sources as well) and forget that the Tumblr dashboard exists.
And the Tumblr dashboard itself also doesn't need to be operated by the same company that hosts Tumblr's blogs. It could just be a fancy RSS reader, that uses Tumblr's API only for posting. And so it could be a third-party app, without needing to make any (authenticated) API requests to Tumblr, when all a user is doing is consuming content.
A set of subreddits that people browsing casually.
I don't think that there are many communities that live only on Reddit. Most of subreddits are pretty casual. Even niche ones. Niche communities already have other places to have discussions. They aren't core audience of Reddit. The core audience browse a 'junk'.
I've been building a platform to target this specific thing. It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. In order for a creator to capitalize on this they currently tend to leverage a combination of different platforms like Patreon, Discord and Reddit with their community often times spread out amongst the different platforms. What we've done is combine everything into a singular place to allow them to offer their communities as a product alongside their content.
It's in theory equivalent to a "share things for me to react to" Discord channel — but the fact that it's Reddit means that it has automatic chronologically-segmented userbase-wide voting rounds applied to the links, which makes it easy for the content-creator to react "blind" to a bunch of "interesting" things in a row, without needing to do any pre-filtering for things they haven't seen yet, or editing out boring things, or showing anything that would break content-guidelines on a livestream.
Does your software have an answer to this use-case?
As far as content moderation, we are leaving it mainly up to each community to self moderate. We are also looking into leveraging AI to assist with flagging posts for the moderators to review to help improve their job.
The only real censorship power the main hub would have would be a de-listing, but it wouldn't take down the instance entirely.
Someone already did this [1] as stackoverlflow alternative
"I hacked this together with the worst code you've ever seen and the server is crashing every 5 minutes, but a thousand people signed up today and usage is growing exponentially."
It's much more of a marketing and PR challenge than a tech challenge. Having a site that works well would be nice too, sure, but finding a way to get tons of users signed up (and keeping them engaged) is far more important.
Lemmy looks a little too technical for majority users to consider I'm afraid.
Some are going to Tildes. Some are going to Lemmy, though the two most popular servers are dying right now. Enough went to kbin.social that they disabled registration. Then there's mentions of Raddle and Mainchan depending on your preference.
Discord servers with forums seem to be the big one from what my oldest was showing me. Seems that plus some additional web forums will end up filling in the gap.
Reddit will probably still last for a while as it bleeds out users. We'll have to see what replaces Reddit. Nothing proposed so far is going to be the new consolidated home.
But what is the value of reddit anymore? I have one of the oldest accounts, and I loved it.
Last time I logged in (not a joke) it told me I had a new free avatar that was a girl? That I’m stuck with? And I had to pay money to make myself look like a dude?
And we thought hats in TF2 were lame.
For finding new interesting content, I strongly believe that instead of creating a new platform someone should create a “hub”: a centralized aggregator which presents all of these platforms in a consistent format. A place where you can find various forums and Zulip / Mastodon instances, get a feed of their posts, and even create accounts and make posts/comments; but it doesn’t host the instances or posts themselves, it just uses their APIs. It can also host some of the archived / scraped data from SE and Reddit for consistency. The reasons being:
- The platforms I mention already exist for many communities, and there’s already a lot of difficulty in finding content. This has been a good idea way before platforms started closing off their content
- Creating a fully-centralized platform is actually way harder than creating a decentralized one. At the same time, it’s very important that whatever platform we use is easy for newcomers, easy to find content, and fast; all properties of centralized servers. Hence, the centralized entry-point and hub but decentralized instances works well.
- Mastodon has a centralized hub but tbh it sucks. Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, etc. have none. And of course there’s no hub which supports all of these platforms together.
- I’ve only heard bad things about Lemmy and the UI is crap.
I would absolutely love to help such a project but, like many unfortunately, don’t have the time or networking ability to start it myself. But if I see a Show HN or something similar which seems like it’s actually getting momentum I will try to contribute
What makes this approach really stand out is that, even if there are 5 different aggregators, it doesn't matter, because they're all aggregating the same data. And even if someone decides to use one of the existing platforms (e.g. discourse), posts/comments from this aggregator to the platform still show up. So this is actually a way to alleviate the "yet another standard" issue (though I acknowledge it won't be as good as a single common instance, due to different formats).
Matrix is a start. But when I go to https://matrix.org/, I see a giant header and "Try Now". When I go to https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/, I see a bunch of clients. When I go to https://app.element.io/#/welcome and click "Explore Rooms", I see random forums including some russian forums.
I think that you go to the site hub, you should immediately see a feed of curated popular posts and a "Create Account" form, similar to https://reddit.com/r/all, along with a search bar and list of filters. And when you create an account, you choose some suggestions and get presented with various communities, also like Reddit. Most people are barely even going to try your site, if you want them to join and put real effort into contributing you need to present good content as fast as possible.
Another issue with Matrix is that a lot of content just isn't on Matrix. As well as Reddit and other existing communities. For example, Rust has a subreddit, discourse, Matrix forum, and Zulip, and probably a discord somewhere too. There should really be a single platform where I can see posts from all of this, because I'm definitely not going to be checking each one individually.
[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/finding-interesting-comments-dis...
The communities that form around content creators tend to be high in engagement and are a sort of naturally occurring beacon for connecting like minded people together online. That is the core of social networking after all.
I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. Here’s what I have so far. Got the post submissions and community creations working:
I shared some implementation details here if people want to read more:
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...
I read through those threads a bit, but I'm wondering if you can say a bit more about why you didn't use the nostr protocol as is? I'm not trying to pull for criticism, I'm curious about the tech choices and how some of these emerging options differ from one another (I think I've read about two other nostr forum ideas now?)
1. Nostr relies on Schnorr scheme for signing the data. While from my research, the patent on it has expired, I also read some other details on how there’s other pieces of it which are still patented. I am not a legal expert, so my understanding on this might be wrong and it might be in the clear.
2. Schnorr is fairly new and not used widely yet. It’s not even built natively in Crypto Subtle which comes built-in in all browsers.
Based on this alone, I couldn’t use Nostr. My implementation uses ECDSA P-384 keys which can be generated using the browser built in crypto subtle library:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenPar...
So this allows one less third party library to rely on the client side.
3. The 3rd reason (and this was one of my biggest reasons) was that Nostr runs on websockets. I didn’t like that at all. Servers are already limited on the number of sockets they can handle. Plus it seemed like unnecessary complexity when vast majority of the developers already know how to use REST api.
So instead of websockets, mine uses a simple REST api with only 2 endpoints: one for creation of records and other for searching for records based on filters. I shared more details here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/_/jmkpll...
And here:
As a sidenote, the circuit-y background of your site makes it unreadable with Dark Reader addon. I disabled it for your site and it looks great, but maybe you would like to check it.
IOW, is the sky not falling for my use-case?
Yeah, I'm either on my laptop, or the official(?) Reddit Android app if I'm bored outta my skull somewhere and need something to look at (which is very rarely).
Shocked anyone tolerates this horrible interface over old.reddit.com
Like c'mon. Every other site doesn't care I'm using a permanent incognito window except for reddit.
Queue the, “I’m leaving the community!” posts I guess.
1. Moderators used many tools (including bots) which relied on the API to improve their moderation abilities. This indirectly impacts all users to some degree.
2. Users with disabilities often used third party apps to improve the site's accessibility. This significantly impacts a small portion of users with disabilities.
3. Most third party app users had concerns about the UX of the official Reddit app and mobile site - or at least wanted to get rid of ads. This is probably the least use case in terms of "importance", but directly impacts the largest portion of users.
I'm part of that third group. For me, the sky is definitely not falling. But the degraded usability of the mobile site creates enough friction that I will probably reduce my Reddit usage quite significantly. Frankly, Reddit is probably doing me a favor by encouraging me to use their site less.
But I'll probably run this to grab everything else.
Even 5k people reading content on my site would be better than 50k people skimming through the comment section.
Most people worried about the API change have the "correct politics" so your data is safe. It's only people who participate in wrongthink that need to backup everything.
This tool has iffy support for adding rich data for deleted comments, but I have some plans.
You guys must be using Reddit way differently than I am. It's just a social site. The subreddits I subscribe to are hobby-related. People sharing what they're doing with regards to their hobby. What data would I have to archive? If Reddit were to go away I'd just find another similar service allowing me to hangout with people interested in my hobby.
What are you guys doing?
Reddit can be used many ways. Maybe archiving your stuff isn't important to you and that is fine.
As I side note, I have a peculiar fascination with how people use tools so differently, how they work them into their workflows and make them their own.
Is it though?
This started long ago, when the new UI was announced. This was the first obvious "we're going to make it worse for everybody because that's how we operate and there's nothing you can do about it" step for me.
Realistically, there are ways to protest that increase costs. Everyone uploading 20minute videos of their wall for example. That would increase costs but not really affect how user's use the site. People want to hit their pockets yet all they can think of "If we don't use it, that'll hurt them" when if it really hurt them they wouldn't allow it. They own and control the site, they can make it impossible to make subreddits private with probably a few minutes of code - just make the process error out for a few days and then remove the error at the start of the request.
It's a bit of both - reddit exists and is profitable because of user engagement/activity.
Reddit is shutting down primary way many (most?) user prefer to access it.
The symbolism of making communities dark isn't just to hurt Reddit; it's also to forshadow the state of the apparent NewWorld reddit is ushering in.
I doubt that most people using reddit use third party apps. I even doubt many people do.
The reason to archive your content is because (1) you want to delete your account or (2) losing access to a free API will make it difficult to do later.
Subreddits going dark is just a day long protest, no one needs to archive content due to that.
File "/home/XXX/.local/pipx/venvs/reddit-user-to-sqlite/lib/python3.10/site-packages/reddit_user_to_sqlite/reddit_api.py", line 1, in <module>
from typing import Any, Literal, NotRequired, Optional, Sequence, TypedDict, final
ImportError: cannot import name 'NotRequired' from 'typing' (/usr/lib/python3.10/typing.py)Plus - it's the manner in which Reddit has conducted themselves here. Not just the fact they are making the changes, but how they went about making them.
On top of that, afaik, Facebook and Twitter didn't try to spread lies about 3rd party devs using the drama as leverage to blackmail them. I don't recall much about when Facebook did it, but with Twitter, I think Musk was pretty straight with saying that those 3rd party apps cost money to support and he'd rather do it in house.
Finally, Reddit relies on volunteer moderators, but does not (and has for years promised but failed to) offer the associated tools moderators need. So all those are third party things which also end up in doubt with these changes. With the way Reddit have attempted to deny that they want to kill 3rd party apps despite it being obvious, and the lies about devs, I think it'd leave an even more sour taste to everyone if they tried to carve out an exemption for specifically moderation tools, since it'd make it even more apparent what their goal is.
Reddit/Twitter only caring about short term metrics and survival don't care about the further out timeline.
I looked at my 1000th comment in the archive and it's only back to Sat May 28 2022 (I guess I comment a lot), if I want to save 10+ years I'll need a higher limit.
Edit: Looks like this might a reddit limit? I'm seeing other tools mention 1K. I guess I'll use Reddit's data export tool instead.
I'd suggest starting by fetching recent posts, then download your GDPR archive and run it through the tool as well (the `archive` command). Then it'll be as if you fetched everything from the web API (best of both worlds).
Feature request: delete all comments and posts (can only be done 1 by 1 afaik). There used to be a nuke Reddit chrome extension but it appears removed and/or out of date.
I think that's out of scope for this project, but I've seen some other comments in this thread linking to tools that do just that!
- public
- extensible
- bring your own client
- domains as usernames
- federated but with escape hatches so you're never tied to a single host
- considerations for twitter-scale from the start, eg with "big graph servers"
Still under a waitlist / closed for now / under very active development, but seems very promising.
I have a friend who, back in 1998 or 1999, printed out all his emails. He was really active on IRC so he had a lot of email, and he wasnt savvy enough to know he could copy his mbox. He carried those papers around with him for decades and finally realized he never flipped through them once so he recycled them all. I think that’s the case with almost all the data that we produce. It’s not useful for us, but probably useful for companies like Google to create models of our thought patterns.
BIX, CompuServe, FidoNet, usenet, dozens of email accounts, voicemails, interviews, chat logs, facebook...
Heck, I have zero trace of the specialty BBS (and network) I hosted. Which was my everything at the time.
Young me thought it'd be great to record and archive my lifestream.
Current me is glad it didn't work out.
Sure, I may have written some clever bits of code & prose.
Now I see great value in forgetting. It's hard to adapt, grow, accept, forgive, and be forward looking while lugging around a lifetime of baggage.
If I ever did say something useful, I'm confident someone will pick up the thread. Whether independently or by quoting me, it's all good.
Reddit does have a feature to export your data into a GDPR archive, but it's pretty barebones ... the highest fidelity data comes from the API.Finally one additional suggestion which I guess might be doable (?) would be to submit the post URL to archive.org and include the archived URL in the database dump.
I see someone else has already filed one about saving the context.
Clearly all I’ve put on Reddit is dross. I can’t think of anything I’d care about losing.
(And, the process was really easy, just as the blog post described. Requires Python 3.11+.)
https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
Has anyone here tried it? I'm curious what kind of formatting is used for the data dump.
- there will be stricter limits
- NSFW content won't be served through the API
So depending on how you use Reddit, this sort of export may not be possible in the same way after the cutoff.
What subs did you look at? My experience on Reddit is the exact opposite. There's even a subreddit where people whine about people whining about how awful America is: https://old.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/
> 2. Apple is god.
What subs did you look at? Even /r/apple frequently hates Apple.
> 2. China and Russia are very bad.
I do see these sentiments a lot.
> American invasions were justified.
What subs did you look at? What invasions are we talking about?
> 3. Chinese,product, companies are all bad. All they do is copy the almighty American companies.
I see this one a lot. Especially on subreddits devoted to military hardware and any time someone mentions TikTok.
I think the truth is that people remember the things that evoke an emotional response. It sounds like you get upset when you hear people say bad things about China and when you hear people say good things about America. You forget, or just don't read, all of the comments that contradict those people.
When Russia started invading Ukraine and there was a global shortage of grain. I saw a lot of comments about starving 3rd world countries that dared to still be friends with Russia.
3. Apparently "Huawei was killed by US because it was too good and getting too big" is a completely delirious thinking.
On one instance i was downvoted to hell and made fun off for saying that any secret document worth declassifying isn't really a secret document. As an exemple, i cited the kidnapping of random civilians and sending them to prison to be raped and tortured to death by the US soldiers for fun and the videos about targeting civilians and kids with drones while laughing and making jokes about the kids growing to be terrorist anyway. Both of these only saw the light of day because of wikileaks and were a huge embarrassment to US that never wanted them to be known.
What irked me the most is i was told to grow up and touche some grass because apparently it's a teenager phases to care about these things (for some reason they talk to me as if i was an american )
As for your last statement, it's not that i get upset when good things is said about America. I may be extremely paranoid but am more like scared. As someone living in instable country with oil and therfore may be next on the US oil crusade. when i read anything america did and them prising their killing capabilities, i just look at my family and imagine that maybe one day i'll be excavating their dead bodies from under the rubbles of our home after a drone strike while the operator is drinking mountain dew and making a joke with his buddies about a having good day of work.
It's probably my depression.