Hacker News Reader

~2 years ago, Reddit was cracking down on this type of usage. This lead to a mass exodus of users to lemmynet and other decentralized platforms.

What makes you special in this aspect? Seems you are small fish now, but if your niche project picks up steam. Nothing to stop them from cutting you off or forcing you to court/injunction and waste your personal resources.

View on HN

That crackdown was for regular API usage aka just regular content access, which definitely isn’t special. Most other “reddit data access” sites either use some sort of headless browser or just the JSON endpoints, which are brittle and limited, whereas I can access the private mobile API that the app uses for ad/recommendation distribution at a much larger scale. These things aren’t accessible via the API. Picture it as: an API where you can access just content, vs having programmatic access to every piece of data the mobile app can access, which unintuitively is not limited to what the mobile app displays (there’s other interesting fields available).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com