This is one thing that I’m still scratching my head about. Like, Reddit said no once, and everyone just shrugged and moved on.
I’d understand if most just threw in the towel completely and never wanted to work with Reddit at all, but it seems most would prefer continue to work on their apps.
And since most apps were free or even FOSS, why not say screw that, and make a (perhaps) last update with a field for the user to enter their own key?
Of course only a few users would take advantage of that, but then there’s even less reason for Reddit to actually care about that, if they could even detect it at all.
I know some forks may pop up, I’m just wondering about the devs themselves.
Reddit specifically said that you were not allowed to do exactly that.
I know, I wrote
Reddit said no once, and everyone just shrugged and moved on
And? So what? Are they gonna send a SWAT team after everyone that does?
Why fight so hard to stay on a platform that clearly doesn’t want you anymore?
A shit ton if people have been fighting hard for the last month. 8000 subs, people have been campaigning and making dedicated web sites to follow what’s up and to connect. There’s been immense effort put into this from lots of people.
A few hours of work to pull the dev’s key out and make the fields editable doesn’t seem like much in comparison.
(I’m not demanding anyone to put their time for free to do this or anything. I’m just curious why this was such a no-go from the start while all the other campaigns were on full throttle.)
Ed: Btw look how e.g. Nintendo is hostile to everyone and yet people keep making fan games and whatnot…
A shit ton if people have been fighting hard for the last month. 8000 subs, people have been campaigning and making dedicated web sites to follow what’s up and to connect. There’s been immense effort put into this from lots of people.
Pretty sure 99% of the people here participated in the effort, when Reddit showed they wouldn’t budge after the first blackout, we knew the fight was over, why beg to stay over with your abusive partner?
Sure, they can ban the account of anyone using API keys like that, it’s transparent to detect. Then they all get mad and come after the developer.
That was a nonstarter. Was not going to happen, Reddit needed those apps dead.
Chances are they could detect it and ban you. Hell I got banned from discord for interacting with their API using my own authorization token for a normal user account… To be fair my custom client was not convincing at all, but oh well.
But if you wouldn’t continue with Reddit otherwise, then you don’t need to care about a ban anyway.
I’m just wondering if I’m the only one with that thought process. You know what I mean.
The apps’ user agents and other fingerprinting detectors, which are shared by a public app, will get blocked by Reddit for breaking the API terms of service. The only way to avoid getting caught is to have the source code of the app and build it yourself with your own API key, while changing any unique fingerprints of the app.
I was thinking those fields could be editable.
Ed: Also wondering if it’s actually against the rules or just spez being a twat again.
It means it would only be a temporary solution.
There’s three things I’d expect that reddit could do in retaliation:
- They’re able to identify the people using an API key for this, and either deny them API access, or straight up ban them
- They further restrict free API access, rendering this option useless
- They take legal action against the app developers
And even if they don’t take any action, ask yourself this: do you really want to keep using reddit, with the way they’re acting right now? All this feels like a big middle finger towards their oldest users.
I still wonder if that’s some actual rule - like what, “you can’t make an app for other people to use” or “if you’re a dev, you can’t use other peoples apps”? That doesn’t make any sense of you’re providing an API. Sounds to me like Spez just said no without even knowing what’s up.
As for wanting to use, well lots of people expressed interest, and devs wanted to keep their apps going, so I’m just surprised nobody actually entertained the idea. Changing a few fields from hardcoded to editable isn’t that huge of a task. Most apps have gotten some end of life updates anyway.
They are now limiting the number of API keys an account can make from unlimited to 3.
This most likely mean that they are now monitoring more closely the use of each key.
A few years ago I wrote a simple app to pull data from the Weather Underground site via APIs. Because of API limits I did exactly what you’re proposing. The app had an easy way to enter a key and each user was responsible for signing up to get a key and putting it into the app.
This was a very small scale app, so the data may not be meaningful, but for every person who used it I got two or three comments from users who chose not to because it was just too difficult.
Bear in mind that the “difficulty” involved going to a website, entering your name and email address, and pasting the key it provided into the app.
I suspect that any app where you have to get your own key would have to overcome a lot of resistance.
