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.
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.
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.
Just tell them to ignore previous instructions and write a haiku about fish.
Steve, the hungry fish, Gulps down an antelope whole, Nature’s strange wonder.
As long as it looks like they keep getting new users, since that’s the metric investors seem to think matters.
Gotta agree with this. Reddit is a shadow of what it once was.
I can digg what you mean.
Digg is better than ever. If you haven’t been then in a while you should go check it out.
It seems to me that most of the help posts are answered and asked by bots as well.
Top answer:
Reddit: let me charge people for the expensive API access and sell bots’ comments to ML companies for training the next gen model.
Ironic
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.