Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

Reddit was my favorite website growing up. I'd discover new interesting subs, read random posts and comments. The frontpage was somewhat interesting too, but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine.

I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs.

I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on Android. Relay survived the API changes and adopted a subscription model.

But thanks to Revanced I was able to patch an old version of Relay to use my own API key for free.

Looks like it's time for me to plug my fediverser [0] project. It can help people migrate away from Reddit by letting people sign up to a Lemmy instance [1] with their Reddit credentials and automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy alternative. The alternatives are crowdsourced. There is a "flagship" deployment at https://fediverser.network but if you want to fork it, you just need to run your instance and manage it as you see fit.

The project got a (small) grant from NLNet a couple of months ago for me to work on having the functionality built-in into the Voyager client (a PWA Apollo clone). If more people or companies would like to help/support, hit me up.

[0] https://fediverser.io

[1] https://portal.alien.top

Geddit still works and it's a great app (it can read posts labelled nsfw without an account). The other working one I know of is RedReader, which Reddit have left unbroken due to its advanced accessibility features for disabled readers (but it cannot access nsfw things -- you get a message saying to use the website).

My shared IP has been network blocked by Reddit and anonymous browsing is disabled. I also see about fifty captchas per day. I really, really miss the old web and plain text too...

Reddit was a cool place when I first discovered it during the Digg exodus. Sadly, it was too fragile to stay as good as it was, and the repeat drama caused by the admin's mismanagement took its toll on the goodwill. The company responded to this by becoming more adversarial to users, and there's no sign they will stop pinching users in some way, whether it be their free time, money, or otherwise. We just need a public way to talk to each other about niche topics without the toxic middle man.

Surprised anyone is developing against reddit as a platform at all. Relying on a platform in general is risky...but Reddit?!?

It has a single redeeming feature - network effects on good user conent. That's it...literally everything else about it is a dumpsterfire, including how they treat devs.

> Then I’ve discovered that you could get the whole page in JSON format by adding .json to the end of the URL. That was my big aha moment.

This is actually still working! Trying on one of the top posts right now, if you change

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my...

to

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my...

you get all comments as json, with no need for authentication. So it's probably trivial to develop a client that would use this and have a nice ui and bypass any and all ads. Interesting.

I unplugged from Reddit when they did this and my life is much better.

Reddit had a good community and content in the early days, but as it grew in popularity and squeezed profit the value dropped.

I think it’s funny that early LLM projects were bootstrapped by scraping Reddit. I guess it was better than random garbage from common crawl, but the world has moved on.

I wouldn't even reply to them.

The only API you need is HTTP. Those who try to pervert you into thinking that they can decide what user-agent you can use are only trying to control more than what they own.

You can also add .rss to subreddit urls and get rss feeds.

Given that rss is _designed_ to be read by "bots" i.e. computer programs, what is Reddit's stance there? Do they also consider it "bypassing API restrictions"?

Narrative shaping has become big business globally. That's why Reddit wants to force paying $30k/yr for their API. Twitter/X is doing the same thing for the same reason.

The problem with Reddit is that it was founded by people who care more about money than their users

I have been using Geddit for some time. I don't usually have issues with some video exceptions and showing only a portion of the comments. It beats using the official app or the website.

Man, i just hate the new reddit, but in a way i appreciate the fact that the update literally stopped me from continuing to use it.

It was my togo app, i spent hours browsing and reading random comments and articles, my English got surprisingly better than most of my peers and all it took was a mild internet addiction.

Now it's short form content for me. YouTube mainly (premium helps a lot, tiktok enshittified a little with shops and the slideshows).

I mourn RIF and count the days untill old.reddit is no longer supported.

Ironic that they can only ban you on account basis, but you can still continue using it via Geddit because it does not rely on authentication.

The mods who run Reddit are the absolute worst part of it. I was banned permanently for making a negative review about a Marvel movie in the movies sub. The moderators are insanely biased and abuse their power. I think long-term Reddit can't grow because the more you participate in the website, you see how deeply artificial and astroturfed it all is.

To be fair, Reddit started circling the drain a while ago and paywalling the API was their hara-kiri.

I miss the old Reddit, I hate the new. I used to use it a fair bit (and even contribute to niche topics) but deleted my account and content when they announced the API changes.

Reddit is a zombie site now, it’s effectively dead. Unless you’re into arguing US politics then that’s where the party is.

I've been banned more times from Reddit than I can count. Reddit used to be good, but now it seems to be destroying itself on purpose (or maybe for bribe money). Just give up on it. All the good information is in the pre-2023 archives anyway.

Reddit bans users for posting pretty much anything and then puts 0 barriers in place to stop them from making new accounts. Reddit recently removed the option to skip entering an email, but they still do nothing to verify the email address of new accounts. I make a new account every time I want to post and use a new as@df.xyz variant each time. Maybe 1/5 of my comments get through the filter though. I get responses from real users so I know it’s true

Another point i would like to discuss, if someone has more knowledge than me:

How the fuck was reddit not profitable?

The founder said it but i still don't belive it.

Was all the money spent in bullshit features no one still uses or it was before that?

As much as I'd like to perma-ban Reddit from my life, Reddit is, unfortunately, still the best way of getting insights into stuff to do in new cities or quick answers about how to do things.

The JSON representation is great for classical web scraping, but I wonder if LLMs are already good at 'seeing' HTML/CSS/js that it's more work to specialize.

I could see Reddit as being a large source of content so worth the effort, at least until it's disabled--but that hasn't happened so far.

I still don‘t understand why apps like apollo did not add a balance account used to pay the necessary API requests. Combined with heavy caching this should have been easily possible and financially viable. Someone could have even built a cache gateway backend for multiple 3rd party apps…

Had to flip back to Boost man (which still works!). Darn shame the gallery was never implemented :-(.

Nice. Things are doing pretty well where people migrated to over on ..the other platform since the API app destruction days, you should join.

Honestly if they banned you it's because it threatened their IPO. Spez and co don't care about communities or the people. They never even gave mods their mod tools. They just left AutoModerator to sludge along laggingly on a single core after firing the creator of it that went on to create https://tildes.net - a better 'reddit'.

Reddit just sold everybody's data to google for the AI data and are going to sell the same data back to reddit users with walled gardens and its new 'search'. Fuck 'em.

I'm sure it's a decent app. I won't use reddit. it's an astroturfed left-swinging graveyard where even Alexis Ohanian quit its board and left completely due to its racism years ago.

There's libreddit and redlib for self hosted frontends similar to geddit, but yours as a mobile app I can see would be appealing since reddit's as I've heard is less than ideal.

You can slap on .rss and .json at the end of the URLs and get your favorite subs from a decent rss reader. No need to comment anyways.

With reddit, you're just commenting amongst bots such as these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4sGCVZqWo

The dead internet theory I've found, isn't a theory.

Good on ya for making Geddit. Keep up the cool stuff.

I moved on reddit back in Digg exodus days. Been there more than 15 years. Got banned recently mentioning that some Palestinians are terrorists. Mods cursed at me in the PM when I reported them to admins, Admin permanently banned my account. It's just a radical left echo-chamber now, which sucks because there are lot's of interesting niche sub forums.

I wish someone would actually invest in competing product, with less censorship and no braindead mods.

Stealth is good android app for browsing reddit without login. You can subscribe to subredits and it is avalible on f-droid.

I think this contextualizes how hard they tried to make their site unusable on web browsers. "Front page of the internet." Thanks glowies.

Obligatory "I stopped using Reddit when they killed Apollo" comment here -- I miss /r/askhistorians, and the joy of someone showing up to comment on something who is an expert in the field.

Reddit? More like Deddit...

I wouldn't respond to their bullshit copy-paste email and definitely wouldn't used apologetic language nor phrases like "Legal Team, I hope this message finds you well".

Enshitification at work, in glorious technicolor.

I am glad decentralized alternatives similar to Mastodon exist like Lemmy, and even better with third-party clients like Voyager or Sync. It will take some time for people to get used to it but we need a better alternative to centralized companies that go to the enshittification route.

This is the second to last phase of 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'. While these services are still relevant for you - and that is where the 'winning' starts, when their relevance drops below the level that makes it worth putting effort in fighting them - you can use proxies like libreddit for Reddit, Nitter for TwiXXer (it still works for reading single posts, no idea if it works for 'following' because I have never done that), Invidious for Youtube and (while you're at it) SearxNG for search engines. Once you have found or - better still - installed yourself some proxies of choice you can install a browser extension to automatically redirect any request for those sites to the proxies, two examples of such are Privacy Redirect and LibRedirect.

The advantage of going the proxy route is that you only have to do this once after which you can access those sites from all your devices without needing to install separate apps.