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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
