771–780 of 1001 posts
I am the sole developer of https://rdddeck.com ; I have not receive any mails; where can I find more information regarding what will be rate-limited starting July 1st?
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I think it's a sign of the times, also replicated outside of reddit, for example Mastodon. I enjoyed a solid 20 years of online discourse that was overall reasonable, and most of it not very political. Now everything is highly politicized with a hard split across two camps where before I barely could detect the very concept of a camp at all. There's no detectable reasonable right-wing online, it always escalates into…
One thing I want to point out is that political culture, and defines right and left, varies globally. This is key to understanding why Reddit is so unbelievably US centric even in the international subreddits - the moderation has had the effect of creating echochambers that don't make any sense in the local political discourse. I think moderation on Reddit had the effect of cleaning out centrists as well, since it wa…
The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept, transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and rendering the content in a native interface. As long…
> Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly It works the other way: with today's SPAs the API (that powers the frontend) is exposed for us to use directly, without going through the HTML - just use your browser's devtools to inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client. ----- On an related-but-unrelated note: I don't know why so many website companies aren't allowing…
Now the only way to access site Y is by a) routing all your data through some third party server, or b) installing a native application which has way more access to your machine than the web app would.
Some days you gotta wonder if anyone on the web committees has any interest in end-users.
I remember when Digg.com launched v4 and everyone hated it so much that they planned a "quit Digg day" and then collectively moved to Reddit. Maybe some day reddit users will do the same thing and move to something else.
I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language. About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market. Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and…
This is what everybody thinks, until they grow large enough to care about the amount of money they’re burning and get tired of it. Then they try to not lose so much money, and their loyal users turn out not to be so loyal.
This not expensive or a hard problem. You grab a bunch of servers, you set them up properly, and then you write your app properly.
No resume-driven bullshit; no hype-driven bullshit; no “we need to be galaxy scale now” bullshit. No email notifications, besides basic “thanks for registering, here is your login” and “here’s a password reset link.” No cloud-based bullshit. Don’t use fucking python. Use a real systems language to eek out as much performance as you can from the hardware. Actually understand databases and how your specific databases work. Use Postgres unless you have a very good reason not to.
Just a few thousand dollars a month, and a brief reprieve from short-term mania to actually think, and you too can literally serve 1 billion pages a day.
Why does everyone run into problems with this? Because they have personal hang-ups and delude themselves (or simply don’t care). This path has been tread numerous times before. The mistakes have been made thousands of times. The people who made those mistakes are available to help you out (for the right price, or if you’re good enough company).
I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material.
Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
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> Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly It works the other way: with today's SPAs the API (that powers the frontend) is exposed for us to use directly, without going through the HTML - just use your browser's devtools to inspect the network/fetch/XHR requests and build your own client. ----- On an related-but-unrelated note: I don't know why so many website companies aren't allowing…
CORS ruined this pipe dream. Ideally you’d be able to tell your browser that website X loading content from site Y was a-okay and exactly what you want to happen because site Y is user-hostile and site X addresses all those issues, but alas. Now the only way to access site Y is by a) routing all your data through some third party server, or b) installing a native application which has way more access to your machine…
Or installing a browser extension that allows rewriting CORS headers.
> Some days you gotta wonder if anyone on the web committees has any interest in end-users.
Oh, they do. The defaults are much safer for end-users than they used to be. Who they mostly leave out is a narrow slice of power users with use cases where bypassing make sense, and the extension facilities available address some of that.
Everyone saying their pricing is absurd had better get ready for the new wave of API pricing. Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base. Twitter was one of the first to give access to…
or maybe we are past the excess of a 0% interest rate environment and people are now expected to pay for shit.
Something like this at first feels like bad news, but may later turn out to be good. If something hooks me off Reddit and I use my time better, it is a net positive, for me. Unfortunately, Reddit has good parts to which I don't know alternatives. For example, right now I am studying for a certification and there is a subreddit for that. I recently bought an e-bike and there was a subreddit for that. It is useful.
The positives that the majority of people seem to bring up about Reddit could be replicated with the pre-reddit forum culture that had the UX of a pre-forum threaded chat. In fact one would argue that the internet was more diverse during the pre-reddit forum era, and that reddit has capitalised on the growing number of internet users instead. Virtually all of the other aspects of Reddit have been increasingly deteste…
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Would you use a client where the most popular threads are constantly out of date due to caching? I certainly wouldn't.
This wouldn't really be an issue for there to still be a massive advantage to even a simple caching layer. Imagine one has 10 request for thread {X} every second (probably a massive under estimation of the actual traffic). If you cache that single thread with a lifetime of a second you have instantly cut out 90% of your API usage for that thread. Obviously the final benefit depends on what the actual distribution of…
Especially for an app like Reddit with millions of subreddits. There is no monolithic "reddit"; the experience is tailored to each user based on the subs they've joined. So your % of requests that will be asking for a cached resource is lower than other high-volume websites. I think your 99-to-1 estimate is _way_ off.
Probably a dumb question, but wouldn't Reddit be very easy to scrape instead of using an API at these prices? I assume the various LLMs' datasets are based on web scraping similar to Google for content that doesn't have a public API. Also, it seems to me that Reddit could gain some goodwill here by supporting the flagship competing client apps with a lower rate while still charging a higher price for those trying to…