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Teddit Is Shutting Down

tedd.it

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Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#81

Post by mappu »

Shekelphile wrote: post #36
grishka wrote: post #30

Seeing all Reddit apps shut down, I can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules? What happened to the adversarial interoperability spirit? What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps? I can understand the iOS apps, the App Store hegemony does kinda force this and there were cases of Apple removing apps that interact with an online servi…

> Seeing all Reddit apps shut down, I can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules? What happened to the adversarial interoperability spirit? What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps? The official reddit app uses a seperate, undocumented graphql based api rather than the public REST one they allow for public use. I suspect someone is/…

Stealth ( https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.cosmos.unreddit/ ) has an optional access mode that works by scraping old.reddit.com, that still works.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#82

Post by grishka »

cratermoon wrote: post #77
grishka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by that? An API key usually is the secret. And everything needed to access the API must by definition be contained in the client app, so it's only a question of reverse engineering enough of it to extract these parameters.

This is why I get paid big bucks to investigate and remediate security problems in applications and systems.

It is technically impossible to embed a "secret" into something you allow everyone to download, and expect it to stay secret forever. This is called security through obscurity and it isn't real security.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#83

Post by graeme »

Shekelphile wrote: post #49
kumarvvr wrote: post #33

Reddit has allowed the third-party app system go too far and now they are struggling to contain it. I remember when Twitter did the same thing, but they realized it early and did it when there were not too many apps that users were used to. I feel Reddit will come out fine from this. A minor hiccup. Mods will be replaced, apps will be forgotten and users will talk about this whole thing in some AskReddit thread. The…

They already have 'come out fine' from the whole fiasco. The majority of users already used new reddit and the official app because they haven't actually used old reddit or the third party apps that were available to begin with, and with few exceptions pretty much every subreddit that went dark was already back and fully open a week or so after the blackout. Stripping API access was just a giant 'fuck you' and experi…

> Stripping API access was just a giant 'fuck you' and experience downgrade to the small group of savvy users who won't ever use new reddit no matter what roadblocks are put in their way.

This small group includes the moderators and power users who make most of the content and moderate it.

Reddit might pull it off but we need to wait and see the long run effects. It feels like the structure is intact but it has rotted from the inside.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#84

Post by charcircuit »

costco wrote: post #67
grishka wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's in the US though. It's known that the US government does its best to protect the interests of corporations. There are other countries, in some of which reverse engineering something for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly allowed. edit: looking at the list of cases, and knowing that the US legal system relies on precedents, it feels like using an online service's private API is allowed under this act…

Yes, as far as I can tell terms of service violations resulting from things like scraping/using unofficial APIs are not CFAA violations and certainly not criminal unless you are not supposed to have access to the data in the first place. The company may still sue in civil court but it has to be on other grounds. Which is why hiQ "lost" to LinkedIn and settled even though they won on the CFAA issue. And why Plaid is s…

The important thing is that it was suggested to use API keys which you are not authorized to use. Just because the keys are technically public it doesn't mean that you are authorized to use them.

If someone uploads their AWS token to Github it isn't legal to use it even if it was made public.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#85

Post by safety1st »

oezi wrote: post #59
safety1st wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do we need a "winning" instance for? In a federated world what does that even mean? What is this (online? HN?) cultural obsession with winner-take-all? The whole point of federation is that you don't need winner-take-all which is in fact unhealthy. If you have a community on Reddit which you want to migrate you just need to find a stable instance with admin policies you consider reasonable. If it's a big communi…

Lemmy needs a better experience for first time users. For instance, one should be forwarded to the front page of a random instance and see r/all type content (and given the ability to sign up).

Why not create it? Everything is open. Lemmy is not a monolithic entity like Reddit. It would be nice if the developers created something like this but it doesn't have to be them.

I thought about creating something like r/all, but you can get something similar on any instance if you filter by posts + All: https://lemmy.sdf.org/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&page=1&... . This will be restricted to whoever that instance federates with of course.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#86

Post by cratermoon »

grishka wrote: post #82
cratermoon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I get paid big bucks to investigate and remediate security problems in applications and systems.

It is technically impossible to embed a "secret" into something you allow everyone to download, and expect it to stay secret forever. This is called security through obscurity and it isn't real security.

This I know. What keeps me employed is knowing how to construct a client that doesn't embed a secret yet manages to perform an authorization flow.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#87

Post by chipshortagesux »

This is somewhat tangentially related to this whole reddit api ordeal, but can someone share why they think that official means of accessing content on reddit app? For example, I’ve been using reddit ios app for a while and it’s fine for me, aside from ads and some weird a/b tests when “sort comments” dropdown changes its location. Just before Apollo shut down, I downloaded it to see why other people swear by it. Well, it’s relatively similar and it didn’t see anything that’d make it so much better than the official app.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#88

Post by kobalsky »

kumarvvr wrote: post #33

Reddit has allowed the third-party app system go too far and now they are struggling to contain it. I remember when Twitter did the same thing, but they realized it early and did it when there were not too many apps that users were used to. I feel Reddit will come out fine from this. A minor hiccup. Mods will be replaced, apps will be forgotten and users will talk about this whole thing in some AskReddit thread. The…

> Reddit has allowed the third-party app system go too far

did everyone forget that reddit didn’t have an official app for years? they ended buying one of those for their official client

there was never going to be an easy way to rip that bandaid off because their platform grew with the help of these developers

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#89

Post by Gareth321 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #56
zzleeper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? I've used Reddit for 15 years and it's the first time I don't really have a good way of using it, besides the desktop (on old.reddit). On mobile (where I used to spend reddit most time) their own app is so crap I don't even have it installed, so I have no easy way to browse. On Chrome I'm not even logged-in, so I only use it whenever a google search leads me there, but I don't post or do anything meanin…

You are on HN, and you are not the average reddit user. I use old.reddit, and I am also not the average user. Most of them use the newer UI. Most of them are not even aware of what an API means. Most of them don't care. I have been observing the site for sometime now, and except for pics and a few others, I did not find any much difference between before and now. Also, most users use the official reddit app.

While you’re correct, it is a not insignificant number of users who were using third party mobile apps. Depending on the subreddit, I saw stats of up to 30% in data uploaded to various channels. Of course, some of these users will convert to the official app, but many, like the user above and myself, will not. It sucks. Time will tell if losing the active minority is worth it.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#90

Post by [deleted] »

grishka wrote: post #82
cratermoon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I get paid big bucks to investigate and remediate security problems in applications and systems.

It is technically impossible to embed a "secret" into something you allow everyone to download, and expect it to stay secret forever. This is called security through obscurity and it isn't real security.

[deleted]
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