Github redlib thread still unfolding. From reddit shareholder letter,
And a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience.
Most on lemmy know the privacy and bot-infested dumpster fire reddit is. So it’s very easy to think good riddance. But that misses an important point. IMO.
Inspite of the dumpster fire, it also contains a huge body of knowledge not found anywhere else. Example. Many times I have searched for a super obscure error message and the only good hits were a reddit thread in a tech sub. This is formerly open knowledge, accessible privately, now being closed and locked behind logins.
In old web forum days, weird niche info was distributed all over. That made it robust. Big tech social media displaced most of that world. It all got centralized. No matter hjow awful their algorithms are, no matter how toxic, those sites do have riches of knowledge.
We ARE losing something, if open access to niche info created by normal ppl is cut off.
“Ppl will figure a way around” you may say. There is no way to win that fight in the long run.
I guess redlib could use a login cookie with a dumb reddit account ? Less privacy focused but still accesible without all the bload and stupid ads.
It would likely have to have a large pool of accounts and randomly pick one per request, to avoid Reddit noticing a too-high volume of requests from one account.
IMO, there might be something to that idea. It would have to be a huge pool, and it would be endless whack a mole as reddit etc get better at detecting automated traffic patterns. The more requests, the bigger the pool has to be.
Reddit is very good at detecting multiple accts using dev fingerprinting, which they could do here too. It might be hard to have a big pool and keep it alive.
In theory, I think it might work. Esp with heavy caching. In practice, IDK. There’d be challenges for sure.
I dont think that would work. Not a programmer in the least bit but I’m sure Resist would recognize when a single login cookie is pulling and unreasonably amount of request from the website.
I was referring to your own dumb reddit account cookie, but yeah this would take away the whole purpose of redlib however it would still grant access to important stuff present on reddit :). It was anyway inevitable…
Thousands of people all browsing the site from the same account? Yeah Reddit would pick up on and ban that in a heartbeat.
There’s a fork that does exactly this already. It works but yeah it kind of eliminates the point.
Yah … I think it eliminates the point if it requires a per-user login. And if they try to put it all behind a common login, then brackled@lemmy.world’s point enters the picture. Reddit will cut it off. Or make it so rate limited to be useless for that.
There might always be some way to get a little data out. But it can become so painful, so limited, to be almost useless.
There is a fork that also incorporates small browser to scrape reddit directly. No cookies needed but UX gets a hit(poster names censored until opening the post, not all comments loaded at once, search not working, 403 errors).