technologyRSS feeds were the single most useful feature of reddit that made it succeed with technology people long enough to bridge into the mainstream. Being able to turn basically any page on reddit into an rss feed simply by adding /.rss to the URL was genuinely the smartest thing they ever did. It was definitely a feature that came from the brains of people who are no longer there.
Reddit is limiting API access to companies so they can use AI bots. Why give away a public API when you can rent access?
I'm genuinely curious what reddit has to do to finally kill the site, cause apparently the remaining userbase is impervious to the concepts of standards, usability and quality of life
It really does seem like there's a mentally debilitating FOMO or "Stranded Japanese soldier on an island" situation going on with people who use reddit outside of porn
How much of said user base is just bots talking to themselves at this point?
50% bots, 50% smug libs
Critical support to in their endless crusade to finally kill
Why did techcrunch plainly state "because of AI bots" in the headline as though it's a fact? That's Reddit's publicly-stated reason, not some insight into their actual decisionmaking, and bots aren't forcing them to do anything. "Because it's profitable for them to do so" is likely the more accurate headline.
They already killed old.reddit last month to prevent people from browsing without creating an account. I bet they're doing this to target other reddit frontends like redlib.
tangental, I had an account recently declared a bot by reddit (and therefor suspended). It was not the usual "suspicious activity" suspension social media websites normally use to blackmail you into handing over your email/phone number.
it kind of just shits itself instead of making the usual captcha:
This definitely happened because I was using a custom app.
so I guess my account is kafka-locked? I already had one account before kafka-locked where it was suspended for no reason, reddit is demanding I verify an email, and for whatever BS reason it never worked.
also I recently tried to get a new API key for a thing, and the system is completely incomprehensible anyone wanting to do something as simple as "use API key, make HTTP requests", which is just one more way mods are getting shit on.
Surprised it took them so long. Also haven't seen hardly anyone (other than me) do as much as talk about using the RSS features.
As somebody who appreciates curation and control over the whims of an opaque algo, I generally adore anyone who offers me meaningful RSS support. In reddit's case they havent had anything worth subscribing to
I think it was pretty need what they offered RSS wiese like you could subscribe not just to subs or users but also searches. The reddit algo never felt particularly opaque (no idea how best works but new and top are pretty obvious and hot is still understandable) and with regards to the RSS it's just a chronologic timeline of whatever you subscribed to.
What is Lemmy doing against bots?
Mostly just using Anubis to increase cost of scraping. Hexbear only uses anubis on unauthenticated requests
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