So am I right in thinking that the backend was needed to poll the user account in order to generate notification? Was that one of the issues that reddit had with how apollo was using their apis?
That’s how it worked, yes, but we went to great lengths to ensure that call had minimal impact on their end.
The TLDR here is that we only ever requested new notifications (give me anything that came after this thing I know about), which funnily enough then broke for some users, because if a reply you got notified about gets deleted and you use it for reference, Reddit will never return anything new to you, so I had to go and write a 2nd service that runs much more infrequently but does some checks on each account to make sure this isn’t the case.
I doubt reddit had any actual issues other than it impacting profits and no optimization to Apollo would fix it.