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by anste 1072 days ago
Neat. I wasn't aware that there's an endpoint you could use to retrieve JSON data without an API key. If this project were to gain more traction, I suppose they would interfere with that, right?

It's sad to see that every free Reddit client is forced to be a browser nowadays.
4 comments
radarsat1 1072 days ago
> Neat. I wasn't aware that there's an endpoint you could use to retrieve JSON data without an API key.

Call me naive but in fact I always thought that's what the apps were using. One thing that took me by surprise in the whole fiasco was that the apps were actually using their own API keys -- I always thought I was just logged in to reddit in my own account. I figured it might be using some backend service for storing some app metadata but I didn't realize it was needing to communicate with reddit using the app developer's account on my behalf.

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vladxyz 1072 days ago
Based on folks using ReVanced to patch the shut down apps, it's an oauth client id that was specific to an app. Communication was with reddit's API directly.
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lvncelot 1072 days ago
The JSON endpoints are pretty neat, you can just take any reddit page, be it subreddit, submission comments or username, and append `/.json` to the URL and tadaa, JSON data. Although like you said, I'm pretty sure they will axe it at some point, and I'm honestly surprised that they didn't already.

I can imagine however, that old.reddit.com scraping/parsing layers will pop up left and right as soon as that happens (and those in turn could be the final nail in the coffin for old.reddit.com)

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conradfr 1072 days ago
There is also `/.rss`.
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qalmakka 1072 days ago
I think spez completely forgot about the fact they had a way to export data as JSON everywhere. That's basically 80% of what a reddit client needs and basically all an LLM model needs for training.
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jstimpfle 1071 days ago
Sorry for spamming here but please check out this -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36707252
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nicce 1072 days ago
> I suppose they would interfere with that, right?

They will, and go hard on it. Otherwise they are not backing up their problems and prior decisions.

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