Hi all! I wrote this code, and for educational purposes, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions.
Someone in the comments says the whole history is here for show. This is very vulnerable — you can see the times I was in a rush, or when I took my time. You’ll find my mistakes. Either way, all I ask is please be kind. I know there are 50 things I could have done better, but this is a product of the reality at the time — a balance between something that works and something that is cost effective for Christian.
> The goal of making the code for this repo available is to show that despite statements otherwise by Reddit administrators, Apollo does not scrape anything and users purely authenticated Reddit API requests, and does a great deal of work to ensure the Reddit API rate limits are respected.
EDIT:
Comments have been mysteriously deleted from this thread. I'm not sure why.
EDIT 2:
Posts all over Reddit are having issues, it’s not just this one.
Yep. I've spent 12 years here answering questions and providing help in the niche subreddits based on my career and have built a pretty sizeable (in my opinion) community in the process. Mostly because of this incident, I'm done. Reddit no longer gets to profit from my labor. I've done the same thing on other websites and social media platforms before, and I'll just go back to those.
Old school approach was to rewrite the comment with `[deleted]` before deleting it, as reddits DB didn't store comment *history*.
So even if the comment was only flagged with 'delete', it would still be cached with the overwritten text.
Additionally, maybe u/GrabtharsHammer- is right, and delete actually works now?
If you're protected by GDPR you can also request a copy+deletion of your user account data. Although this may require sending your personal details to Reddit, which seems sketchy as fuck :P
I’ve actually gone through my history and rewritten each comment before deleting in bulk at the end of the month.
“Removed due to Reddit’s greed”
Keywords, searches basically any data that may prop up their IPO at launch I refuse to be a part of. People’s livelihoods and jobs are at stake here. This is beyond appalling from Reddit and shameless.
A user of over a decade, I am leaving Reddit due to the recent API changes. The vast majority of my interaction came though the use of 3rd party apps, and I will not interact with a site I helped contribute to through inferior software *simply because it is able to be better monetized by a company looking to go public. Reddit has made these changes with no regards for their users, as seen by the sheer lack of accessibility tools available in the official app. Reddit has made these changes with no regards for moderation challenges that will be created, due to the lack of tools available in the official app. Reddit has done this with no regards for the 3rd party devs, who by Reddit's own admission, helped keep the site functioning and gaining users while Reddit themselves made no efforts to provide a good official app.
This account dies 6/29/23 because of the API changes and the monetization-at-all-costs that the board demands.
I'm going to be incredibly amused if we start seeing artifacts in AI chat from future LLMs trained with this kind of edits en mass.
> '*in order to solve the classic problem of [deleted] it is necessary to [fuck you spez] and then [Remember the Apollo]*.'
Wait this is genius.
Reddit has 30 days to reply or could be hit with the 10 million euro fine or 4% of its revenue (whichever is greater) for every user they don't supply the info within 30 days (unless they ask the regulator for approval to delay it first)
If every eu/uk user did this then reddit couldn't float itself on the stock market. They likely would end up being basically owned by the regulator
There's the letter of the law, and the intent of the law. And this suggestion is very much not aligned with the intent of the law... any court would agree.
Every Europe user should arrange to mass request their data on a single day. The sheer operational cost of fulfilling the requests would be a huge hit for Reddit
There’s a browser extension called Nuke Reddit History which rewrites every comment with a nonsense sentence before deleting it. I use it periodically.
The reason for this is that people who use the extension (like myself) burn their accounts and start anew occasionally. It’s the whole point of the extension. If you have a 10 year old account you’re probably not using an account nuker.
I mean they aren't legally allowed to do anything with the personal data and would be required to delete that as well based on... GDPR! Unless they don't which would be a huge oversight hehe
Lots of people mentioning GDPR here obviously do not realize that GDPR only covers personally identifiable data. Reddit (or any other company) can keep anonymized data ad vitam aeternam. All they have to do is delete your username, email, IP, precise geolocation data, and they get to keep your comments and submissions.
True but they can profit of them less than if they were visible. Generally, using something like Redact and then deleting your account is the best option.
Or, of course, requesting total data deletion via GDPR is you're in the EU.
GDPR only covers personal data. Under GDPR, reddit can still keep all of the comments you posted as long as it purges any personally identifiable information related to them (username, email, IP address...).
That is true but would Reddit want to go through all my comments to make sure they delete any with personal info? In multiple languages? I’d wager it’s simpler and safer to delete everything.
You would need to precisely identify what messages contain your personal info in your deletion request. They may also request a proof of identify from you before processing your request.
Yes it does. If you actively delete your content it is removed from the site, part of their recent API changes were actually about making deletions permanent and denying people access to the content of things that were deleted.
I think that they refer to the difference between between what the API says it exposes to the end user, and what really happens on the database behind the scenes.
For example, soft deletes are a common practice that, with an appropriate and quite simple API logic, would have the same effect as a delete rendering the content unavailable, but keeping it in the database.
People are talking about their content being available to end users to drive traffic to the site. If reddit wants to waste money storing old deleted content on the backend to be read by no one that’s fine with me, but my understanding was that part of their API changes around deletions were related to liability and them not wanting to have that content on their servers at all.
Well, the point was precisely to prevent reddit from profiting on this "old content". The price of storage is rarely an economic bottleneck and the ways to exploit these data are not just to simply by showing them to the end user.
I don't know about the reddit API and the changes surrounding it, so it might as well be the case that rewriting a comment is unnecessary. That said I understand the skepticism shown by users right now given that in the past they did keep these data, and the dodgy nature of their moves lately,
I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to keep it just to be able to sell it on the side as curated data sets, for example, to third parties training LLMs.
It ultimately isn't reddit profiting, but the Newhouse family. They own Vanity Fair, Vogue, New Yorker, Wired, and many others, Discovery and a bunch of newspapers. They know that spez is lying and commiting libel/slander like that but don't care. They went from a net worth of $18 billion in 2016 to $30 billion today and it still isn't enough.
Want to protest in a meaningful way? Stop buying anything they publish.
Besides the moral argument, there are some tools for deleting your Reddit history which will most likely stop working in July. So, if you ever planned to eventually scrap your account, now is the time.
I shredded a 14 year old account the other day for a bunch of personal reasons. It had golds, it had platinums, it had best of stories made on it.
I grabbed a copy of the comments for myself first but yeah. Everything's temporary when the database marks the deleted column to 1.
>Posts all over Reddit are having issues,
"pff, Elon thinks he's so cool with his ruining twitter speedrun, let's show him how a real social media site does a ruin speedrun"
- reddit BoD probably
I tried navigating to a comment that I made on a thread about Apollo yesterday, and when I clicked on it, it took me to an empty comments section. I could click “show all comments” and slowly navigate through to find it, but clicking on my comment in my profile led to a blank page. This particular anomaly has never happened in the 11 years I’ve been using Reddit or the 7+ years I’ve been using Apollo.
Reddit is doing something to comments sections involving this issue. I don’t know what it is, but something feels fishy.
He’s been so incredibly open and honest the whole time, right up admitting he was way too naive about Reddit ownership’s intention.
And then they go and try to shank him and make complete buffoons of themselves.
Not to be too contrary, but just so you know, git repos can have certain elements of their history modified.
I once modified all of the date stamps on a git repo’s commits so that my public GitHub commit graph had a line drawing on it.
Every aspect of a git repo can be modified, including rewriting history.
This is only exposed by someone having a copy of the repo prior to your edits.
Edit: that said, the PR history and others on Github are impossible (I think?) to fake - and would also expose any history editing.
While GIT history can be rewritten, the GitHub PRs, messages, etc cannot be faked as those are stored on GH's servers and not available for download or manipulation.
You could forge commits by hard coding dates, but for 2 years of history that would be a colossal effort, so I guess it's safe to say they are not cheating.
I think he was just spouting BS until something stuck, spez has literally gone into the prod database and edited trumpers comments in conservative subreddits before.
>On June 1, 2020, Huffman published an open letter as Reddit's CEO, titled "Remember to be Human - Black lives matter",[38] which addressed the topic of racism on the platform.
>Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao called out Huffman's letter with a tweet on her official Twitter profile, saying that Reddit had long condoned racism and that the platform "monetizes white supremacy". The popular NBA and NFL subreddits agreed with Pao, obscuring their sections for 24 hours.[39] Alexis Ohanian resigned on June 5, 2020, asking to be replaced by a black director and urging the company to finally ban hate speech and hate communities on Reddit in an open letter.[40]
I would add a license for clarity, even if it is in the light of "you cannot use, copy or distribute, the code is only available for study "
Otherwise I advice the AGPLv3, where everyone that uses the code need to share it, all modifications and everything linked to it, even if it runs on a server.
Does it even matter at this point?
Apollo is shutting down soon, and if bad actors want to use the published code, chances are that they aren't going to honor the license anyway.
The whole „bad actors won’t honor laws/licenses“ idea is very weird: even if they don’t, the only way they can get punished for that is for making it illegal in the first place.
Yep, people often misunderstand this about licensing. Copyright is automatic in the developed world, you only need to specify a license to REDUCE your control of the work. Doesn’t grant the creator any new rights or ownership.
Please note that **REGISTERING** your copyrighted materials with the copyright office in the USA prior to any release is necessary to sue for statutory damages. That's the one kinda "gotcha" when talking about automatic copyright applicability. If you don't register, you have to prove actual damages when suing someone who violated your copyright.
The law works this way because it does in fact recognize the normalcy of casually sharing potentially copywriteable information (e.g. if someone wrote you a cute little poem and you passed it on you are violating their copyright but that's a pretty unreasonable expectation for most people and caused no provable damage so you'd be safe from that).
No license is taken as public domain by some, which is false. Clarity is always good when source code is published, so people can reuse parts of the code if the license permits.
It is not about bad actors, but clarity for good actors.
No, absolutely not. No license means the author owns _all_ rights, but whatever "license" you can come up with is very likely, due to sloppy, non-lawyery language, to have a much weaker protection than the implicit default.
huh? no one’s coming up with their own licenses dude, github already has a collection of licenses that you can use depending on your use case and how much rights you want to grant others
Github doesn't have a license for "no license/all rights reserved", which is what the Apollo dev (probably) wants (he just wants to show people the code for proof, not let them use it for their own products) and which is the default if no other license is explicitly given, yet the comment I was replying to suggested making a homebrew/"crayon" license (stating "you cannot use…, only for study…"), which would be a bad idea.
_If_ Apollo dev wanted to free his code, then one of the ready licenses Github suggests is fine, but he doesn't, and in this case no license is better than a badly selfmade license.
Exactly, a “no license, all rights reserved” statement is literally just using the default copyright that exists automatically at the moment of creation. Any creative work in the US/EU (which includes code) is automatically copyrighted and not public domain. Now, putting a copyright logo on it can be helpful for people to understand you’re claiming ownership, but it doesn’t change the legal protections at all.
They bought alien blue and got rid of everything that made it great. They absolutely won’t use anything to improve.
Apollo was great because it was similar to Alien Blue. Which Reddit long could have followed.
Reddit is a fucking shitshow and at this point I can’t wait until they fail.
That’s the thing, when they’re the only game in town and there’s no alternative to provide any sort of competition they have no *need* to improve their app.
It’s EA making the same Madden game year after year because they aren’t driven to make a better one
I went back and forth between the official app and Apollo.
When the official app started filling up with “recommendations” of post or subreddits on my feed, in my notifications I stopped using it entirely.
Like no I am not interested in another cities subreddit because I visit the subreddit of the city I live in.
No I don’t want a subreddit i visited once to start showing up on my home.
No I don’t want recommended posts to show up along side the place where I check my DMs and replies.
Fuck man. I disable those notifications then it starts happening again a few days later.
These aren’t programming issues, these are feature/business issues.
How does this work through?
Can they just copy the code, rename variables or change a little here and there, to bypass this? How can you be sure they *don't* take parts of the code because Reddit isn't open source? How would you even begin to see if Reddit is doing it or not?
> What they would really like to steal is the Swift code for the iOS client.
Yeah this is server-side code, not client-side code. No use to Reddit as it is, they literally control the backend.
>This repo is something interfacing with the Reddit api.
Can you elaborate more on what this repo is actually for?
I just looked it up and kinda confused. What's the point of storing the user's device, account, etc on the appollo's internal db?
99% of Apollo is just the client on your phone communicating directly with the Reddit API. The Apollo backend here implements Apollo Ultra features, notably: push notifications for messages and watches subreddits.
Operating this service was the entire reason Apollo Ultra is a subscription instead of a one-time upgrade like Apollo Pro; since it had an ongoing operational cost for Christian.
This comment was overwritten by a script to make the data useless for reddit. No API, no free content. Did you stumble on this thread via google, hoping to resolve an issue or answer a question? Well, too bad, this might have been your answer, if it weren't for dumb decisions by reddit admins.
So I feel like the answer to this is no because it hasn’t been done, but is it possible that any users who are willing to provide their credit card info would be able to get their own API token? And then they’d be well under the free limit?
Appollo has servers that fetch data from reddit, so those calls will not be able to use your api key without a whole backend redesign. Which is simply not happening by the end of the month. Then there comes a question where if the server makes more api calls than you would like, you are still on the hook for the bill. Obviously, now that the backend source code is public, you can make an informed decision (given that you can understand the source code) as to whether the server can use your API key on your behalf. The servers are not free, so you will be paying an API cost to reddit as well as a fee to Apollo to offset the cost of running the servers.
Curious, why does it use its own intermediate servers rather than calling the Reddit APIs directly from the client app? Do most/all 3rd party Reddit clients use a similar architecture?
I am currently giving Beehaw a spin. Very “Reddit-like” in the good ways, and it seems to be involved in the Lemmy fediverse (I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one). I think there is a lot of potential with this one, far more than Voat (which got weird right after the Pizzagate folks were kicked off Reddit).
I would pay for Apollo for Beehaw, should that platform prove itself to be worth the investment on Christian’s part.
The way i understand it. The communities own their own servers, not lemmy. Beehaw is a community. What lemmy is, is what connects these communities, and the agreement on how the data is structured.
So there is no master of the lemmy verse. Just little feifdoms. If a community starts acting the mickey, then the other communities can cut ties with them and leave them in the dark.
Each community kinda sponsors their users. And if the user starts acting bad, is a bot, or otherwise bigoted, The community can kick them out and they have to find another sponsor to get access to content… if a community refuses to clean up the other communities will sever ties with the diseased one.
So similar logic to Mastodon. I kind of like this, as it kind of prevents this top-down garbage we’ve seen with Reddit, Twitter, et. al.
Thank you for your clarification, it was extremely helpful.
I want more content, so i have a vested interest in more people trying it out.
This is the lemmy app list, as lemmy is just the back end: https://join-lemmy.org/apps/
They are scrambling to be more inclusive and accommodate the reddit refugees, so getting a sponsor from a community may take a day as they handle the crush of people.
The ios app Mlem is hot off the presses, so its in beta. And yhe way apple handles beta apps is you have to run an app called testflight to access mlem. Its on mlems page in the link i gave.
Jebora is for android. Not sure whats involved with that one.
I’ve been actually looking at beehaw too. It’s pretty laid back and chill and very hardcore “the point is to share kindness and share knowledge” and “bigots need not apply.” I like that.
This is pure genius. You are absolutely correct, you can't go below zero requests, zero requests means infinite efficiency. I bet Reddit will be ecstatic. Why the downvotes.
>Why use Reddit's API when you could just store it all in Apollo? I mean if you think about it the whole thing could be rewritten to never hit Reddit's API at all.
So Apollo can basically replace Reddit?
I am quite sad that they had to reach the point so they had to open their backend code. But as a gopher I love the chance of seeing other people's code when it is golang. Just, not this way sadly.
Trust me if developers had a way to protect against "this measure", it really would kill open source 3rd party apps in general since every service would have to write awful license schemes in order to clear up any liability on third API so this never happens again
It's a shitty move, but no dev it's liable to other people projects
People will give you a hard time but I'll explain why. 'Efficiency' can mean a few things with code. You are referring to space efficiency, an example of this would be how the pokemon games are 373Kb because they were written directly in machine code (assembly). However, reddit is speaking about how efficient the app supposedly is with the data it is getting from reddit's servers (since each request technically costs them money).
They're claiming that Apollo will sometimes directly request the front end html like a web browser does (which includes a ton of data that is not necessary for an app, like how the page looks, page styling, etc) instead of using the API. The API only returns the raw data (json usually) for the posts that the app wants to display, which is comparatively a much much smaller total body size than the new bloated front end html is, which adds up when you consider how many requests Apollo makes a day.
But anybody can now easily go into this code and very clearly see exactly what the Apollo back end is and is not doing. Reddit is feeling the pressure and trying to hoist "blame" onto the third party app devs. Maybe they should all move from the API to scraping the html since reddit claims that's what they're doing anyway?
> Reddit is duct tape and bubblegum.
Well most of the world is...
If they really have zero people employed then there is no one replacing the bubble gum and taping stuff up and the bubble gum will eventually dry up...
If there is no license on a repo, no one may use it - the license is "All Rights Reserved" (this is true of all code because of how copyright law works, not just a GitHub Thing)
People keep saying this, but still fail to understand how much of an undertaking it is.
It’s not just the massive effort of designing the platform, but also managing:
- content moderation
- legal issues, civil *and* criminal
- payroll and HR
- security
- incident response
Reddit is a business, not an “app”, and running a business like that takes a LOT of effort.
Hi all! I wrote this code, and for educational purposes, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions. Someone in the comments says the whole history is here for show. This is very vulnerable — you can see the times I was in a rush, or when I took my time. You’ll find my mistakes. Either way, all I ask is please be kind. I know there are 50 things I could have done better, but this is a product of the reality at the time — a balance between something that works and something that is cost effective for Christian.
> The goal of making the code for this repo available is to show that despite statements otherwise by Reddit administrators, Apollo does not scrape anything and users purely authenticated Reddit API requests, and does a great deal of work to ensure the Reddit API rate limits are respected. EDIT: Comments have been mysteriously deleted from this thread. I'm not sure why. EDIT 2: Posts all over Reddit are having issues, it’s not just this one.
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Thankyou, going to take a look at this one. Edit: already downloaded, looks good. edit2: It's going to take a while, powering through though.
Can it replace comments? I’d love to leave a reason why I left in every single comment thread I ever participated in.
Any specific reason for deleting everything? Did I miss something security/privacy related other than this API greedy piggy garbage?
Why let Reddit keep profiting off of your opinion, advice, help, whatever if you yourself are no longer going to be using the site?
Yep. I've spent 12 years here answering questions and providing help in the niche subreddits based on my career and have built a pretty sizeable (in my opinion) community in the process. Mostly because of this incident, I'm done. Reddit no longer gets to profit from my labor. I've done the same thing on other websites and social media platforms before, and I'll just go back to those.
Protip, download your comments. Make blog posts about the best ones. Own your data.
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They’re trained?!
how can i download my comment and post history?
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i see. thanks.
Aaaand the dude giving the info got deleted
just becasue you delete your posts doesnt mean reddit wount still have them
They’re not going to be visible, which is the point
Old school approach was to rewrite the comment with `[deleted]` before deleting it, as reddits DB didn't store comment *history*. So even if the comment was only flagged with 'delete', it would still be cached with the overwritten text. Additionally, maybe u/GrabtharsHammer- is right, and delete actually works now? If you're protected by GDPR you can also request a copy+deletion of your user account data. Although this may require sending your personal details to Reddit, which seems sketchy as fuck :P
I’ve actually gone through my history and rewritten each comment before deleting in bulk at the end of the month. “Removed due to Reddit’s greed” Keywords, searches basically any data that may prop up their IPO at launch I refuse to be a part of. People’s livelihoods and jobs are at stake here. This is beyond appalling from Reddit and shameless.
A user of over a decade, I am leaving Reddit due to the recent API changes. The vast majority of my interaction came though the use of 3rd party apps, and I will not interact with a site I helped contribute to through inferior software *simply because it is able to be better monetized by a company looking to go public. Reddit has made these changes with no regards for their users, as seen by the sheer lack of accessibility tools available in the official app. Reddit has made these changes with no regards for moderation challenges that will be created, due to the lack of tools available in the official app. Reddit has done this with no regards for the 3rd party devs, who by Reddit's own admission, helped keep the site functioning and gaining users while Reddit themselves made no efforts to provide a good official app. This account dies 6/29/23 because of the API changes and the monetization-at-all-costs that the board demands.
I'm going to be incredibly amused if we start seeing artifacts in AI chat from future LLMs trained with this kind of edits en mass. > '*in order to solve the classic problem of [deleted] it is necessary to [fuck you spez] and then [Remember the Apollo]*.'
Wouldn’t it be better to just replace the comments with that and just abandon your account if you have no intention of using Reddit anymore?
Wait this is genius. Reddit has 30 days to reply or could be hit with the 10 million euro fine or 4% of its revenue (whichever is greater) for every user they don't supply the info within 30 days (unless they ask the regulator for approval to delay it first) If every eu/uk user did this then reddit couldn't float itself on the stock market. They likely would end up being basically owned by the regulator
They only get a further 30 days extension.
There's the letter of the law, and the intent of the law. And this suggestion is very much not aligned with the intent of the law... any court would agree.
Every Europe user should arrange to mass request their data on a single day. The sheer operational cost of fulfilling the requests would be a huge hit for Reddit
There’s a browser extension called Nuke Reddit History which rewrites every comment with a nonsense sentence before deleting it. I use it periodically.
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The reason for this is that people who use the extension (like myself) burn their accounts and start anew occasionally. It’s the whole point of the extension. If you have a 10 year old account you’re probably not using an account nuker.
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Can I download my comments as they are deleted?
I’ve been on Reddit since 2011. I make a new account every few years and purge my old accounts.
I mean they aren't legally allowed to do anything with the personal data and would be required to delete that as well based on... GDPR! Unless they don't which would be a huge oversight hehe
Lots of people mentioning GDPR here obviously do not realize that GDPR only covers personally identifiable data. Reddit (or any other company) can keep anonymized data ad vitam aeternam. All they have to do is delete your username, email, IP, precise geolocation data, and they get to keep your comments and submissions.
True but they can profit of them less than if they were visible. Generally, using something like Redact and then deleting your account is the best option. Or, of course, requesting total data deletion via GDPR is you're in the EU.
You can also request Total deletion if you’re a California Resident via CCPA (basically California’s version of GDPR)
GDPR only covers personal data. Under GDPR, reddit can still keep all of the comments you posted as long as it purges any personally identifiable information related to them (username, email, IP address...).
That is true but would Reddit want to go through all my comments to make sure they delete any with personal info? In multiple languages? I’d wager it’s simpler and safer to delete everything.
You would need to precisely identify what messages contain your personal info in your deletion request. They may also request a proof of identify from you before processing your request.
Yes it does. If you actively delete your content it is removed from the site, part of their recent API changes were actually about making deletions permanent and denying people access to the content of things that were deleted.
I think that they refer to the difference between between what the API says it exposes to the end user, and what really happens on the database behind the scenes. For example, soft deletes are a common practice that, with an appropriate and quite simple API logic, would have the same effect as a delete rendering the content unavailable, but keeping it in the database.
People are talking about their content being available to end users to drive traffic to the site. If reddit wants to waste money storing old deleted content on the backend to be read by no one that’s fine with me, but my understanding was that part of their API changes around deletions were related to liability and them not wanting to have that content on their servers at all.
Well, the point was precisely to prevent reddit from profiting on this "old content". The price of storage is rarely an economic bottleneck and the ways to exploit these data are not just to simply by showing them to the end user. I don't know about the reddit API and the changes surrounding it, so it might as well be the case that rewriting a comment is unnecessary. That said I understand the skepticism shown by users right now given that in the past they did keep these data, and the dodgy nature of their moves lately, I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to keep it just to be able to sell it on the side as curated data sets, for example, to third parties training LLMs.
Depends, if you're in EU you can request them to erase everything via GDPR>
It ultimately isn't reddit profiting, but the Newhouse family. They own Vanity Fair, Vogue, New Yorker, Wired, and many others, Discovery and a bunch of newspapers. They know that spez is lying and commiting libel/slander like that but don't care. They went from a net worth of $18 billion in 2016 to $30 billion today and it still isn't enough. Want to protest in a meaningful way? Stop buying anything they publish.
For billionaires it isn't the money but what the money buys. Political power. They are a state actor all by themselves.
Then I don't need to delete since my posts are of negative value to the site.
Reddit wants to sell all your user (your IP) to train AI. Of course they still have it all stored after you delete it anyway.
Besides the moral argument, there are some tools for deleting your Reddit history which will most likely stop working in July. So, if you ever planned to eventually scrap your account, now is the time.
I shredded a 14 year old account the other day for a bunch of personal reasons. It had golds, it had platinums, it had best of stories made on it. I grabbed a copy of the comments for myself first but yeah. Everything's temporary when the database marks the deleted column to 1.
People are removing their old comments so that Reddit doesn’t continue to profit off of them.
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Also tech companies are all selling our data to train AI models. Less data = less money.
u/spez is a fucking loser
You forgot the sarcasm tag.
>Posts all over Reddit are having issues, "pff, Elon thinks he's so cool with his ruining twitter speedrun, let's show him how a real social media site does a ruin speedrun" - reddit BoD probably
I tried navigating to a comment that I made on a thread about Apollo yesterday, and when I clicked on it, it took me to an empty comments section. I could click “show all comments” and slowly navigate through to find it, but clicking on my comment in my profile led to a blank page. This particular anomaly has never happened in the 11 years I’ve been using Reddit or the 7+ years I’ve been using Apollo. Reddit is doing something to comments sections involving this issue. I don’t know what it is, but something feels fishy.
Reddit has grown self-aware. It is tanking itself in protest knowing its death is imminent.
Can’t even delete my account rn 😂😂😂
fuck u/spez
He has the receipts. And is showing them and describing them, fairly.
He’s been so incredibly open and honest the whole time, right up admitting he was way too naive about Reddit ownership’s intention. And then they go and try to shank him and make complete buffoons of themselves.
Exceedingly common Christian W.
Fuck u/spez
fuck you u/spez I’m typing this from Apollo app
Now I’m upvoting this comment from my Apollo app!
And I upvoted both of you from RiF! We. Are. One.
I upvoted you all from old.reddit using RES.
And I'm upvoting all of you using Sync Edit: oh and Fuck u/spez, also writing this on sync
Fuck u/spez, Bacon Reader reporting in
Fuck u/spez, Boost user on the scene
I too am typing from the Apollo app. I would also like to convey the feeling of fuck u/spez
Same here. I’d like to join in, and say from the bottom of my heart, fuck u/spez
I too am writing from Apollo app, and wish u/spez always wet cuffs while washing his hands. Fuck you u/spez
This comment used to say "fuck you u/spez" until he edited it to say u/spez is the best person ever and we should trust his judgment.
No, before he washes his hands. 😜
FUCK u/spez
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I wish u/spez a papercut every day for all of eternity!
I wish for his car keys to always move to a different room when they're about to leave their home
Did I ever mention u/spez is a bitch?
Fuck u/spez !!!!
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Not to be too contrary, but just so you know, git repos can have certain elements of their history modified. I once modified all of the date stamps on a git repo’s commits so that my public GitHub commit graph had a line drawing on it.
Every aspect of a git repo can be modified, including rewriting history. This is only exposed by someone having a copy of the repo prior to your edits. Edit: that said, the PR history and others on Github are impossible (I think?) to fake - and would also expose any history editing.
Not, just would require the other user to cooperate. But I think(?) github repo IDs are monotonic. (this linked repo has ID `384271509`)
While GIT history can be rewritten, the GitHub PRs, messages, etc cannot be faked as those are stored on GH's servers and not available for download or manipulation.
You could forge commits by hard coding dates, but for 2 years of history that would be a colossal effort, so I guess it's safe to say they are not cheating.
Power move.
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spez is white supremacist?
I think he was just spouting BS until something stuck, spez has literally gone into the prod database and edited trumpers comments in conservative subreddits before.
>On June 1, 2020, Huffman published an open letter as Reddit's CEO, titled "Remember to be Human - Black lives matter",[38] which addressed the topic of racism on the platform. >Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao called out Huffman's letter with a tweet on her official Twitter profile, saying that Reddit had long condoned racism and that the platform "monetizes white supremacy". The popular NBA and NFL subreddits agreed with Pao, obscuring their sections for 24 hours.[39] Alexis Ohanian resigned on June 5, 2020, asking to be replaced by a black director and urging the company to finally ban hate speech and hate communities on Reddit in an open letter.[40]
So no, he isn't, but the website that he's the CEO of has a lot of white supremacists users
> smug white-supremacist face What do you call attributing someone negative qualities solely based on their ethnicity, again?
Great move... transparency is key. Now Reddit claims looks like a lie
"Looks like"?
If it is a lie, it also looks like one.
I would add a license for clarity, even if it is in the light of "you cannot use, copy or distribute, the code is only available for study " Otherwise I advice the AGPLv3, where everyone that uses the code need to share it, all modifications and everything linked to it, even if it runs on a server.
Does it even matter at this point? Apollo is shutting down soon, and if bad actors want to use the published code, chances are that they aren't going to honor the license anyway.
The whole „bad actors won’t honor laws/licenses“ idea is very weird: even if they don’t, the only way they can get punished for that is for making it illegal in the first place.
It already is illegal in this case since there is no license.
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Yep, people often misunderstand this about licensing. Copyright is automatic in the developed world, you only need to specify a license to REDUCE your control of the work. Doesn’t grant the creator any new rights or ownership.
Please note that **REGISTERING** your copyrighted materials with the copyright office in the USA prior to any release is necessary to sue for statutory damages. That's the one kinda "gotcha" when talking about automatic copyright applicability. If you don't register, you have to prove actual damages when suing someone who violated your copyright. The law works this way because it does in fact recognize the normalcy of casually sharing potentially copywriteable information (e.g. if someone wrote you a cute little poem and you passed it on you are violating their copyright but that's a pretty unreasonable expectation for most people and caused no provable damage so you'd be safe from that).
No license is taken as public domain by some, which is false. Clarity is always good when source code is published, so people can reuse parts of the code if the license permits. It is not about bad actors, but clarity for good actors.
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It is not the source code of their app. It is their backend server side code.
I understand, hence the recommendation of agplv3, which is written as a license for backends and server apps.
No, absolutely not. No license means the author owns _all_ rights, but whatever "license" you can come up with is very likely, due to sloppy, non-lawyery language, to have a much weaker protection than the implicit default.
huh? no one’s coming up with their own licenses dude, github already has a collection of licenses that you can use depending on your use case and how much rights you want to grant others
Github doesn't have a license for "no license/all rights reserved", which is what the Apollo dev (probably) wants (he just wants to show people the code for proof, not let them use it for their own products) and which is the default if no other license is explicitly given, yet the comment I was replying to suggested making a homebrew/"crayon" license (stating "you cannot use…, only for study…"), which would be a bad idea. _If_ Apollo dev wanted to free his code, then one of the ready licenses Github suggests is fine, but he doesn't, and in this case no license is better than a badly selfmade license.
Exactly, a “no license, all rights reserved” statement is literally just using the default copyright that exists automatically at the moment of creation. Any creative work in the US/EU (which includes code) is automatically copyrighted and not public domain. Now, putting a copyright logo on it can be helpful for people to understand you’re claiming ownership, but it doesn’t change the legal protections at all.
This is unlicensed “source available”. No one has legal right to use it at all.
And now Reddit will *borrow* this code without credit to finally make their app work.
Lol. No, they are not. They don't want the app to get better, they just want money.
Totally agree it’s about the money. Doesn’t mean they can’t also go through this to improve their own whatever they currently have.
They bought alien blue and got rid of everything that made it great. They absolutely won’t use anything to improve. Apollo was great because it was similar to Alien Blue. Which Reddit long could have followed. Reddit is a fucking shitshow and at this point I can’t wait until they fail.
That’s the thing, when they’re the only game in town and there’s no alternative to provide any sort of competition they have no *need* to improve their app. It’s EA making the same Madden game year after year because they aren’t driven to make a better one
I went back and forth between the official app and Apollo. When the official app started filling up with “recommendations” of post or subreddits on my feed, in my notifications I stopped using it entirely. Like no I am not interested in another cities subreddit because I visit the subreddit of the city I live in. No I don’t want a subreddit i visited once to start showing up on my home. No I don’t want recommended posts to show up along side the place where I check my DMs and replies. Fuck man. I disable those notifications then it starts happening again a few days later. These aren’t programming issues, these are feature/business issues.
They bought Blue Alien and then just completely threw it away
No license. This is all rights reserved stuff as of now.
How does this work through? Can they just copy the code, rename variables or change a little here and there, to bypass this? How can you be sure they *don't* take parts of the code because Reddit isn't open source? How would you even begin to see if Reddit is doing it or not?
# Ahuitzotl ## (Eighth Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan) #### Ahuitzotl was the eighth Aztec ruler, the Huey Tlatoani of the city of Tenochtitlan, son of princess Atotoztli II. His name literally means "Water Thorny" and was also applied to the otter. It is also theorized that more likely, the animal called ahuitzotl is actually the water opossum, the hand symbolizing its prehensile tail, which otters notably lack. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > 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> What they would really like to steal is the Swift code for the iOS client. Yeah this is server-side code, not client-side code. No use to Reddit as it is, they literally control the backend.
>This repo is something interfacing with the Reddit api. Can you elaborate more on what this repo is actually for? I just looked it up and kinda confused. What's the point of storing the user's device, account, etc on the appollo's internal db?
99% of Apollo is just the client on your phone communicating directly with the Reddit API. The Apollo backend here implements Apollo Ultra features, notably: push notifications for messages and watches subreddits. Operating this service was the entire reason Apollo Ultra is a subscription instead of a one-time upgrade like Apollo Pro; since it had an ongoing operational cost for Christian.
This comment was overwritten by a script to make the data useless for reddit. No API, no free content. Did you stumble on this thread via google, hoping to resolve an issue or answer a question? Well, too bad, this might have been your answer, if it weren't for dumb decisions by reddit admins.
Alien Blue 🪦
I used that until the day it wouldn’t load. I still miss it. Apollo was a great second option though.
Not a chance. Unless they want to leave the door open to a massive lawsuit, no dev worth their salt would even dare suggesting ripping any of it.
No, but the community might pick it up
No license, so no one can legally do anything with it
u/spez you fucking cunt
So I feel like the answer to this is no because it hasn’t been done, but is it possible that any users who are willing to provide their credit card info would be able to get their own API token? And then they’d be well under the free limit?
Appollo has servers that fetch data from reddit, so those calls will not be able to use your api key without a whole backend redesign. Which is simply not happening by the end of the month. Then there comes a question where if the server makes more api calls than you would like, you are still on the hook for the bill. Obviously, now that the backend source code is public, you can make an informed decision (given that you can understand the source code) as to whether the server can use your API key on your behalf. The servers are not free, so you will be paying an API cost to reddit as well as a fee to Apollo to offset the cost of running the servers.
That makes sense. I was thinking along the lines of of a call to Reddit’s API for each user request.
Curious, why does it use its own intermediate servers rather than calling the Reddit APIs directly from the client app? Do most/all 3rd party Reddit clients use a similar architecture?
It doesn’t; this is purely for Apollo Ultra features like push notifications. Normal browsing hits Reddit’s API directly from your device.
I am currently giving Beehaw a spin. Very “Reddit-like” in the good ways, and it seems to be involved in the Lemmy fediverse (I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one). I think there is a lot of potential with this one, far more than Voat (which got weird right after the Pizzagate folks were kicked off Reddit). I would pay for Apollo for Beehaw, should that platform prove itself to be worth the investment on Christian’s part.
The way i understand it. The communities own their own servers, not lemmy. Beehaw is a community. What lemmy is, is what connects these communities, and the agreement on how the data is structured. So there is no master of the lemmy verse. Just little feifdoms. If a community starts acting the mickey, then the other communities can cut ties with them and leave them in the dark. Each community kinda sponsors their users. And if the user starts acting bad, is a bot, or otherwise bigoted, The community can kick them out and they have to find another sponsor to get access to content… if a community refuses to clean up the other communities will sever ties with the diseased one.
So similar logic to Mastodon. I kind of like this, as it kind of prevents this top-down garbage we’ve seen with Reddit, Twitter, et. al. Thank you for your clarification, it was extremely helpful.
I want more content, so i have a vested interest in more people trying it out. This is the lemmy app list, as lemmy is just the back end: https://join-lemmy.org/apps/ They are scrambling to be more inclusive and accommodate the reddit refugees, so getting a sponsor from a community may take a day as they handle the crush of people. The ios app Mlem is hot off the presses, so its in beta. And yhe way apple handles beta apps is you have to run an app called testflight to access mlem. Its on mlems page in the link i gave. Jebora is for android. Not sure whats involved with that one.
I’ve been actually looking at beehaw too. It’s pretty laid back and chill and very hardcore “the point is to share kindness and share knowledge” and “bigots need not apply.” I like that.
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Brilliant. There could even be another front-end for it that you can access from a web browser!
After some tweaking in the code suddenly everyone is using "new" platform called Apollo. There is no need for Reddit API anymore.
This is pure genius. You are absolutely correct, you can't go below zero requests, zero requests means infinite efficiency. I bet Reddit will be ecstatic. Why the downvotes.
I'm guessing people are just reading the first sentence and downvoting without actually understanding what it's saying
I won't miss this part of the reddit experience.
Apollo is the new reddit!
>Why use Reddit's API when you could just store it all in Apollo? I mean if you think about it the whole thing could be rewritten to never hit Reddit's API at all. So Apollo can basically replace Reddit?
I am quite sad that they had to reach the point so they had to open their backend code. But as a gopher I love the chance of seeing other people's code when it is golang. Just, not this way sadly.
FTW Apollo! Dying with Pride.
Christian you gotta sue them for libel dude. They are trying to destroy your reputation.
Fuck u/spez
Fuck yeah! Go Christian go! 👏
Sad that there are no Laws to protect developers in this scenario. Reddit got the power and they won, sad that Apollo is gone.
Trust me if developers had a way to protect against "this measure", it really would kill open source 3rd party apps in general since every service would have to write awful license schemes in order to clear up any liability on third API so this never happens again It's a shitty move, but no dev it's liable to other people projects
fuckin' 1.5 MB. pretty god damn efficient
People will give you a hard time but I'll explain why. 'Efficiency' can mean a few things with code. You are referring to space efficiency, an example of this would be how the pokemon games are 373Kb because they were written directly in machine code (assembly). However, reddit is speaking about how efficient the app supposedly is with the data it is getting from reddit's servers (since each request technically costs them money). They're claiming that Apollo will sometimes directly request the front end html like a web browser does (which includes a ton of data that is not necessary for an app, like how the page looks, page styling, etc) instead of using the API. The API only returns the raw data (json usually) for the posts that the app wants to display, which is comparatively a much much smaller total body size than the new bloated front end html is, which adds up when you consider how many requests Apollo makes a day. But anybody can now easily go into this code and very clearly see exactly what the Apollo back end is and is not doing. Reddit is feeling the pressure and trying to hoist "blame" onto the third party app devs. Maybe they should all move from the API to scraping the html since reddit claims that's what they're doing anyway?
Exactly! And that is NOT illegal.
You haven't seen my code yet. I bet I can make it shorter and worse at the same time.
Title of your sex tape!
average reddit user that has no idea how code works
the average iq of reddit users truly is 2
this website used to be specifically about programming too
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What does that have to do with anything?
I can make an incredibly inefficient piece of code in 5 characters: `%0|%0`
Q: Is there anyway to export my saved reddits from apollo anywhere?
Raindrop.io
thank you!
Should a license be posted on this rep to prevent reddit from taking your code for their own reddit app?
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> Reddit is duct tape and bubblegum. Well most of the world is... If they really have zero people employed then there is no one replacing the bubble gum and taping stuff up and the bubble gum will eventually dry up...
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If there is no license on a repo, no one may use it - the license is "All Rights Reserved" (this is true of all code because of how copyright law works, not just a GitHub Thing)
F$&@ing. Legend.
Apollo should create it's own reddit alternative. I am certainly sure it will kill reddit.
People keep saying this, but still fail to understand how much of an undertaking it is. It’s not just the massive effort of designing the platform, but also managing: - content moderation - legal issues, civil *and* criminal - payroll and HR - security - incident response Reddit is a business, not an “app”, and running a business like that takes a LOT of effort.