Eight hours ago, admin /u/lift_ticket83 posted this update on /r/modnews, titled "Reddit Data API Update: Changes to Pushshift Access."
I think their TLDR sums it up pretty well:
TL;DR: Pushshift is in violation of our Data API Terms and has been unresponsive despite multiple outreach attempts on multiple platforms, and has not addressed their violations. Because of this, we are turning off Pushshift’s access to Reddit’s Data API, starting today. If this impacts your community, our team is available to help.
Essentially, Reddit is removing access from pushshift in order to take it offline. This will impact projects like /r/BotDefense, which rely on it. The admin admits this, saying:
We understand this will cause disruption to some mods, which we hoped to avoid. While we cannot provide the exact functionality that Pushshift offers because it would be out of compliance with our terms, privacy policy, and legal requirements, our team has been working diligently to understand your usage of Pushshift functionality to provide you with alternatives within our native cowtools in order to supplement your moderator workflow.
And they say that they are trying to work with users:
We are already reaching out to those we know develop cowtools or bots that are dependent on Pushshift. If you need to reach out to us, our team is available to help.
Personally, I doubt Reddit will be of any help to the many mods that rely on pushshift, or literally any deleted content hosting site like reveddit.
Users React:
There are so many uses for pushshift and ban flow/removal reasons are at the bottom of that list
The Admin who made the post chimes in with a downmarseyd reply
Not surprisingly, this conversation has spanned multiple teams at Reddit who are all working to ensure mod workflows are minimally impacted by these changes. We’ve hosted a number of calls and research sessions with mods prior to this but would love it if you could elaborate on how you use pushshift so we can make sure we’ve accounted for your use case. ? Tagging in /u/sn00byd00 and /u/Flyinglaserturtle for visibility.
A mod reply to the original post:
Users have questions abut their favorite removed content service
Does this destroy cowtools like removeddit? Because I use that website constantly.
And most people are just fricking mad about it.
Thank you for killing off a useful tool many of us use daily.
/u/thespookiestuser has some words for the admins
Let's cut to the chase here:
You expect us to sympathize with you over Pushshift, for some reason, despite the fact the changes you're making are going to frick up a lot of third party apps and cowtools that lots of mods (and general users too) use daily.
Well, we don't.
You probably do not actually care about this and will not deviate from whatever plan corporate has set out. Reddit will probably not actually see that big of a blow to its metrics, but I can foresee a small dip and a lot of mods leaving, perhaps protesting / closing up shop on the way out.
You continually fail to understand that you have staked the operation of your entire website on thousands of unpaid and unmanageable volunteers, of which you're now pissing off continually in half-baked schemes to wring more money out of the site. Even if this doesn't kill the site, it will definitely lead to a decrease in overall quality as the people who care more about having good communities are pushed out in favor of those who instead like seeing numbers go up when they get to mod more subs.
But it's likely you don't care about this either, because quality ≠ profit, engagement does.
This message will also be ignored and tossed in the shredder, like all the rest. The most I can really hope for is that the low level technicians and community managers actually give a darn even if corporate and shareholders don't.
Personally, I saw this coming since the API announcement
This is horrible for Reddit and it's communities, and only moves this platform to a bots world that we have to live in. I hate this. Frick their IPO.
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This is funny but i don't know why.
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Larson seriously probably has no idea why he made that comic.
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He talked about it in one of his books. He said his mistake was making one of em look like a saw. They were meant to be completely alien to humans.
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Oh. I had no idea about this
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The joke is that the place is called "Sneed's Cow Cowtools" which is clever in itself and quite funny to those with a mature sense of humour but what's really just hilarious about it is that if you look closely at the front of this store, Sneed's Cows Cowtools, you can see a line that reads "Formerly Chuck's". Now, this might go over the average viewer's head as this, THIS, is peak comedy. I doubt anything will ever be as funny as the joke about Sneed's Cow Cowtools. Are you ready for this one? So, like I said, the place is called "Sneed's Cows & Cowtools" and that when Chuck owned the place, well, I don't have to tell you...
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Neighbor you not supposed to answer. Laugh and move on, goddarn.
Ol' opinion havin butt. You the neighbor that ask for the manager because your the waitress flirting at another table. You the neighbor that puts political bumper stickers on your car. You the neighbor that watch 24/7 news and repeat all that shit like its facts. You the neighbor that squeeze all the goddarn tomatoes before you decide you don't want one tonight. You the neighbor that actually takes the darn surveys after a service call. You the neighbor that tell the telemarketer about how offended you are she called. B-word got a job! She don't give a frick about you, but you don't care, cause yo butt got something to say. You count calories for everybody but your goddarn self. You the neighbor that use a recipe from the internet, then put a comment under it about how much you liked it after you changed every goddarn ingredient
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Janny tears taste like nectar
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It's going to make finding drama harder tho.
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Hurts them more than it hurts me.
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I wish. Beside some power users, who would even notice the difference? I don't think your normie downy uses removeddit at all. And frick jannies anyway
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Gosh they might have to work twice as hard for free
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Guess it’s time to double their salary then
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I’m so confused, why would mods need push shift as part of their “workflow”? Do they actually need to find bad think comments that were deleted years ago to justify banning someone from their sub?
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Anybody who unironically uses the word "workflow"...
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Imagine having a “workflow” you don’t even get paid to have.
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easy-to-groom 13 year olds ain't gonna find themselves.
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Yeah so when you appeal your ban, they can check for problematic content in your past.
That's 99% of their use
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They got caught with their pants down when they realized how much they could've made by selling user data instead of handing out for free. Really missed the gravy train from the recent LLM releases.
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Web scraping is legal in the US, they can't do shit as long as content is publicly available. Companies are forgetting why they created open APIs in the first place, scraping is way more expensive for them, it's much easier to just send back json.
I wouldn't be shocked if the next step is for reddit to limit views for people who aren't logged in.
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Simple solution, just ask ChatGPT to make an alternative
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This is also the answer to "what happens if all the jannies quit?"
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Tbh I can’t help but wonder if killing bot defense is actually seen as a good thing by the Reddit administration.
The reality of it is that you can’t really be your true self on Reddit and talk about politics or ideas unless those ideas happen to be exactly aligned with Hillary Clinton’s platform and, by extension, Corporate America’s.
Anarkiddies and far left extremists used to be completely fine but we’re all seeing how reportmaxxers are doing, the right got completely wiped out as well after Trump’s campaign, they’re slowly pivoting towards a complete NSFW ban as well… Today Reddit is mostly useful as a platform to talk about products, hobbies and memes. Which of course is the point.
So seeing as the ideal user is the guy who posts about buying funkos, star wars and vote blue no matter who if it talks about politics at all… well shit that’s extremely easy to automate.
So yeah, no shit they don’t care about bots. No wonder they don’t do jackshit to prevent spam beyond some token countermeasures. Heck, take a look at /r/politics. They actively welcome bots to drive up user metrics. I would not be surprised if some of these bots were implemented by them directly.
The NPC meme was not a meme lmao, if it’s already bad now, after the IPO you either learn how to imitate the bot and speak only what Corporate America approves of or you will be banned.
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Can't forget the trans shit and leftoid agitprop from approved sources only, ofc
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Yeah, because ultimately LGBT and leftist discourse is not seen as a real threat to the system in quite the same way as right wing populist discourse is.
/r/anarchism, /r/communism and others never managed to frick up Reddit in the same way /r/thedonald did. Despite their ideology, their actions prove they’re quite comfortable existing in a system of corporate hierarchy.
Which may be the most ironic thing of it all. Far left sneeding is so ineffective and marketable that corporate doesn’t mind letting them screech their bleeding little hearts out as long as they keep pumping content and buying funkos. And when somebody goes too crazy for the legal department’s comfort and starts talking about punching nazis you just ban them.
Maybe if they managed to make Bernie Sanders president instead of Trump we may have seen things unfold differently but, welp.
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Communism is literally a system of hierarchy. It never ceases to amaze me how many people who have a strong opnion on communism don't seem to understand what it actually is.
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If you're saying it's obvious I never bothered to read far left theory beyond what I managed to pick up by internet comments written by the mentally deranged, then yes, you'd be absolutely correct. Why the heck would I bother to study an ideology that so very clearly failed what it set to do on all accounts
Regardless, I'd be rather surprised if the hierarchic system of this mythical so-called "end-stage communism" included doing a corporation's work for it for free, but what do I know.
My opinion on communism is quite simply that it failed, and that it's not seen as a threat even in a stupid internet forum about funkos and
s. If you disagree with this... Well, I suppose there's a bridge in Brooklyn I might want to offer collective proletarian ownership of.
But hey, have an upmarsey comrade
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The godless will be ruled by the making of their own hand
Trans lives matter
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Like that isn't 99.99847% of mods. Only the most mentally deranged losers, the ones desperate for any resemblence of power in their lives would do unpaid janny work. Though I do find it funny this person sees jannies as these great, selfless moderators and not petty egomaniacs.
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I will still run a bespoke small business op of reportmaxxing on targeted subreddits, will just need to make sure I archive before reporting.
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Anime isn't just a bunch of cheap American ripoffs of cartoons, it's art. Next time you American sheeple are watching your simpsons or south park or whatever mindless American cartoons that have plots, storylines and comedy, I'll be Admiring the wonderful and superior art of Chinese cartoons.
Snapshots:
/u/lift_ticket83:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
this:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
/r/modnews:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
/r/BotDefense:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
There are so many uses for pushshift and ban flow/removal reasons are at the bottom of that list:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
downmarseyd reply:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
/u/sn00byd00:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
/u/Flyinglaserturtle:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
This just made modding 100x harder. Thanks.:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
Does this destroy cowtools like removeddit? Because I use that website constantly.:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
yes:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
Thank you for killing off a useful tool many of us use daily.:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
/u/thespookiestuser:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
some words:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
Personally, I saw this coming since the API announcement:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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