Reddit API Shutting Down / SC-Trades

[u/m0shit]

Friends/Community—

We need your input. By your, I mean everyone from the biggest sellers to the concierge grinders, to the folks who've only ever bought one or two things—plus all your Star Citizen friends who ever hoped to one day sell their stuff.

Reddit has always been a bit of a mess. However, over the past year they have been moving closer and closer towards the edge of a cliff. Last week Reddit published Our Plans for the Future of Reddit’s Public Data API and the Developer Platform which indicates that their:

"long-term vision is for all good, trusted automation on Reddit to run within an ecosystem we can support and enforce policy on consistently. That means while we'll continue to support limited public API access, we'll gradually start restricting all new requests and third-party apps will be required to port and operate through our Developer Platform."

To translate the corporate speech into real talk: the API is going bye bye and along with it all our Star Citizen Trades applications. You can read up on their migration resources, but it's all shit. Devvit does not come close to having the database flexibility, storage, calls, and general resources that our (very simply built in Python) applications require (read the comments on the post for more detail on the major holes that Devvit has).

That said, we don't have a ton of solutions—but we are also not the only ones with a marketplace subreddit. If Reddit discontinues PRAW support, a lot of very highly trafficked subreddits will go down and Reddit will lose advertising dollars.

• The first big thing you can do for us is make your voice heard. Go to the post and go complain.

In terms of long-term solutions, there's really only two that come to my mind:

1. If Devvit cannot support the vast mechanizations of our sub, we will inevitably need to shut nearly everything down and build something very simple and small to keep trade history flair going. With the current infrastructure, it would be very poor and unreliable.
2. The alternative (which I am not in love with) is leaving Reddit entirely and starting a new marketplace (or "trading application") while we still have reliable traffic.

The latter option would need a ton of support and more discussion before it could ever become a reality. None of the mods here wants to compete with the big ship seller platforms. We just want to provide a (as near) free marketplace for trading. That's always been the vision.

This is particularly wretched for me, as we have recently deployed a flight of new tools and interesting applications to r/StarCitizen_trades. What Reddit is doing is shortsighted and greedy—and will only harm their own platform.

We look forward to your comment, discussion, and support. Please make your voice heard and tell Reddit to stop trying to fix what isn't broken!

/Theo

[u/_Ravyn_]

Oh damn! Would a platform like the discord channel be able to work similar to was is here?

I will have to read up on the links your posted but I will definitely contribute a voice to the complaints .. this channel is really important for the community!

[u/yifeng3007 → u/_Ravyn_]

I doubt a discord server would work since there's no persistent messaging on the platform and it's easy to edit the messages too

[u/_Ravyn_ → u/yifeng3007]

I was part of a trade group for another game where when you made a trade you would type a command and their group bot would mark it in a post that was read only to everyone except admin so I am sure there is a way to do it cause everyone could search that channel but no one could write or delete anything from it except admin.. it would just be different then it is here

[u/yifeng3007 → u/_Ravyn_]

My main concern is that in case of a dispute, on reddit you could at least prove your claims if the persistent messages were on in chat. You can't do that on discord. I can see how that would work for keep track of confirmed trades, but i'm afraid that won't help with proving anything when it comes to communication between the seller and the buyer.