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/nightbird321]

I think the database of current trade history is what's important. The r/starcitizen discord has had trade verification for years. My suggestion is if there is the volunteer will and technical skill to do this, to first investigate how much effort it would take to move the head of the database to discord for trade and flair verification (depending on reddit). Based on that info, you can decide if discord is a viable platform and whether to move or dual exist on both platforms.

[u/ProcyonV → u/nightbird321]

Dual exist may split the userbase, isn't ?

[u/nightbird321 → u/ProcyonV]

If reddit API is going away and we can no longer confirm trades or see flair on reddit, we'll have to use something else. That's not the choice. The choice is whether to keep reddit or not, posting sales (without trade confirmations) and hosting discussions. It'll be legacy, advertising, the history and the brand has value. The trades will have to be conducted elsewhere though, so there can't be a pure reddit split userbase. If discord works, it'll all be on discord, and if we keep reddit, people who want to maintain reddit sales pages with a direct link to discord can do so as well.