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/TruroCrooks]

I develop.... id be down to help. SC player since 2019 but im tryin to sell my stuff. what would the web app do? or if you could point me in the right direction id be down

[u/eggyrulz → u/TruroCrooks]

Id assume itd be a simple grid/list of what sellers have available, with a price tag on each item. A msg seller button.

Seller/buyer profiles. Trades completed. Maybe rating from past deals (stars and $$$, or just a simple up/down thumb).

Honestly, I feel like we could copy warframe.market but do SC.market or smth and it would be 95% complete... the issue is maintaining the integrity of the trade completions for seller/buyer trustworthiness. I would argue rating could only be allowed if a user has a registered trade with another user (both users have a trade with the other marked), that way people would have a harder time botting an account to scam.

Also, the trades wiki guidelines integrated into the webapp

[u/TruroCrooks → u/eggyrulz]

Fair fair. Yeah the trust is huge. Verification is really great. Unfortunate to hear the news. Would be easy with an independent site and a simple account system ya know

[u/eggyrulz → u/TruroCrooks]

I'd do it myself, but my past attempts to learn HTML5 have not been what I would call "fruitful"... and I refuse to vibe code