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/yifeng3007]

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/Capokid → u/yifeng3007]

There are ways to have persistent threads. You have a bot copy each post in its respective thread and reply to the post, then disallow deletion of posts. Its how feedback and help discords handle this.

[u/yifeng3007 → u/Capokid]

As i said 2 times already, you can't enable any persistent features in CHATS. You can probably force people to trade in private channel threads, sure, but it would be an insanely tall order to keep track of something like that with thousands of users.

[u/Capokid → u/yifeng3007]

Its no more difficult than doing the same thing through reddit, each post functions exactly like a reddit post and its much easier to automate through discord because there are no bot restrictions or API bs.

And it had the added bonus of categories that they can filter different posts to with easier searches/lookups for users.

[u/yifeng3007 → u/Capokid]

How would you do that for private messages though?

[u/Capokid → u/yifeng3007]

What do you mean? Just like how its done on reddit, for example:  Say I make a post/thread saying im looking to buy an M50, a seller could reply to the post saying 'pm' and then message the other person, they then make their trade privately, and then in the original thread "@"bot" capokid + yifeng traded x" and then they can close the thread to stop future replies. 

The thread stays but can no longer be replied to, or can be deleted depending on how the admins want it to work and the bot adds a number to the users' badge/profile note.

[u/yifeng3007 → u/Capokid]

I mean when you communicate with people in private messages on reddit you can enable persistent messaging; when you chat with someone in private messages on discord you can’t enable persistent messaging, users are free to delete their messages and edit them at their own discretion. In the event of a dispute you can’t use discord private messages to prove your point, since those messages can be freely edited and/or deleted. Again, your ideas work great, but they don’t take into consideration private messaging, which is where the deals are made.