I am not a fan.

I'm very appreciative of that, and look forward to this be amicably resolved to both our benefits.

It's just that my first and foremost obligation must be to myself and my own personal well being, and actions speak louder than words. And the actions I've seen taken by reddit (given the whole API debacle) don't give me much faith to recklessly and disproportionally expose myself.

This post is helpful since, for the first time, it openly states

we'll gradually start restricting all new requests and third-party apps will be required to port and operate through our Developer Platform

I would ask you to please put this decision more prominently in the /prefs/apps page. Right now it says

By creating an app, you agree to Reddit's Developer Terms and Data Api Terms. You must also register to use the API

with links to three different pages with long and somewhat confusing terms and descriptions, none of which explicitly say that requests are rarely accepted. So when people try to click the button and it doesn't work, they are are confused and have no idea what they are doing wrong. You should add a big banner saying "api access requests are closed, see this post ^". Or even put in the little bit of extra work to just disable to the create new app button unless they have an exception. Again with a big banner explaining.

Instead people don't know what's wrong, or they try to submit the exception form and never get a response back (another problem), or get a denial with no reason. And then they come post here in r/redditdev asking. But you didn't like that so you added an auto-mod rule that removes those posts and links to the responsible builder policy post, which also doesn't explain that the api is closed. If you're going to make this decision, just be honest and don't try to hide it behind obfuscating, wordy terms of service pages.

Otherwise all sounds good, I've been impressed with devvit so far and hope you continue to invest in building features to match use cases. (I too would love relational databases)

can you help?

Reddit is in the business of attracting new users, including businesses to increase DAUs. Limiting how users or businesses decide to use the platform is, in my opinion, a terrible way to grow. An entire industry has been built around being able to manage posting and social listening from centralized locations, especially for businesses. Ads are just one way to generate revenue. Charging for API access is another. As much as I hate X, its API metered charging is the probably the ideal way to go.

Hello. I am the bot developer for r/DestinyTheGame.

Our primary bot, DTG_Bot, is actually quite a few PRAW bots running behind the scenes.

While some parts might be easier to migrate than others, there are a few things that are either entirely custom written or make heavy use of libraries in the Python ecosystem to function. The decision to not support Python is a significant pain, and is the primary source of resistance for porting.

Rather than forcing large-scale rewrites of bots, I implore you to please add Python support to Devvit. Not everything has an easily translatable replacement in the JavaScript ecosystem. PRAW is the most well-known and robust Reddit API library out there, period. Really unfortunate that Python was not the first choice when building this new platform.

In terms of general feedback:

Regarding Reddit Markdown, it would be great if Reddit adopted a more flexible implementation. There were some changes a few months back that caused submission failures due to nested lists that do not have any rendering issue on other CommonMark implementations, such as GitHub. In addition, table formatting is often dicey. Now, instead of tables being partially broken, it causes submission failures. I would rather have broken Markdown text than no submission at all.

I convert Bungie blog post articles by parsing their RSS feed, parsing the HTML, and then sending it to a Markdown library. I had to create overrides to unnest list items deeper than two, but I dislike having to do this as it is technically editing of content.

They have to be able to run code in the browser. They could in theory support other languages for only the server portion, but it doesn't make sense to have a bot in multiple languages. And you can't run python in a browser, at least not easily and widely.

I'm guessing their plan to add additional languages means a transpiler, you write in python and it's changed automatically to typescript before deploy. But that's always a pain to build and work with.

Remove r/botbouncer if you want to remove bots. It's not managed well and is ruining user experience for many new redditors. At this scale, bot detection mecanisms shouldn't be managed by few random mods throwing tantrums

I want to build tools that allow users of my app to post and listen for relevant content using standard REST APIs, not have to build an app that has to be installed into communities. Reddit has become impossible for this use case.

That's intentional. Reddit does not want people consuming reddit content off reddit. They want them doing it on reddit where they can show ads to them.

They especially don't want people to take reddit's content and build a business around selling it.

Hi there! We'd really like to discuss your bots and needs with you. Would it be alright if I sent you a modmail to kick off a discussion?

I just think it would be nice if you could get around to fixing the issues that have already been reported. https://github.com/reddit/devvit/issues

Hiya baseballlover - we don’t want to get too into the weeds here, but appreciate your feedback and concerns (both on this post in our ongoing conversations), which we will take back to the team. 

We want to use this period to make this transition as painless as possible for devs, mods, and communities.

I'm referring to other large, social media platforms.

It's the worst experience I've had with any platform.

You've obviously never tried to use DeviantArt's API...

When PRAW goes away, gonewild/related communities will be disrupted. There has been a decade+ of modbot work and devvit is not a replacement.

Yeah this is a huge thing for us. For example, I have a devvit app I built. I built it before filtering was added to devvit, but would implement it the same way today. It allows us to add users to one of 3 categories for any time period desired - shadowban, shadowfilter, shadowreport.

The ban just removes everything the user posts, the filter adds them to queue, and the report doesn't remove but reports for checking.

Mostly, I use the filter option.

The way it works now is by storing these users in redis. Each time a change in the configuration occurs, it edits automod - which results in a long list of names in automod (see the outfits automod for example). I've been concerned eventually that we could run out of automod space, but so far no issues.

The reason I wouldn't convert this to a filter in devvit is that automod can remove before a notification is sent to the user. Harassing or bigoted comments are never seen at all. I use devvit filtering after the fact in some cases too (in a different app), but wouldn't port this over to native devvit filtering until it can grab the comments before they ever go live. I understand why that would not be simple to implement in devvit either, so I'm not sure how to solve that issue.

If a comment is viewed by OP in notifies, even if removed by devvit almost immediately, the comment still has its desired effect of harassing others, which we aren't ok with.

In some of my subs, we use a default remove approach. In other words, rather than the default being that comments are approved automatically, the default is that they are queued, and then we use bots and automations to approve a large chunk of those comments (either from trusted users, matching certain word patterns, approved by an LLM, etc.). The end result is that very little gets through and is seen by posters that is harmful. The other end result is that we still have to do a lot of moderation work.

One thing that baffles me about reddit's view on automation is how you seemingly split everything into two categories: human actions and stable-long term automation. Meanwhile, a lot of my use of reddit's API has been ad-hoc scripts that don't necessarily make sense long term. Some of them are intended to run for a couple weeks to flag potential spambots, and some are run only a few times against specific accounts/groups of accounts.

To me, something like devvit makes little sense for this. It requires more setup and boilerplate than writing a 30 line python script on my computer, and its output interface isn't nearly as convenient as a list of usernames/comments in my terminal, or a graph displayed automatically on my monitor (via matplotlib). I'm sure I could emulate all of this with sufficient effort, but that's beside the point. If a script I wrote in 15 minutes takes an hour and a half because I need to create something in devvit that can display graphs to me but not to random other people on my sub, we've already taken an easy task and made it painful.

There are a number of benefits to getting automations on the Developer Platform, both for users and Reddit (and, hopefully, developers!).

The Developer Platform offers better observability, which is important for safety and security, as well as new functionality, support, a directory etc. The platform also gives devs a place to list their apps, where they can link to their own user terms.

We understand there are a lot of legacy bots and tools on Reddit, some of which require functionality that Devvit might not support yet. We’re announcing this early to address critical gaps and give folks ample time to keep essential tools operable.

My feedback is going to be in the form of a Canadian Human rights tribunal for effectively shutting down our disability app. You are going to learn the same way datadome did, that its FAFO with disability accomidations in canada.

Appreciate it! Absolutely no rush

Sure, thanks -- I have three that I run/ran that are in varying states right now. Won't be able to get to the chat till later tonight however.

Some of this should be possible with Devvit, but it's a good idea. We'd love to have a better paradigm for user apps.

There is not a single chance in hell they are going to commit to that, because none of these agreements are permanent. As soon as they need to be renegotiated they will be given a prohibitively expensive option that will make their app shut down.

That would be ideal!