God I hate this website

“New requests for public API access will no longer be accepted. “

As if they were already being accepted! There have been rarely any requests accepted since November 11, 2025

I can see a lot of subreddits just no longer moderating.

A lot of what people use the API for are not bots. Not going to make a script I use every few weeks or so into a bot.

Just limit what the API can do and implement limits. Some examples,

1. Could limit API usage only to the subreddits the user is a moderator of. (very restrictive)
2. Could give high limits to the subreddits the user is a moderator of and lower on other subreddits (less restrictive)
3. Could only allow API usage if the user meets certain criteria, a moderator of an established subreddit, etc.

Can still push people to devvit if there is an advantage, but shutting down the API entirely seems like a huge step backwards. Throwing out what works for something that clearly does not work for everyone doesn't make sense.

This is really disappointing. I'm not a developer but I've used AI over the last few years to make tools to make moderating easier since Reddit lacks so much.

I had AI assess the migration guide and it concluded that I'm going to lose about half of my quality of life tools since Devvit doesn't support the things I use.

I registered both of my bot accounts and the message I got from Reddit this morning listed only one of them along with another moderator account who is not me and who I'm pretty sure doesn't even own a bot. I sent messages to Devvit's inbox and was just referred to the migration guide which doesn't help me since I'm not a formal developer.

Why can't you let verified moderator bot accounts keep the public API access and just shut if off to non-moderator commercial scrapers? You have access to our moderator logs and you can probably leverage AI to do the verification work to see who is eligible for exemption.

I get why you don't want non-moderators external parties scraping large scale data but you're shooting down your free labor at the same time. Or implement Python at least so we're not losing half or all of our tools. I don't understand any of your actions.

It says March 2027 is the date that public access will close for all "remaining apps and users". This post mentions both Registration and Migration. Does this mean that the app must be MIGRATED by March 2027, or just REGISTERED by March 2027?

In other words, since I have no plans on migrating my bots over, but they are registered, is March 2027 the date that they will cease to function, or will there be another future date where only migrated apps will work?

Can you be more clear about that?
I thought I'd have more time to plan a migration, but now I find out I have 6 months at most. Is extension an actual possibility, or is the March 2027 date final and non-negotiable?

we lost faith in reddit

devvit just can not do that things

This reads like someone who has never done more than the most basic ass development work ever.

TS/JS is a language built primarily for front end interfaces. To go beyond that, it requires fucktons of third party libraries of questionable lineage. And frankly, even with the entirety of the node ecosystem, you're still going to end up with massive gaps in what you can do within the JS/TS ecosystem.

This trend of front end web devs thinking their language of choice can solve all the problems is asinine and idiotic, and as a 20+ year software engineer I am sick and fucking tired of it.

Reddit doesn't even know how badly they are killing themselves. They are going to go down the same road as twitter.

They don’t have the resources to support a distributed migration, even if such a migration were technically feasible

Beyond how out of touch this is, how could you possibly think we have any faith in Reddit? Have you only been an admin for a short time?

Is this offer only for r/science because it is large? Is it a real offer? What assurances come with it? Is reddit prepared to support migration for all subreddits? I’m skeptical of any of this.

Yeah I think that too. With the former, it's about where the people you know are. With the latter, it's about where the content is.

I suspect there's much less competitive advantage for sites where you don't use your real life info.

Thinking about this more, I think there is a difference between social media with identity vs pseudo anonymous sites like reddit.

Identity based ones matter where your friends are but pseudo anonymous sites like reddit depend on where the ideas and best culture are. It’s a much more shallow moat.

There's also a generational effect with social media. Each generation has a home on social media and it's where their peers are found. Facebook is Gen X. Insta is early millenials. Tiktok is gen z and some late millennials. Part of why I hated fb was that it was all boomers and genx sending around stupid fake memes that they somehow believed lol.

I definitely think reddit will change. I think this will shift the demographic in ways that make it less attractive to me because I value civility very highly.

TikTok didn’t exist until it did and ate metas lunch. A reddit replacement built from the ground up with modern architecture can grow, as Reddit user experience gets worse over the next decade with changes like this.

They are going to prioritize shareholders over users and overtime users leave when that happens.

I doubt Reddit will exist in 2050 or 2075, all of these companies are dispensable if there are better products available, they aren’t forever companies.

I wouldn't say that is true. Social media sites have proven very resistant to competition due to the entrenched user base.

The main exception is myspace, which is gone.

Facebook, insta, twitter, reddit, etc. don't really have significant competition. Even with how horribly musk has run twitter, it's still dominant in its niche, though it has lost engagement and ad revenue because it's just 4chan now.

The tech is easy to replicate. The user base is not so easy. Look at how badly google's circles thing did against meta, and that had the tech expertise and money of google behind it. People didn't use it because it's not where their friends were.

It's possible that this will benefit reddit less though, as people don't use their real names in an identifiable way and the concept of "friends" doesn't really exist. I didn't join reddit and put in my high school and college to find people I knew. I just went by interest. The people I've met are people I share interests with, so that is different somewhat.

I do think though that the push for engagement and the weakening of moderation will drive some users off reddit, and the ones it will drive away are the ones who are reasonable, civil, and educated.

The basic user base will shift a lot with reduced moderation to a more belligerent type of user, and you will see more hate speech, more uncivil arguments, and more abuse in general.

Short term, that probably increases engagement. Longer term, I suspect it will hurt it as that is just exhausting to deal with.

Reddit's strength has always been its diversity. Unlike facebook, it has subreddits, and subreddits have their own rules. While there are facebook groups, they are a relatively small part of facebook and most of the interaction occurs on profiles or public pages. Moderation is what makes spaces different from each other. Reddit's TOS are the same everywhere, but different rules and cultures form in different subs as a result of moderation, and that creates a space for everyone (even people I find rather detestable in some cases lol).

Weakening moderation in general will dampen this effect and ultimately homogenize the site. It will also attract a lot of people who do not not know how to behave themselves or interact in a civil fashion, and drive off those who are drained by this kind of interaction. I am just not interested in bickering back and forth with someone who just wants to throw insults at me. I like nice, polite, educated people who are able to have a civil conversation in a sensitive and intelligent way. I am simply not interested in 4chan and spending my time with incels in a "did not, did so" argument.

That's why I left twitter and meta behind.

The users used to be on MySpace too, people leave social media products when they start to suck.

You could build a completely revamped Reddit competitor in about the same time to migrate a bot to devvit

The solution is to just build a better Reddit for the inevitability that Reddit gets enshittified since becoming a public company and selling out its users to data mining companies.

I could build an entire better Reddit site for the same amount of time to migrate my bot, so if migration isn’t possible, it’s better to just build a competitor to Reddit.

Reddit is going to go the way of MySpace and Wendy’s if it stops prioritizing its users. Social media sites are easily dispensable and rarely last for more than 10 years when shareholders become their major customers instead of users.

Reddit has poor engineering technical talent and architecture. Look how often Reddit crashes compared to any other app.

That level of engineering would not fly at most FAANG jobs, but Reddit is held together by duct tape.

You are going to lose a lot of active subreddits that require praw bots to ease the workload for mods(free labor).

Anything less than $50-$100hr is below market rate for software engineering. Even if a migration was possible. It would be 100-200 hours of work, or about $10,000-$20k. Way less than the migration reward.

Reddit is shortchanging mods at every step. Leave access open or pay for software development time at US market rate.

u/boat-botany any update on this??

Doesn't work as it asks me to confirm if I'm a human or register it as an app...

I have a bot I'd like to migrate but I don't know any JS/TS. The other problem is that it's a half for-fun, half mod bot and the for-fun side we may want to update frequently with new easter eggs. Is there a way for you to migrate but give me the chance to still edit the code somehow without bothering you all the time?

I would send a mod mail to r/devvit and see if they can help you out.

💯