I am several hundred opossums in a trench coat

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Emily@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoTechnology@lemmy.worldUnofficial Reddit API
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    20 hours ago

    Making a breaking change to the mobile API also breaks old outdated installations of the app. Websites and their APIs are usually synced, apps not so.

    If they were really motivated to stop your method, they could just obfuscate the frontend with webpack and break your scraper every time they make an update.


  • I suspect that any of the methods proposed here would be prone to a C&D, but IMO the safest legally would probably be the RSS method (not a lawyer though). Reddit’s RSS feeds are public, documented, and available without the need for private APIs, authentication, or an API key, so I don’t see how they could claim that a wrapper is unauthorised/illegal. Documenting their private API however seems like a gray area. Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. found that APIs are copyrightable, but this use may constitute fair use.


  • Emily@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoTechnology@lemmy.worldUnofficial Reddit API
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    2 days ago

    Is there a reason you’re scraping data rather than attaching a network sniffer/reverse engineering the official apps and documenting the results? Or map the RSS feed to an API? The main thrust behind my comment is that I think scraping is pretty fragile, so I’m interested as to why other options are infeasible.







  • Emily@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoTechnology@lemmy.worldI'm giving up — on open source - Blog
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    3 months ago

    This is the comment that tipped the maintainer over the edge:

    ayan4m1

    You should do a better job updating your documentation so that people do not waste their time like I did. This change to closed source was announced where, exactly? All of your READMEs and documentation sites do not mention this. Very easy to be confused and very disappointing to me that this went closed-source.

    Not only did you sell out, you also removed all the old versions that were released under an open source license so that others couldn’t continue to use out-of-support versions. DISGUSTING.

    tl;dr get off GitHub and npm entirely if you want to do the closed-source thing, kthx.

    Which is incredibly disrespectful in my opinion, and this kind of entitlement is what makes me weary of starting any open source projects.





  • Ok, so they do that. Here are some things that can plausibly go wrong:

    • Are the people posting the story funding thing anonymous? Because if they are, no one will fund it based on a one line description with no details. If the authors are known, any company engaging in the practice will be watching them like a hawk (essentially making investigation impossible)
    • The company engaging in the practice assumes the investigation is aimed at them and temporarily stops double billing until the journalists runs out of budget and everything blows over. They then resume double billing.
    • The company engaging in the practice assumes the investigation is aimed at them and consequently intimidates would-be whistleblowers into staying silent, basically preventing any progress
    • The company intentionally floods “Kickstarter for News” with spurious stories to drown out the item about them
    • The story isn’t funded because it doesn’t agree with the preconceived notion of enough users, who are only willing to fund content matching their own worldview
    • The story isn’t funded because, while people find it is important, more attention was placed on a story that agreed with the preconceived notion of enough users
    • What stories are funded have a huge bias towards the material condition of the wealthy (moreso than now), since they are the only ones with enough disposable income to fund content. Therefore, content focused on the conditions of the poor and marginalised is ironically marginalised
    • Unable to be subsidized by less prestigious entertainment content (like traditional investigative journalism was), the required upfront cost for stories balloons to a size not feasibly collected by donations
    • The wider population becomes apathetic to the platform as a whole (people have actual jobs and lives, and may not have the time to trawl through potential stories for something they want to fund), leaving only the extremely wealthy/powerful to fund stories. As a consequence the media is even more controlled by the elite than it is currently
    • It turns out there was never a story, and those that donated feel burned and are less likely to donate in the future
    • It turns out there was never a story, and, feeling pressure to produce something, the journalists intentionally misconstrue the truth

    I think a crowdsourced approach is a great idea, but only in the sense that my tax dollars go to independent news organisations.


  • Emily@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoWorld News@lemmy.worldDemocracy Dies Behind Paywalls
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    3 months ago

    That seems like a terrible idea. How are you supposed to properly investigate a story if you have to first disclose the entire lead to the world? Would this not create the same kind of overreaching editorialism that investigative journalists already push against, except now the person doing the editorialising is actually a whole pool of donors?





  • Likewise, an open source project can totally die if they refuse to engage with the needs of the users. The lack of moderation and content management tools have been a longstanding criticism of Lemmy, and instances will migrate to alternatives that address these concerns. It is a genuine legal liability for instance operators if they are unable to sufficiently delete CSAM/illegal content or comply with EU regulations.