208 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
View submission: API Updates & Questions
I'm dissapointed in this FAQ. The questions responded to are largely straw-men of the legitimate concerns people have, and still leave the largest questions unaddressed.
It is still ambiguous whether moderators will be able to leverage 3rd party Reddit clients as moderation tools for example.
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And if they break, we will work with you to fix them.
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Reddit is also covering hosting for apps via the Developer Platform, which uses the Data API.
My understanding is that the Developer Platform has major usability issues for anything but the most trivial bots, and also largely has no migration path for existing services that weren't written in typescript.
Per one of the early beta testers:
When looking at the API, the way we get all of the information we need, we have access to a fairly large amount of information. The Developer Platform, while it has its uses, is not designed with large and busy bots in mind. It's much better suited for entry-level 'learning to code' style bots that we see frequently pop up on the site. Issues from data usage limits, data storage limits (500kb! Our database in Blossom is over 1.4GB), connecting to services outside reddit (which we have gotten special permissions for, I'll give them that), and more plague the development experience at the time of this writing.
Comment by ponimaa at 05/06/2023 at 20:12 UTC
98 upvotes, 2 direct replies
> And if they break, we will work with you to fix them.
In this post they promised to help non-commercial devs. In that post they told the dev who they expect to pay 20 million dollars a year that they're not going to help him. So he would be paying for something, but it wouldn't be for support, that's for sure.
Comment by itskdog at 05/06/2023 at 20:43 UTC
12 upvotes, 0 direct replies
A little BTS context, if you might find that helpful:
The FAQ was originally shared on the Dev Platform subreddit, and began with a bunch of back and forth with in a dedicated Discord channel over the weekend to let people vent their frustrations with each other and highlight where people had concerns around the changes or where the messaging was unclear, so from that angle the FAQ is definitely more focused towards bot development than it is 3P apps. Comments were left on that, but it's not something that was commented on with us given the app issues are on the business side than the technical side, and the admins there don't feel like they're involved on that end.
I can't say much without admin approval due to the NDA, but from my perspective being inside the closed beta, updates are frequent, and I think it's good in this early stage that it's initially a single language so that features get developed and missing features and data are discovered and patched. As soon as a second language is added, that's extra work for each release and complicates things. Personally, I'd love them to add Python (and they even ask when joining the waitlist what languages you already know) as Node is causing me some headaches in what I'm working on, but I wouldn't want that in exchange for the frequency of updates to the SDK that are allowing for much more user-friendly bots than we've currently got with the Data API, though they do still have their place.
Comment by [deleted] at 06/06/2023 at 16:24 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
[deleted]