alt Hacker NewsAfter 2+ years of maintaining the FOSS lightweight Reddit frontend Redlib [0], I realized that my niche but extremely detailed knowledge and experience of using Reddit's endpoints might be useful. After reverse engineering the mobile app and writing code to emulate nearly every aspect of its behavior, plus writing a codegen framework that will auto-update my code from analyzing the behavior from an Android emulator, I can pretty easily replay common user flows from any IP around the world, collecting and extracting the data. Some use cases:
* OSINT (r00m101 just beat me to it by launching...)
* Research into recommendation algorithms, advertising placement algorithms, etc
* Marketing (ad libraries, detailed analysis of content given data not even exposed to the mobile app due to some interesting side channels, things like trend analysis, etc)
* Market research for products
* Sales teams can use it to find exact mentions of other products. Eg: selling crash reporting software? Look up your target accounts' brands and find examples of complaints.
Plus a few more with more imagination.
So I'm working on a site that allows user access to some of the read-only functions available here. Coming soon :tm:. Been really fun building it all in Rust, though :) If you're interested in anything here, email in profile.
Replies
~2 years ago, Reddit was cracking down on this type of usage. This lead to a mass exodus of users to lemmynet and other decentralized platforms.
What makes you special in this aspect? Seems you are small fish now, but if your niche project picks up steam. Nothing to stop them from cutting you off or forcing you to court/injunction and waste your personal resources.
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Is there any interest in factoring the Reddit parts out of the UI code? I've been thinking of taking a stab at that myself but figured this would be a good place to ask if you have plans :)