Github redlib thread still unfolding. From reddit shareholder letter,
And a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience.
Most on lemmy know the privacy and bot-infested dumpster fire reddit is. So it’s very easy to think good riddance. But that misses an important point. IMO.
Inspite of the dumpster fire, it also contains a huge body of knowledge not found anywhere else. Example. Many times I have searched for a super obscure error message and the only good hits were a reddit thread in a tech sub. This is formerly open knowledge, accessible privately, now being closed and locked behind logins.
In old web forum days, weird niche info was distributed all over. That made it robust. Big tech social media displaced most of that world. It all got centralized. No matter hjow awful their algorithms are, no matter how toxic, those sites do have riches of knowledge.
We ARE losing something, if open access to niche info created by normal ppl is cut off.
“Ppl will figure a way around” you may say. There is no way to win that fight in the long run.
There’s a fork that does exactly this already. It works but yeah it kind of eliminates the point.
Yah … I think it eliminates the point if it requires a per-user login. And if they try to put it all behind a common login, then brackled@lemmy.world’s point enters the picture. Reddit will cut it off. Or make it so rate limited to be useless for that.
There might always be some way to get a little data out. But it can become so painful, so limited, to be almost useless.