- cross-posted to:
- cross-posted to:
As we’ve seen in the past week, a large amount of users don’t care why subreddits are blacked out or why, they just want their timeline back to normal.
It’s understandable, most users just want something to “work” when they want to use it and don’t give any thought to what that means. We’ve already seen mods be replaced, deleted histories come back to life, whatever it takes for Reddit to make it seem “normal” so they don’t lose users. Heck, even some of those who have left Reddit may be tempted to go back and read / comment on things they see there, because Reddit obviously isn’t going to die overnight. So how do we continue the fight in the current environment Reddit has put us in while still getting a message across the users?
My thought is the following, and I’m putting it here because I think recent migrants are/were more than semi-casual reddittors, and it’s clear we’ve got some development talent out there. I’m a developer as well but I’m looking for:
- Thoughts on the approach I’m suggesting
- Thoughts on implementation / usage
- Overall feelings regarding this in general
The idea
Make browser plugin(s) and / or a website that [knowingly to the user] intercept comment post requests for reddit and stores the post content elsewhere. In its place, all that is submitted to reddit is a link to a website (where people can click to view users intended comment text) along with a blurb about “reddit owning your comment data”.
The browser plugin can also find these comments within posts and automatically query and get the raw text and replace it within a reddit page to make viewing these posts easier for everyone.
The idea being that the more users install the extension to easily read these posts, the more users obfuscate their posts so that other users also need the extension to more easily read comments on reddit.
Not only does this protect user data from being owned by Reddit, it makes it so Google searches will not find content on reddit.
Example post before and after:
(Unencrypted, or viewed with the browser extension installed)
(The posted content stored in reddit)
There’s my idea. A few thoughts / notes:
- Is this possible? I haven’t checked out manifest V3 or made a browser extension in a long time, but with what RES already does I assume this would be doable.
- Is it worth it? Will enough people want to read comments stored in this manner to “join the fight”? Who knows
- Should it store the comment data elsewhere, or just store encrypted text in the reddit comment itself?
Anyway. I know we’ve got a lot of ex-redditors here, a lot of very talented developers, and a fight still going on that deserves a next step from the users.
Open to any and all thoughts from. This is just a musing on a potential next step - I haven’t decided if I’m going to start developing anything yet.
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There is no point fighting. Reddit is a business and they will do what they want, even if it ends up killing the company in the long run.
Even if you could somehow “win” it would be a short term victory.
Much better to put time and energy into making the fediverse a great place. Then people will join naturally and the age of social media giants will end.
Technically, reddit could update their site to read from those URLs and display the contents directly - ditto with invoking whatever site or tool to decrypt the encryped text.
The 2nd part is stronger - since you agree that Reddit has your content, they surely are free to decrypt it and show it. However, the first might be on weaker group - since the content itself is not directly posted to Reddit, they might be more limited in what they are allowed to do legally with it.
I think the best of both worlds is possible - just have the link to redditdataprivacy forward to kbin or some other part of the fediverse and show the comment on here. So redditors have to at least visit the fediverse to read all the comments on a reddit post.
the idea for the plugin in theory would work perfectly fine
issue is that nobody is going to a) download a browser plugin to do this and b) majority of reddit users are using from apps, mostly reddit official app
i like the idea of having a link with a message that says something like “this comment is hosted off of reddit to maintain ownership of the content” and then a tinyurl link or something… i really do like that honestly
i wonder if you’d get hit with spam filter though
i wonder if you’d get hit with spam filter though
Once admins see that deluge of urls and sameish comments they surely will add it to the blacklist.
Without any kind of context, just seeing that comment for the first time, I’d probably just think it’s spam, downvote, and move on.
If I were still on Reddit, that is.
Even if it works at first and was legal, you will be fighting Reddit, who will be changing their page format in a breaking way faster than you can get your browser plugin to work again. No need to bring Reddit down, looks like fediverse growth is not slowing for now, and it’s all the people you want on your social media website. Enjoy this for what it is.
