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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  • 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.






  • As a moderator of a couple communities, some basic/copypasta misbehaviour is caught by automated bots that I largely had to bootstrap or heavily modify myself. Near everything else has to be manually reviewed, which obviously isn’t particularly sustainable in the long term.

    Improving the situation is a complex issue, since these kinds of tools often require a level of secrecy incompatible with FOSS principles to work effectively. If you publicly publish your model/algorithm for detecting spam, spammers will simply craft their content to avoid it by testing against it. This problem extends to accessing third party tools, such as specialised tools Microsoft and Google provide for identifying and reporting CSAM content to authorities. They are generally unwilling to provision their service to small actors, IMO in an attempt to stop producers themselves testing and manipulating their content to subvert the tool.



  • 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.