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.
IMO, there might be something to that idea. It would have to be a huge pool, and it would be endless whack a mole as reddit etc get better at detecting automated traffic patterns. The more requests, the bigger the pool has to be.
Reddit is very good at detecting multiple accts using dev fingerprinting, which they could do here too. It might be hard to have a big pool and keep it alive.
In theory, I think it might work. Esp with heavy caching. In practice, IDK. There’d be challenges for sure.