Reddit not long ago announced a plan to delete all comments from a submission whenever an OP deleted their submission (ordinarily only the OP's post would be deleted).

There was quite a lot of pushback since the consensus was many comments aren't just for the benefit of the OP but everyone (in fact sometimes the OP doesn't even appreciate the comments they receive but are nevertheless useful to others).

So Reddit walked it back but it does show many of the site's users are conscious of the broader utility of comments outside of just the smaller contextual interactions.

I blocked reddit in my hosts file and have found my news through other means. Here and fark.com lol

Same on my local PiHole =D

It's worked the couple times I instinctively sought reddit advice.

Same for me on NextDNS

Not to worry, you can still search google/etc., which scrapes Reddit, or Reddit itself through its native search. No need to use an API explicitly to access content like that.

In my googling this week by far the vast majority of promising reddit links for my searches have resulted in the "r/[subreddit] will go dark..." message instead of the discussion. Usually only the first reddit result has the "Cached" link available. I suppose there's probably a way to force Google to use the cache for other links but knowing that there's a cached link available is already something few regular users are aware of.

> I was relying on a very light social contract that was in place there

This was never a social contract so I actually wonder how you or the original blog poster ever got to that idea. In fact, it's explicitly not the social contract if you ever read the Terms of Service of sites like Twitter and/or Reddit.

You're thinking of a legal contract. A social contract is what two sides do in practice in order to not piss the other off.

I know exactly what a social contract is, and it's always superseded by a legal contract (which the ToS sort-of is, though it would have to go through the courts if challenged). Given that the ToS explicitly says that Reddit et al. can do whatever they want with your data, the idea that there's a social contract there is wishful thinking.

> I know exactly what a social contract is, and it's always superseded by a legal contract

Legally sure, it is also legal to be a jerk but in most circles/societies there is social contract to not be. Social contracts are often built on top of legal contracts where you live by the social contract and fall back on the legal protections of the legal contract where that fails. Most ToSs and contracts with social media companies are one sided though so for the average user there is not much to fall back on.

I think why people use social contracts on top of legal ones is because it is hard to get all of the details right in a legal document while in a social contract is normally more flexible and can change through time with iterative back and forth and therefore can make both sides better off compared to if they just stuck with the legal framework.

Uhh... I really don't think you do know what a social contract is. A social contract is a temporary state of affairs, where both sides are benefitting from being able to implicitly hold the other side to it; where either side can freely breach it, but where this dissolves the social contract that held until that moment; and where dissolving the social contract will (obviously) cause the other side to rescind all benefits they were granting the other, and instead revert to whatever it perceives as the game-theoretic global optimum — usually involving local indefinite defection, to "make an example of" the party that violated the social contract.

A ceasefire during a battle is an example of a social contract. Neither side shoots until the other does. Once someone shoots, the other side responds with everything they have, to make an example of the side that shot first.

Not eating your coworkers' food in the office fridge is another example of a social contract. Once someone violates it, people either stop putting food in the fridge, or start petty games of bringing random leftovers dosed with ex-lax to work and leaving them in the fridge.

A social contract isn't "superseded by a legal contract"; a social contract is relied upon in preference to a legal contract. The legal system only applies when a given social contract is broken and dissolved by one party breaching it, thus leaving no recourse other than the underlying legal reality.

The social contract for Reddit, that did exist until it was breached, was "Reddit lets people consume its data for free; and in exchange, users act to curate and maintain and grow the data, rather than actively polluting/destroying/lessening the data." Now that that social contract is dissolved, users are doing everything they can to make Reddit a shithole.

That's exactly what I meant by a social contract, thanks for clarifying it so well.

I have these thoughts about the homeless problem.

Can you elaborate?

> A ceasefire during a battle is an example of a social contract.

This is absolutely false. A ceasefire is not a social contract. It's just bizarre to even claim this, as ceasefires are most often enacted in the context of ceasefire.. uh, treaties.

> Not eating your coworkers' food in the office fridge is another example of a social contract.

This is a better example (though still a very poor one, as we have laws against theft), and the key here is that a social contract is implied or implicit. Why would free API access be an implication of using reddit's service? Almost no other social media website does that.

> as ceasefires are most often enacted in the context of ceasefire.. uh, treaties.

Also known as "armistice treaties." (Where "armistice" is preferred, because otherwise "ceasefire" would have two very different meanings.)

Yes, an armistice usually causes a ceasing... of fire... at the site of any battles that happen to be going on at the time. But you wouldn't usually call what happens on the front lines as a result "a ceasefire." You'd call it "the battle being quit by both sides." During an armistice, both sides usually pack up and go back to their respective bases to be held for redeployment.

"A ceasefire", when the term actually comes up in practice in relation to "phenomena you can experience during a battle", does not usually refer to the ceasing-of-fire that exists as part of the enactment of an armistice. Rather, a ceasefire is used mostly to refer to a temporary, tactical Nash-equilibrium state that lasts a few hours or days; is local to a particular battleground; and is enacted bottom-up by the boots on the ground just not shooting anybody for a while.

(A ceasefire is usually considered an example of a principal-agent problem — during a battle, the known Commander's Intent is to drive your opponent to surrender. A ceasefire does not accomplish this; in fact, it gives both sides time to replenish materiel, and thereby "gives ground" on a war of attrition. But a ceasefire is a state that's better for everyone who's actually there at the site of the battle — so it can be held to by social contract of the people who are actually there.)

Mind you, the phenomena of "a ceasefire" doesn't exist much any more in its original usage (land wars), as land wars have evolved past the point where ceasefires are feasible, due to the introduction of over-the-top raids, guerilla warfare, precision drone strikes, and other approaches designed to punish stillness and allow top-down enforcement of bottom-level participation. Ceasefires still come up pretty often in naval combat, though! (And they can also still come up in land wars in edge-case situations when a particular land-war battle has the properties of a naval battle — e.g. if two strike forces of armored vehicles meet.)

---

I should mention, as well, that there can be ceasing-of-fire during an armistice, where both sides continue to just sit there guarding the lines they had established for the whole armistice period. This is the case mostly for wars of conquest being fought to claim scraps of land inch by inch. (There's a well-known one of those going on right now, in fact.)

During an armistice in this kind of war, the zone between the previous front lines of each side will stay watched, to make sure neither side "slips" the lines forward a bit in the other's absence. This creates a No Man's Land [or eventually a Demilitarized Zone], where both sides agree that no one from either side may enter as long as the armistice holds. (A good example of such a No Man's Land / DZ exists between North and South Korea, which have maintained such an armistice for decades now.)

The soldiers posted to guard a No Man's Land / DZ aren't usually the same soldiers used for combat — so for the soldiers who were on the front, they do still experience the armistice as "and then we were picked up and taken back home." The ceasing-of-fire is just one step in that higher-level "clocking out" process.

(The only time you'll have the same soldiers sitting there during an armistice that were originally delivered there to fight the battle, is if the armistice period isn't expected to last very long. And even then, only if both sides are willing to "tip their hand" to reveal their lack-of-confidence in how long the armistice will last.)

"Why would free API access be an implication of using reddit's service?"

Because they offered free API access for 17 years.

Same way Heroku breached a social contract when they got rid of their free tier: if you offer something like that for more than a decade, people will reasonably expect it to continue and will be angry with you if you pull the rug on them.

> Same way Heroku breached a social contract when they got rid of their free tier: if you offer something like that for more than a decade, people will reasonably expect it to continue and will be angry with you if you pull the rug on them.

That's not a social contract, it's the definition of entitlement. By no interpretation is it reasonable to expect anybody to offer a free service indefinitely. Thinking otherwise is just a form of social parasitism that strips the host of its own agency, because they were dumb enough to make a handshake agreement decades ago.

Like decrying your favorite band for "selling out" and evolving with the times. You'd rather they only make music a diminishing fanbase wants, until they starve?

Even child support agreements can be renegotiated every 3 years and last up to 21 years at most if your ex's attorney is particularly conniving. You likely renegotiate your own salary every 1-3 years as well. Reddit stuck to their end of the agreement for 17 years (already impressive for anything in tech!), it's now untenable, but fuck them for not going insolvent.

Only the generations raised with the internet seem to have the expectation that if you offer anything for free, you're expected to continue doing so forever even if it kills you.

You’re thinking about standard ceasefires. I’m not the parent posters, but the Christmas truce of 1914 was done IN SPITE of orders to keep fighting between both sides.

I’m guessing that was what they were referring to.

International law in general is more like a social contract than a legal contract since there is very limited recourse to enforce it against violators other than rounding up a bunch of other countries and getting them to agree to enact a punishment.

I get what simonw is saying though.

Reddit: We could sell API access to your answers, per our TOS

reddit poster: k

Reddit: We're gonna sell API access to your answers, per our TOS

reddit poster: then nevermind

Both have a superseding TOS but the social contract is still appreciable

> wishful thinking

It remains to be seen who is thinking wishfully. If Reddit dies because their users all go away, there really may have been a social contract which Reddit breached. Reddit has a ToS which may attempt to supersede such a social contract but it doesn't necessarily.

The legal contract states that Reddit can do what it wants with the data, yes, but there is no consideration for production. That is where the social contract takes over.

The social contract states (allegedly, at least; we shall see) that producers agree to produce content in perpetuity so long as Reddit plays nice with the data. With that contract broken, production may cease.

I think you're confusing the term "social contract" with "oral contract." An oral contract will usually be superseded by a written contract, but saying a written contract supersedes a social contract seems like a category error. One determines your legal standing, the other determines your social standing, neither really supersedes the other.

There’s still a social contract that is supra the ToS: treat me and my contributions well and we will stick around. Stop, and we won’t.

Yes, Reddit can (try, at least) get away with anything they claim in the ToS — but community members have every right to step away and render Reddit valueless because they have been told that they are not valued.

Pretending that a legal contract supersedes a social contract is wishful thinking. They are orthogonal.

You are thinking of a social agreement often called a “handshake agreement” or “verbal agreement”. Yes a verbal or social agreement at law is often superceded by a written agreement mainly because there’s a specific common clause in written agreements that say exactly this.

The above legal concept is distinct from the term “social contract” that is a sociological term and has a wider definition that a mere legal meaning. Most of our laws are intended to capture concepts that have wider social and cultural relevance to the society to which they apply.

“Marriage” by example is a term with both a distinct legal meaning in many legal jurisdictions as well as a wider sociological conception that can vary from culture to culture.

> things like answers to simple questions people have about SQLite

What about just to answer the guy who had the question?

A little inconvenient but you could Ask/answer it on stack overflow and then link it in the reddit reply?

Stack Overflow is under a moderator strike at the moment too! The company has disabled the data dumps of the content after a recent layoff.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390106/moderation-s...

I predict that all sites like this which thrive on community generated content will be getting rid of apis and bulk exports. This is because ai companies have used those tools to build their systems on data that prevents the need to the source website. This is an existential threat to sites like StackOverflow and a huge, missed opportunity for reddit.

AI companies can just scrape the content, and since the sites don't have an exclusive license to it (it's user-generated, after all) there is little they can do against that.

Actually, I'm not even sure the AI companies don't do this already. If I'd start such a company, I'd invest in a generic crawler once, instead of building countless integrations for all the different, proprietary APIs or dump formats.

Can someone explain to me why Reddit can't have different price tiers for their API service? Why can't they charge people who want to scrape en masse (LLM trainers) 10-100x more than mobile app API users?

Absolutely nothing.

I don't understand why they don't just support OAuth and then the api usage would be by user, not by the app itself.

Otherwise apps like apollo technically would be some of the biggest "users" of the api.

What's wild to me isn't just the amount, it's the lack of time. In theory APollo might have enough users will to pay enough for them to profit (albiet with a fraction of the users). But because there's no time, and because people bought year long subscriptions, he's stuck with his subscribers paying less then their operating cost.

> I don't understand why they don't just support OAuth

OAuth breaks peoples brains and I can only imagine the tech / political debt reddit has

Isn't this why people are upset? It's pretty transparently them giving the axe to third party apps when they explicitly said that wasn't what they were going to be doing. People don't like being lied to or treated like they're too stupid to know what you're actually doing.

I figured because they don't want 3rd party apps because they don't run ads for Reddit. Reddit wants users within their (soon to be) walled garden getting fed all of the monetization pressure systems.

My take when Reddit said that Apollo cost them $20M a year, they weren't talking running costs but revenue potential because Apollo doesn't feed ads to its users.

Hopefully someone has the link, but I heard that the lost revenue from ads is significantly lower than the $20 million bill.

I don’t understand, if API apps not displaying ads is the problem, why Reddit doesn’t include ads in the feed and make displaying them part of the terms for access. They could even have a revenue sharing agreement with the app developers.

This implies that the Reddit administration thinks things through. They have a track record proving they indeed do not.

I wonder how we've ended up in a situation with so many petulant tyrants running amok over previously green fields of humanity?

Elon, Zuck, Bezos, Trump, Gates, Putin and now Reddit, all in the last 5-7 years have been doing things that are user or human hostile while holding some segment of our society hostage in the process.

Elon throwing a 42 billion dollar Twitter hissyfit, Bezos using Amazon's money and connections to lock sellers into their platform and then undercut them with cheap knockoffs, plus underpaying their front line employees as if they don't have enough money already, Trump with turning seemingly normal Republicans into walking cesspools of hate, Gates with the Windows 10/11 privacy and user right shitstorm, and now Reddit redlining their greed and attacking the users and apps that actually makes their site function while not offering any equivalent alternative, Putin tanking the entire country's human reserves and financial strengths to try to vaingloriously steal back a few hundred square miles of land.

All of these things happening in the same bundle of years makes me want to believe in Aliens or Armageddon or the Illuminati or something, because I can't bring myself to believe that the most powerful people in the world would be so selfishly stupid.

Selfish, yes, stupid, yes, but selfishly stupid? When they are surrounded by so many people whose life and lineage and future history depends on the glamorous and glowing successes of these people? And they all ignore all of them and do stupid things with no one checking their ego even the slightest?

How is that possible without an unseen third hand pulling the strings?

I don't know, and I don't think I believe there is something like that, but I suspect there is, and I can't shake that suspicion either.

AFAIK Gates has almost nothing to do with Windows these days, but yeah I see your point.

That’s exactly how it works today, Apollo logs into Reddit as you via OAuth. When you add an account you follow a pretty standard OAuth flow (Apollo sends you to Reddit, you log in, Reddit asks you to authenticate Apollo, then sends you back). But Reddit knows it’s you, and they know you’re using Apollo.

In fact heres the post where Apollo switched to OAuth some years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/44rd9g/apollo_be...

Because why would anyone pay that, when you can just do what search engines do and crawl the site for the data?

They don't want 3rd party mobile apps. That's it. It's entirely transparent, to the point that I really don't understand why Reddit doesn't just say it.

Really? The average discussion on Reddit/StackOverflow/etc is full of wrong answers and it is hit or miss if the "accepted" answer is correct, never mind any of the other ones. These sites are a great model for convincing bullshit but if you wanted something worth training an A.I. you'd need to filter out 90% of the content.

Sadly very true. Most threads are very comparable to ChatGPT 3.5. I think one could recreate Reddit mostly with a LLM.

Yea, the future of public discussions online is interesting to consider. LLM bots are already a thing, comments posted here could be from a bot. We don't have a way to really confirm it, and I am not sure it actually matters (yet).

Reddit probably was a pretty big part of LLM training data. It has a vast trove of conversation on niche topics, and pairings of "what is said in response to input X". Probably the monetisation of the API is an attempt to capitalize on those users.

Fortunately /r/SubredditSimulator has been a thing for a while https://www.engadget.com/2019-06-05-subreddit-simulator-gpt-...

My experience is that it is a good source for leads on things to do but not for convincing facts. And an LLM is good for that too. I still end up needing both.

An example of something is someone posting that their AKG headphones will only charge on the USB-C plug if the other end is USB-A. I couldn't get mine to charge, and that was the answer. That answer existed only on Reddit, until recently when someone had that same problem on another forum.

Thanks for articulating what I meant by the social contract, Simon. I feel the same way, which is why I wrote the post.

General reply to other comments: y'all are right, the post is short and doesn't flesh out all the arguments necessary. But I think I captured the spirit of something about how we, the creators on the Internet, feel about the bargain we strike when we invest in sites like Reddit or Twitter or indeed, Hacker News here.

The funny thing to me is this sort of expectation that a site/app that accepts user contributed content must provide access to it other than the site/app it was submitted.

I assume that most sites won't do that - so I don't invest much of my time and effort in most sites.

Reddit had 17 years of track record of providing access, which had eventually bought my trust. They're setting that trust on fire right now.

I stipulate that a 30 day notice for a major change from something that has been available for 17 years is pretty egregious. However, I'm still of the mind that when you build a company/product that 100% depends on a 3rd party existing or allowing one to play in their playground, these are the exact situations that can arise. You have to know that at some point, if the dependency is no longer available, neither is your product regardless of the reason for the lack of availability. That's just how it goes. Yes, it sucks to have the product of your blood, sweat, tears get invalidated, but that is where you chose to put that effort while knowing the caveats

Sure, and that's why I haven't built a commercial product on top of Reddit.

(I actually did run a startup on top of Twitter's API between 2010-2013 - I'm VERY glad not to have to worry about that any more!)

I'm not talking about this in terms of being an app developer: I'm talking about it in terms of being a regular user posting content on the site.

If you rug-pull my expectations on access to that data in the future, don't be surprised if I find somewhere else to spend my time.

Sorry, with all of the recent Reddit 3rd party apps threads, I've crossed the streams with your case of just submitting content rather than being a 3rd party app

Ignore the app developers for a second.

What reddit is doing is horrible for the users. Reddit benefitted massively from 3rd party apps making it easier for users to contribute, comment, moderate, etc. Without those users' efforts the platform is worthless. That is the issue here.

So are you saying that because I submitted a lot of reddit comments through Apollo I should also be able to access them through Apollo? Because that's a statement I would agree with but I'm not sure it's what you meant.

Same. I usually spend a few hours a week helping people with 3d printer issues and since all this has blown up I have just ignored it all. Not worth putting that knowledge into Reddit and toying with deleting that which I have contributed already.

It would be much better if this knowledge was available elsewhere for other souls to peruse. Say, maybe, a blog?

I do have it cross-posted to my blog actually, and have my downloadable profiles there.

> Why should I work to benefit their service if they're hoarding the resulting data and not making it available to me or people like me in the future?

This I believe is generally called "digital sharecropping" https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634

> What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative.

Aggregation theory: https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/

Please explain to me where Reddit is no longer free for Joe Consumer?

It's the subreddit mods who are making the data inaccessible to you, NOT Reddit.

"It's the striking coal miners who are making heat inaccessible to you, NOT the mine owner"

Imagine comparing coal miners to the equivalent of internet janitors who volunteer to work for free as long as they get their share of petty power.

Tons of them are basically just protesting since they won't be able to exert said petty power as efficiently as they used to.

I can't imagine getting to a point where I'd defend Reddit powermods, even over spez himself. But even in your very shaky analogy, the mods are at worse the petty bourgeois, not some sort of proletariat of Reddit wtf.

How are they bougie? They have no ownership over the means of production or financial stake in the success of Reddit. If Spez IPOs Reddit to the moon, do the mods get a taste? At most (from a class perspective), they are the thin layer of floor management that the site relies on the function - those people are still prole labor.

Yes, yes, Reddit is no where near as bad as a coal mine, that's why it's an analogy.

> I can't imagine getting to a point where I'd defend Reddit powermods, even over spez himself.

Why not? Workers vs. Capital, if you can't side with the workers, then you are siding with the moneyed interests, and I can't figure why an average person would do such a thing.

I'm not siding with the admins, to be clear. I really really dislike how Reddit has been run. Always been a shithole, one way or the other.

But I also think that powermods are a net negative for the website and have turned moderation on Reddit into a joke.

At the end of the day I think users are the "proles" here. And most of them just want to use Reddit for things like tech support or purchasing advice or discussing video games.

That a few mods are able to take ownership of communities that aren't theirs (the community is the users, not the mods imo) and close them down is pretty meh.

I personally would never use Reddit once RiF stops working (and I mean it, I can't even get myself to use the old Reddit interface).

But this is a weird temper tantrum imo that is typical of Reddit; a very tiny minority of third party apps users and even commercial third party app devs shutting down stuff that isn't theirs because they dont have it their way. Again, basically 90% of users just use the new Reddit app and website sadly enough.

It will no longer be free to browse how you like. You will be forced to use Reddit's Apps, Reddit's website, etc. Along with the tracking and restrictions that they impose (Future removal of NSFW is an example of a restriction).

The people working for free are the villains, not the multibillion dollar corporation.

Got it, thanks.

Are they a multibillion dollar corporation though? I know they have had crazy valuation's, but we are moving past a time of value based on eyeballs and to a time of value based on monetization. Where does the monetary value of reddit really lie? It seems like most of their creative monetization strategies like gold, donations and custom avatars have failed. This leaves the more mundane avenues of advertising to users, and selling the content that users creates. Both of those are severely handicapped by a free/low cost api. If they cannot monetize a user or their data then that user is bad for their bottom line.

reddit is doing this because their investors want them to be a multi-billion dollar company, not because they already are.

Same, I wish we could contribute content (posts, comments, votes, etc) in a redistributable way.

I'd like to a P2P-backed service to exist, where people can own all the data. I guess that abuse would be a challenge, but there's probably enough good ideas around bittorrent and cryptocurrency to make sharing and trust/voting possible.

My dream is that people could have a ~raspberry at home helping host the internet in a sparse way. Would it be more inefficient than a centralized service? sure, but decentralization is inherently more expensive, yet better thanks to true shared ownership.

Inefficiency was always a red herring.

$ curl https://www.reddit.com > /dev/null

    % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                   Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  100  970k    0  970k    0     0   840k      0 --:--:--  0:00:01 --:--:--  840k

That's just the index, not images or anything pulled in by scripts. That page takes longer to download on a gigabit internet connection than the <5kB page it ought to be could be uploaded from some asymmetric 10Mbps up cable connection.

The biggest problem is actually funding. The centralized site puts ads on it or tells VCs they could, and then has money to pay for developers or other things that increase the user base.

It's the same reason Linux is used by programmers and not graphic designers. If there is anything deficient about it in the programmer's workflow they fix it for everybody. If there is anything deficient about it in the graphic designer's workflow, they don't know how to fix it so they get a Mac and run Adobe. Social media sites work more like the latter than the former until someone finds a way around that.

I'm not too concerned about efficiency either. Growing with slow and spotty rural internet taught me the hard way that data locality is key.

Also, with enough data, having to get only what you care about is probably faster.

I feel very similarly. I have mixed feelings on my actions but I just finished running shreddit on all of my comments and deleting my accounts. I wrote content with the (possibly misguided) notion that what I contributed would continue to be openly accessible/searchable. I didn't want what I wrote to end up in a locked up walled garden like Meta's products. Imho Reddit will continue to put walls up around user contributed data. I decided to delete everything while I still could.

This makes the idea that sites like Reddit only live and thrive because of user generated content and they're nothing without it, reverberate all across the room.

Looking at what Reddit has done, it makes things obvious to me that the APIs that are free to use are only a gimmick and companies can pull the plug on you as a consumer at any moment. I mean, I can easily imagine that Reddit originally published its API to look "cool" but look at what money has done today.

Why could you not make an offer to buy out Apollo or other 3rd party clients before you closed out your API Reddit? Fuck your leadership and the so called idiots on your management team that pulled ideas straight from a dumpyard.

On one hand I understand not wanting to contribute to a commercial content aggregator that you feel doesn't return enough value to its users, but it sounds like you still use it, i.e. the more restrictive API pricing does not discount its value enough for you to discontinue your use of the site.

As far as refusing to contribute, I don't see the practical difference between that and refusing to help someone in trouble out in the street. You get even less for your trouble in the latter case, but I'm sure you wouldn't demand some value back for answering a question in real life even to a stranger you'll never meet again. Sure, a middleman is profiting off of your answer here, but getting hung up on the share of value is how so much of the web shifted from free collaborative passion projects to for-profit Patreon paywalls and the like.

I'm making a concerted effort not to open reddit, and as a result am spending more time doing side project things.

One such project has been modding an old video game console. On multiple occasions when running into issues, search results are pointing me to reddit posts which I've tried to avoid in favour of alternative results but I find myself still needing more information only to discover the links are to blacked out subreddits - it has been brutal!

I'm in a similar boat. Thankfully you can often use an internet cache to view the contents (this doesn't help Reddit out, which would defeat the purpose of the protest).

I've done this for a few coding things that I needed an answer fast. It does show how much will be lost if things don't improve, but like you I didn't want to fuel Reddit in any way (assuming the sub is even open anyway).