cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/212576

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:

  1. Thoughts on the approach I’m suggesting
  2. Thoughts on implementation / usage
  3. 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.

  • Jamie@jamie.moeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    A neat idea in concept, but would never work in execution on 2 main levels.

    1. Reach: First off, you have to convince a lot of users to install the extension to make it effective. Most aren’t going to care to begin with, but even if they do, it naturally alienates every platform except for PC, and the Android+Firefox crowd. iOS users and mobile Chrome users are completely left out.

    2. The replacement comment: People are going to get annoyed by that really fast, and mods will probably straight up use AutoMod to filter it. It adds nothing to the conversation for most users because of reason 1.