Reddit

Reddit sucks for many reasons and I refuse to use it, but as a software engineer, this hardly looks nefarious. That looks like a pretty typical event gateway in networked applications, which is used for all kinds of things to make a platform run. We have one in our application, and it's not used for any kind of privacy-invasive tracking. We use it for things like bulk data processing for things like userbase-level analytics (like, how many users are using this feature?), or for billing purposes for our customers (since we bill based on usage).

And calls to /api/* routes are absolutely completely normal for any SPA (single page app), and are required for them to function. There's certainly a technical argument to be made against SPAs in favor of more traditional server-side rendering (augmented by tools like https://htmx.org/ for dynamic content), which could be used to avoid these kinds of API calls (and, in fact, it's a model I'm very much in favor of), but that kind of architecture is far from the norm these days. The SPA model is the current (IMO bad, from a technical perspective) standard.

We have many reasons to shit on reddit and their behavior, but this honestly isn't one of them.

I use Redlib to access Reddit, especially because I constantly get the "your request was blocked by network security" issues

Sad. There was a time when Reddit, despite all its flaws, was great for connecting with obscure interests and getting inside knowledge on niche topics. It made small communities feel big. I find myself on Reddit occasionally, usually just the "you've been blocked by network security ;-) page, but I don't feel the same way on Reddit anymore. The more I hear about their behavior in the background, the less I want to read or contribute in the foreground. Lemmy captures some of the vibes of reddit, but the in-depth, obscure communites, were kind of shattered. I'm slowly discovering some cool forums and stuff that have weathered the web centralization era.

I'm a bit confused here. API calls aren't trackers. It's how the frontend communicates with the backend. Of course Shreddit wouldn't work if you blocked them, Reddit doesn't live on your PC. ~~I'm actually surprised Old Reddit still works with them blocked. Are you sure it actually works works, or does it just look like it's working locally? If you save a post for example, does it stay saved if you close the window and open it again?~~

Edit: Yeah, just tested it: even on Old Reddit, saving, for example, doesn't work if you block reddit.com/api/*. Voting looks like it works, but if you reload the page, your vote is gone. Because it only ever existed client-side.

This entire post is just a massive misunderstanding of how web software works. This is a normal, every day thing, and every single non static (and even sometimes static) site out there does this, or something parallel to this.

They don’t need to make api calls to track you, you’re logged in or at the very least connecting in a way that lets them follow your session.

They don’t even need api calls to fingerprint your browser, they can just throw that fingerprinting into every post when you go to get more content.

Bottom line: This ain’t it, chief.

That's like warning me there's bacteria in the shitting bucket

This is good to know - thanks for sharing. I dread that old.reddit.com's days are numbered...

It's a guilty little pleasure of mine to read about how shitty it is for those who freely choose to remain there. It's tragic, but I can't help but shake my head in disbelief at such stupidity. Why do people put up with shit like that, totally blows my mind.

The problem is, if you add this to your Ublock Origin filters the website won’t load properly

This is unfortunately true for many many many sites.

Use non-commercial web pages & internet stuff as much as possible.

weird. old reddit loads fine for me with js completely disabled.

Could the fact that you don't see the requests in Firefox be a sign that uBO actually works better in Firefox and worse in Chrome? Possibly something about manifest V3 being implemented? Or do you think the Firefox DevTools are just less advanced? Or something else?

I'm only speculating, but I believe uBO behaves differently between Chromium-based and Gecko-based browsers because Chrome is restricting the abilities of extensions like uBO to do their thing.