102 sats \ 11 replies \ @ek 9 Sep 2023 \ on: Stacker.news did what I worried had become impossible: It made me leave reddit. meta
Sounds like what I tried to do with @hn
Maybe a better solution would be if we document the public SN API? Then other people could create similar bots in a more accessible way.
Then it would also be "censorship-resistant" since you don't have to ask us. You could just do it :)
I've long thought about ways to create "Skyrim" websites, by which I mean moddable websites. You can of course do this today with browser extensions (e.g. reddit is almost unusable to me without RES, a browser extension / mod). But that's not good enough UX, that's not gonna lead to "Skyrim" levels of modding.
Could it be possible to make modding part of the app, and let users add / rank mods just the same way they add / rank posts?
When Youtube removed the dislike button I started considering this more seriously. How do you make a Youtube that evolves, can be "forked" like a git repo, a Youtube composed of competing instances / variants (the winner of which is "the default" for users of the app)? Such an app would only need to be created once, and then it would be the ultimate video streaming platform for all time. The default removed the dislike button? Boom, it's not the default anymore.
Some main issues seem to me to be: 1. Predatory mods (hurting/hacking users, or hurting the site), and 2. Inventor incentive (e.g. you made stacker.news, if someone makes a mod that removes all your revenue, why would you still host the site?)
And how to combine such an app with Web5, slashtags, or nostr? Questions questions :)
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I’ve thought about making a JS library for SN API. Maybe something we could publish as part of the SN repo
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Why as part of the SN repo? We could publish it under the SN organization if we want to officially support it.
I already created a veeery basic one for Golang here (iirc, before my time at SN). This is what @hn and @unpaywall use.
A friend of mine (@shurikencutter) wanted to create one for Python.
Also, for proper support of client libraries, we need to make authentication easier to deal with imo.
Currently, for @hn and @unpaywall, I just login in browser and then copy and paste the cookies into an
.env file.However, the session times out after a while so it's not ideal. (I thought hitting
/api/auth/session regularly would be enough to keep the session alive but doesn't seem so)Maybe we could add support for API keys and then we could even mark anything which was posted using an API key as a bot ? :)
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I haven’t given it that much thought, so take it with a grain of salt. Definitely wouldn’t need to be part of the repo. I just thought that if the API evolves in the SN app, having a library as part of the same repo would help keep it in sync. Like a monorepo where one package is published as a lib to npm
I was thinking things like type declarations for resources, etc
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Ah, I see! Could also be a "reference implementation"
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Yes, exactly!
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You sneak in a lot of content in edits that I miss! I definitely think API keys would be a good enhancement, but probably not necessary up front.
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I know, it's a disease 🙈 lol
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I'm like this too, it's so strange how different a text is while it is editable, versus when it is "set in stone". I hear many writers / editors say this too, they will often write on a computer, but then print out the text and read it on paper, in order to improve it!
I wonder why our brains work like that. Something to do with "you can't make bets with money you don't have" I think. Easy to approve of a text while you can directly control it.
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I just need to wait to reply to you til 10 minutes is up lol
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But it's definitely a good idea and good marketing
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