I love email, had a Blackberry and that thing was just great.
Today, I have everything I can go to email. If I could get it all, I would.
I do not need or want lots of silos. I do want one store, some rules, and for it to operate off line and async.
Replacing email will take a lot. There was email before http. I have seen nothing even close to the simple utility, robustness of email, never mind anything that looks to endure like email has.
I have almost all email I have ever received. Amazing. And it just works. The better search is, the better it works. There are tons of emails to myself too. I know I can search them and read what past me suspected present me needs to know and that all weaves right in.
I wish more things worked as well and like email does.
RSS is one of those things, BTW.
USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back.
Async, threaded discussion is amazing. Make inline media a little easier, and... yeah.
Problem is none of those high utility things are sexy.
Maybe there should be a floor that just works well. Maybe we are not all that well served by all these attempts to disrupt and own people through what are important interactions.
Big conflict of interest there, if you ask me. It matters now, is lean, mean, near universally used.
Ok, so what is there really to disrupt?
Not much.
And that is why I love email. Unlike just about every other thing I have loved, it will be there, and I will not have to think about it much. It is awful nice to have something be that way.
Nice enough for me to think long and hard about putting it at any kind of risk.
> USENET is another one, but well out of favor. Fact is, someone could spiff USENET up and it could very easily come back.
Reddit?
Usenet was decentralized.
Usenet didn't fight you if you wanted to scrape all of it. In fact, it encouraged that.
Usenet didn't require crappy "API tokens" in order to automate your interactions with it or bring your own user agent... in fact, you had to bring your own user agent; that was the only way to use it.
The only thing Reddit has in common with Usenet is good support for threaded discussions.
Reddit is not that bad with regards to scraping. You can append `.json` to any URL and it will return a JSON representation of this page: https://www.reddit.com/.json
As for API tokens, that's unfortunately just the current trend of basically every other site with user-generated content. It's unfair to single out Reddit in particular when nearly everyone else does this too.
Totally hilarious that you posted this on a discussion site whose API doesn't require tokens.