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Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

439 points david927 | 5 comments | 29 Jun 25 20:21 UTC | HN request time: 1.013s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
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sodality2 ◴[29 Jun 25 21:53 UTC] No.44416799[source]▶
After 2+ years of maintaining the FOSS lightweight Reddit frontend Redlib [0], I realized that my niche but extremely detailed knowledge and experience of using Reddit's endpoints might be useful. After reverse engineering the mobile app and writing code to emulate nearly every aspect of its behavior, plus writing a codegen framework that will auto-update my code from analyzing the behavior from an Android emulator, I can pretty easily replay common user flows from any IP around the world, collecting and extracting the data. Some use cases:

* OSINT (r00m101 just beat me to it by launching...)

* Research into recommendation algorithms, advertising placement algorithms, etc

* Marketing (ad libraries, detailed analysis of content given data not even exposed to the mobile app due to some interesting side channels, things like trend analysis, etc)

* Market research for products

* Sales teams can use it to find exact mentions of other products. Eg: selling crash reporting software? Look up your target accounts' brands and find examples of complaints.

Plus a few more with more imagination.

So I'm working on a site that allows user access to some of the read-only functions available here. Coming soon :tm:. Been really fun building it all in Rust, though :) If you're interested in anything here, email in profile.

[0]: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

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1. Karrot_Kream ◴[29 Jun 25 22:02 UTC] No.44416902[source]▶
Is there any interest in factoring the Reddit parts out of the UI code? I've been thinking of taking a stab at that myself but figured this would be a good place to ask if you have plans :)
replies(1): >>44416944 #
2. sodality2 ◴[29 Jun 25 22:06 UTC] No.44416944[source]▶
Do you mean a way to have the Reddit app render content from some generic social media provider, while keeping the UI? I haven't thought about that yet. I'm sure it would be possible, but that would require tearing out a lot of backend code and replacing it 1:1. Most of my work has been on the network side of the app, and not much modification; just introspection and inspecting behavior.

My main question: why, do you like the UI? I honestly really hate the reddit app, I haven't seriously used it for browsing since I fixed up Libreddit into Redlib :)

replies(1): >>44417010 #
3. Karrot_Kream ◴[29 Jun 25 22:14 UTC] No.44417010[source]▶
I don't like the Reddit app personally but I also do like something a bit more dynamic than what Redlib offers. Personally I'm fine with JS on the frontend and frameworks like React as long as they're implemented well.

I'd also just like to play around with different styles of frontend just as a way to hack on things.

replies(1): >>44417050 #
4. sodality2 ◴[29 Jun 25 22:17 UTC] No.44417050{3}[source]▶
Ah, I see. You can get pretty far with Redlib as a base + modifying html templates. They're very flexible and easy to read/extend. Though it relies on public methods to access Reddit, not my mobile app secret sauce :)
replies(1): >>44417562 #
5. Karrot_Kream ◴[29 Jun 25 23:25 UTC] No.44417562{4}[source]▶
Oh I thought there was interesting user agent stuff going on in Redlib itself but sounds like not. I'll use the public methods then thanks!