Hi folks! I just came up with something, no idea if its good but you judge that:
TL;DR: Can we make a browser extention or something that gives us a button to copy an entire comment chain with crucial, niche advice to a lemmy post or is that gone since the API went down?
I often google things for work and hobbies, code snippets, log entries, ways to make my insane docker setups work. For example, I got a lemmy instance working in docker with this.
Very often, I end up on reddit. If the post or comment in question is helpful, I’d like to upvote or ask a follow up question. For that I still need my reddit account.
But for the “praise helpful comment” I could also do that here. Some people link to the comment/post which also brings back traffic to reddit (which I dont like).
So I’d probably just copy the post (and/or comment chain in question) to a new post on lemmy.
It would go a little like this:
- User1: “Post describing a topic”
- User2: Helpful comment nr 1
- User1: Follow up question
- User2: Helpful comment nr 2
For that, I’d need some kind of automation. Since the API is gone, I don’t know if that is possible but the option to “copy entire comment chain up to this comment” would definitely be awesome.
Feel free to tell me otherwise.
Edit: If this isn’t obvious: It would accumulate the most helpful stuff from reddit on here without it being blindly crossposted by bots and would push google results (because its niche!) and most likely not a copyright issue because it is so few things that it should fly under the radar.
Could of course be done with a browser extension like “webscraper”, with some tweaking you could likely get the data you want without much issue. That could then be packaged into a new extension made specifically for scraping a Reddit post you find and push it to Lemmy. The main downside I see is that all comments will be from the same user, so you likely want to set up a specific user for those posts. Like “reddit-scraper” or some such.
If I didn’t have 2 toddlers and a 7 year old then I’d love to take a stab at it. But what little free time I have is not enough to make any proper progress on something like this.
I agree completely. I would argue that we dont need the comments at all. A post, laying out the initial comment chain would be enough. Like I said „user1“ and so on but with real names.
The reason I‘d like to do it this way (without comments but preserving the OPs names) is twofold: its not pretentious (as comments from the same person) and it would honor the original posters.