Pullpush is an alternative and free API for reddit, this threat/ban is based on the assumption that pullpush is using the official reddit API, and I guess that its using it exclusively through a single reddit account which they just banned.
It has to do with lawyers because they are trying to make a vague legal threat i guess, Youtube made a similar demand of invidious and sent a C&D to them for violating ToS of the Youtube API which they do not use.. So I dont think the lack of lawyers is the issue so much as lack of competent engineers who could explain to the lawyers that one does not need to use API to get content from a public website which requires no login to see contents.
Pullpush is the spiritual successor of Pushshift. Supposedly, Reddit is threatening legal action over Pullpush’s use of Reddit’s API. In reality, I’ll be shocked if this goes anywhere
That tells me everything and nothing unfortunately. What's pushshift then? What does it do? What does it have to do with reddit? And why are reddit's lawyers sacked?
PushShift was a sorta reddit archive that could be used to see deleted comments and threads - if anyone ever sent you to a ceddit, rareddit, unddit, reveddit, etc link to view a deleted post or comment thread, that information was gathered via PushShift.
Pushshift was an API service that connected with Reddit to pull information about posts, users and other data. For example you used to be able to use unddit to input a URL and get a full listing of a comment thread, showing all comments that have been purged.
This was a super handy service that Reddit all of a sudden cut off with only 1-2 months of notice. Moderators used to use this service extensively to help them moderate and actual data scientist used to integrate with it to pull out a heap of data.
The best part about pushshift was that you could take a permalink (e.g. a 5000+ point upvoted deleted comment) and see if it actually violated the rules of the subreddit OR if the admins were just being shitcunts.
I think the implication is that no competent legal council would sign off on the messages sent by Reddit admin, therefore Reddit's legal department must have been sacked. As for the rest of it, I can't say.