Skip the bottom two paragraphs if you are short on time and want the TL;RD

Unfortunately the admins have disabled our ingest due in part to my failure to maintain comms with the admins and to answer their questions related to the new terms.

First, I want to apologize to the community for my absence lately. Let me give you a thorough update and address many of the concerns from the Pushshift user community and the Reddit admins. Pushshift joined with the NCRI organization many months ago. NCRI, or the National Contagion Research Institute, does amazing work in identifying disinformation that are spead within social media platforms. NCRI is a non-profit organization that raises money through donations to help raise funds for Pushshift so that we can expand our services for the academic community as well as several government agencies like the FDA that use Reddit data and other data sources to further understand many topics mainly related to health, etc.

NCRI has raised substantial funds to allow Pushshift to expand and grow. Demand for Pushshift API services has increased substantially since I began the project in 2015. Since that time, we've helped thousands of academic universities both big and small to understand and use big data for a lot of different research proposals.

In 2013, I moved back from Denver to the Baltimore area to help my father with everyday tasks since he has suffered from a brain tumor that has grown very slowly, but unfortunately has caused some dementia over time. Around two years ago, he fell and broke his neck and that necessitated the need for me to step up and help him as much as possible. I love my father and he has been a huge influence in my passion for data science and helping society through providing tools for the academic community. Recently, my grandmother on my mother's side experienced issues that left her with dementia and I've been helping my mother deal with health insurance issues, etc. If any of you have ever dealt with medical insurance and long-term nursing care for an elderly person, you probably have experienced some of the frustrations I have experienced.

Just before the 2023 New Year, Pushshift finally made a move to a proper COLO after receiving substantial financing. The move was extremely difficult for me due to having to allocate my time across family while trying to maintain a service used by more than half a million people. I never charged for the service and my income existed solely from donations and occasional contract work very early in Pushshift's history.

Right now, I am disappointed with myself because I have left the community in the dark recently and haven't done my part in keeping up with comms. I will say that this has been the most challenging project I've ever worked on. I literally get hundreds of emails per day, lots of DMs across Twitter, Reddit and other social media platforms and even on Slack where I am a part of many different academic and non-profit communities. I hate to make excuses for my failure to maintain communication and openness with the Pushshift community, however I hope you can understand some of the unique challenges that came along when I was running Pushshift alone and trying to maintain services that were used by so many people. At first it was exciting and challenging but as Pushshift grew, it become extremely difficult just keeping up with emails let alone time for development and also time to help my father.

I want to make things right with the Pushshift community and do my best to turn things around so that you can depend on Pushshift when you need social media data for research, modding or anything else that you do with Pushshift. I want to make a promise to the community that I will personally spend a few hours each week on this subreddit and update everyone on where we are and what we're currently working on. I also want to make a promise to the Reddit admins like /u/lift_ticket83 that our team will reach out immediately to the Reddit admins and make sure we can come to an agreement on making sure we follow the new terms of service in good faith. Basically, I'm asking the community for forgiveness and another chance to show you all that I am still very invested in this project and I will do anything it takes to make sure all current technical / bug issues are addressed quickly in the next few weeks.

I will be speaking with the NCRI team to address this failure in comms so that it doesn't happen again. There were other people assigned with the task of reaching out and monitoring this subreddit and for whatever reasons that didn't happen as it should have.