A volunteer-made project that fights bots on Reddit is shutting down (BotDefense)
theverge.com
From the article:
A volunteer-made project that fights bots on Reddit is shutting down. BotDefense, a tool that helps fight bots in more than 3,600 subreddits and has nearly 150,000 accounts on its bans list, will be going away.
As for why: The community of users and moderators submitting accounts to us depend on Pushshift, the API, and third-party apps. And we would be deluding ourselves if we believed any assurances from Reddit given the track record of broken promises. Investing further resources into Reddit as a platform presents significant risks, and it’s safer to allocate one’s time, energy, and passions elsewhere.
This is what bothers me the most about the mods and devs who are still bending over for spez. I'm glad the BotDefense devs have some dignity.
If you sunk unhealthy amount of time into a community, it's hard to break up. At this point the mods are just in your run of the mill toxic relationship with reddit.
Dang spez, hope the money you'll be getting from each api call is enough to pay for all the free work the community has been doing over the years
It's the money from Reddit's IPO launch that he is after, the API changes are about sending a message to investors that their needs will come first.
More bots on Reddit? Isn't this what spez was going for?
As long as he can fool advertisers about activity
I think he looked at /r/subredditsimulator and decided it was something to be taken seriously.
that was one of my favorite subs ever
wish the creator would have let it run for longer
tfw the most reddit addicted city is an AWS datacenter
I, for one, welcome our new bot overlords.
The worse was the disingenuous removal of the Pushshift API. Framing it like devs have been using that API for things they didn't envision (like unddit using it to retrieve deleted comments so you could see if an admin deleted a genuine comment or if it was just hate speech)
Terrible situation overall.
Reddit is entering a death spiral that it might recover from. But it’s not looking good. Fediverse is the new cool.
This bodes well for the elections coming up next year…
One day in the future reddit will just be bots advertising to bots.
Future? On some more niche subs already half the posts were made by bots.
It would be lovely if these groups could be convinced to move to the fediverse. There's a large set of problems like this that we don't have the tooling to handle yet, and it'd be a shame if all the knowledge on how to deal with stuff like bots and brigading died with reddit.
The post on r/BotDefense
I can understand why they are shutting down but imagine if they just changed it to specifically go after pro admin bots.
I actually participated in this from time to time. It was sometimes fun to spend a few hours creeping through bot profiles and building a network of them and reporting them all.
Hey, I hope you don't mind me asking a question.
Given that upvotes and downvotes are public on Lemmy, do you think it would be possible to use that info to potentially detect bots or vote manipulation?
Yeah, I'd imagine it's possible to identify the behaviour that some bots followed on Reddit. It also does help that global karma isn't a thing since it was a big part of the incentive that led to bots in the first place. I don't know if you ever encountered the subreddit "FreeKarma4u" but it was basically just a sub with no rules that allowed bots to upvote each other's posts and comments until they met the karma threshold to start posting on other subs.
This can only end hilariously.
It really blows that so many great developers who did free work for Reddit are getting shafted so Reddit can attempt to make more money.