Title says it all. If you think Reddit’s been trending down lately, just wait.
With only a week having passed since Reddit implemented new API rules, it’s alarming to see so many notable community members decide that their volunteer efforts and innovations are no longer worth providing.
I mean they’ve been hamstrung, had their tools removed from them. At that point what can they do?
So if I read it correctly, it was purely because they disagree with Reddit, not because they lost access/usage of any tools. More of “fuck doing all this work for these assholes” thing
https://www.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/comments/14riw76/botdefense_is_wrapping_up_operations/
Like many anti-abuse projects on Reddit, we’ve done all of this for free while putting up with Reddit’s penchant for springing detrimental changes on developers and moderators (e.g., adding API limits without advance notice and blocking Pushshift) and figuring out workarounds for numerous scalability issues that Reddit never seems to fix. Without Pushshift, the number of malicious bots we were able to ban dropped to 5,517 in May.
The “blocking Pushift” part is what actively makes their work harder by a lot.
