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.
And we would be deluding ourselves if we believed any assurances from Reddit given the track record of broken promises.
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.
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
More bots on Reddit? Isn’t this what spez was going for?
I think he looked at /r/subredditsimulator and decided it was something to be taken seriously.
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.
