Reddit mods fear spam overload as BotDefense leaves “antagonistic” Reddit

I’m all for watching Reddit reap what it sowed. They absolutely should be considered damaged goods at this point. But the ones that are really going to suffer are the mods that moderate critical subs such as r/suicide r/stopdrinking and r/auntienetwork. Spez didn’t even give one brain cell to think about the consequences of subs that provide valuable support to struggle people.
Really grinds my gears on that part alone.
- r/stopdrinking is the sub that really gave me the motivation to stop drinking. I went from binge drinking once or twice a week to nearly completely cutting out alcohol of my life.
  
  that's awesome, keep it up =)
- Maybe lemmy users should do their part in reaching out to them and offering the fediverse as an alternative?
  
  Ribbit
  
  A few people the other day were catching site wide bans for suggesting fediverse. Others have had no problem. I think it depends on the mood of newly installed mods or if a pissed off admin sees you. Obviously also your tone.
  I surmise Threads being somewhat part of the fediverse actually might have made it easier to get away with telling people about Lemmy/kbin but I haven't been over to reddit to test this out due to trying to quit cold turkey.
  
  I feel like any mention of lemmy or other competing platforms is suppressed on reddit. At least I saw no activity on any of my posts nor have I saw such posts from others.
- Well said. It’s easy to say “let that shithole burn” for me, as a person who just used it for entertainment and mild education. But there are integral support communities that I hate seeing suffer.
  
  The fact that reddit is now built into the infrastructure of supporting suffering people is literally so fucked.
  And that it is something WE have to worry about. Is anyone else worried? Any governments? No.
- I'm sure he did, he probably just didn't give a shit.
  
  Poop emoji
- Yea it’s honestly stupid how bad it’s turned out. They could have turned back so many times…
- Fuck Around >-------->------->---[Reddit]-->Find Out

It's dying. An event that was literally unthingkable a few months ago and was probably unachievable a few weeks ago.
Little by little, reddit is crumbling. The number of userbase doesn't matter now. If the spam bots overtake reddit, then it's over for them.
- Yeah, people going "hurr durr the protests don't matter" aren't seeing the bigger picture. True, the protests were ineffective at best in changing Spez's mind, but the thing they're protesting will end up destroying Reddit because crippling mod tools is going to cause spam to explode on the platform.
  
  I believe 90% of those "hurr durrs" were bots by Spez trying to psyops the protests and failing like the dipship that he is.
  
  This was my last comments on reddit. We aren't just protesting the changes because we support 3rd party and mods - we protest so the community can stay there.

- The corpo overlords might like it but it will drive away any users for good. Which is what they deserve.
- Elon, that you?

Good. Teach them a lesson.

My guesstimate is that Reddit — with BotDefense up and running — was at least 20% bots posting articles and then bots having conversations about those bot-posted articles. Without BotDefense? Yikes.
- Man the bots aren't even good at hiding they are bots anymore.
  That was just spammed in a news article over and over for hours.

Hey mods I have a message for you: you don't have to do unpaid labor just so a ceo can get rich.
- I decided to step down. Haven't looked back since
  
  o7
- The problem is that some mods are in it for the power. It probably attracts a disproportionate number of power hungry people than normal people just like police.
  
  I know that's commonly said but I think most want to create a community for their interest.
- we need to send this to every community

Even if they were to revert every single poor decision in the last 6 months right now, the damage is done.
They showed their true colours, and everyone is done with the platform.
Long live Lemmy.
- We're done with the platform but there are a lot of real people still using it. I do think the quality is going to tank and they'll continue bleeding users though.
  
  Yeah, its the tech-aware who have dumped Reddit. Unfortunately part of the magic was that it had grown to the point that if you went looking you could end up talking to anybody from a diesel engine mechanic to a paragliding instructor, not just a bunch of tech nerds. I think this'll be the sticking point, lemmy/kbin is still 95%+ tech nerds.
  I think this wave just gave us enough of a userbase to start establishing the infrastructure for general communities here, not even really specialized ones yet. But those will provide escape areas whenever the next wave occurs.
  
  It’s the beginning of the end if you catch my drift.
  There’s no way Reddit can recover from this.
  
  Lemmy needs to hit critical mass and the talented devs making Reddit better as a hobby will come here and make it even better. Reddit's dev team got lazy and complacent because outside devs were doing their job for them better and for free which is pretty ridiculous. If you put a monetary value on the bot defence teams work it would in the millions. Other companies have a team of full time employees fighting spam, Reddit was getting it for free.
- Here here!
  Now if only the guy who made Apollo would make a Lemmy app it’d be perfect! Memmy works but Apollo for Lemmy would just be the icing on the cake!
  
  If your not using wefwef already, try it out.
  Closest thing to Apollo right now.

Further down the rabbit hole. Seems like they're doing everything they can to get to the bottom as fast as possible.
- Almost like it’s being done on purpose. Like spez woke up last week and said, fuck it, I’m tanking Reddit.
  
  Louis Rossmann put his thoughts into the whole saga. He says what's going on with Reddit is Huffman doing the equipment of a business road rage. Somebody crossed him so bad he wanted nothing but to annihilate that person's livelihood even if it means crashing and burning his own company.
  
  There's no way he's competent enough to do this good of a job destroying his company on purpose.

Good.

It's almost like it would be easier to just walk away, I feel for the people that are forced to stay and continue to mod.
- I guess they just don’t want their community to die / be destroyed.
  
  That's what I don't get either, at this point I don't see how anyone would willingly spend their time modding on reddit, so there they must be doing it against their will!
  
  Out of curiosity, are you modding here now?
  
  You guys underestimate the amount of abuse that people who have nothing else are willing to go through.
- Nobody is forced to mod for free on Reddit
  
  Exactly, it was kind of a facetious comment, but it is kind of sad there's mods that feel a sense of obligation to run a corporate social media site and that the reddit leadership is banking on the social currency of being a mod keeping any sort of value.