BotDefense is leaving Reddit
BotDefense is leaving Reddit
Mod-made tool claims to have banned 144,926 spambot accounts.
Title says it all. If you think Reddit's been trending down lately, just wait.
BotDefense is leaving Reddit
Mod-made tool claims to have banned 144,926 spambot accounts.
Title says it all. If you think Reddit's been trending down lately, just wait.
What Reddit fails to understand with their decades of industry experience and 2k employees is that without their users, they don't have a product. Moderators work for free. Creators work for free. These people didn't do it for Reddit. They did it for you and me.
And then like three developers in their spare time ate their lunch.
And yet, with all that supposed experience they still fail to maintain a decent platform.
There's a reason nobody uses their official app.
It's worse than that, when this all started I had a look at their Wikipedia entry. They have 2000 employees across 5 locations. What in the ever loving Christ are they all doing if that app is the best they can do?
Most people use their official app
Your point stands, but just wanted to point out that the lemmy devs have been working full time on this for the last 3 years, funded by https://nlnet.nl/
I had no idea about that foundation - it seems like they've done a lot of great work. Thanks for sharing!
I think they do understand this, to a point. That's why they keep threatening their mods instead of outright removing them.
Except they have outright removed a bunch. All but two of the r/TIHI mods were purged, as an example.
He was a Co creator.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for spez being an open raging asshole.
Did spez create reddit or did they just hire him?
However, they do understand that the APIcalypse will make their financial figures look great, and that’s what actually matters in the coming IPO. They also understand that these actions will hurt the site and that the fallout will come at a notable delay. However, by the time it’s clear the site has only a few months to live, the previous owners have already taken the money and left. At that point, it’s a problem for the new owners. Let them figure out how to fix a sinking ship.
they do understand that the APIcalypse will make their financial figures look great
That would require people to actually pay that API pricing. The apps closing down and AI people scraping the web site instead won't help them.
Sums up all communities. Doesn't matter how much money you have, the "social" part always wins.
Reddit now:
What's your all-time favorite video game?
u/totallynormaluser: "I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I don't have personal preferences or emotions, so I don't have the ability to have a favorite video game."
u/AngryBeaverBeaver : OP, why do you even bother posting here when 90% of replies are bots?
OP : I'm sorry, but as an AI language model...
u/AngryBeaverBeaver: Aight imma reporting every bot
Mod: I'm sorry, but as an AI language model...
Reddit will probably appreciate the extra traffic bots will create
Until that IPO happens and investors want an audit of bot activity vs daily active users and then it all goes south from there.
What's this "from there"? It's already heading south and they haven't even had the IPO yet.
Maybe, maybe not. Advertisers are definitely going to want to know how many of their impressions are actual people and how many are bots.
I fear your right, seems the kind of scummy I’ma god-complex type thing spez would do
BotDefense was great. About 10% of mod activity on r/monero was done by it and with great accuracy too!
not a super valuable stat. 10% on a crypto sub isn’t great
As if Reddit isn’t already a shit show now… just wait. It’ll be overrun with bots.
Maybe that's the plan, charge the bots to talk to each other
Close.
In otherwords they're speedrunning the capitalism fueled ai takeover
I don’t understand why they are going to keep the service running through October? If you are leaving, why not get it over with - could someone enlighten me?
Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.
As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit's new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).
At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.
BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the "client" here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.
If I recall correctly, that 30 day notice was basically cut in half anyway because communication from Reddit's side was so wishy-washy and opaque.
So reddit will juts turn into youtube comments.
I don't get those. Half of yt comments are "I like how x" where x is the plot of the video.
It already has
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.
As the old saying goes, "Reddit fucked around and now they are starting to find out!"
The amount of spam comments afterwards is going to make your average Reddit thread look like a modern Youtube comment section.
This is good for reddit.
jnj