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.
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.
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.
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.
tfw the most reddit addicted city is an AWS datacenter
Reddit is entering a death spiral that it might recover from. But it’s not looking good. Fediverse is the new cool.
