Reddit is about to become "a cesspool of bot-driving garbage"...

[Tiangou]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/...ic-reddit/

The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike. The changes have led to the shuttering of numerous third-party Reddit apps and have pushed several important communities, like the Ask Me Anything (AMAs) organizers, to reduce or end their presence on the site.

The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense. BotDefense, which helps removes rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

A user who asked for privacy reasons to be identified by their Reddit name, Merari01, and who moderates the r/LifeProTips subreddit told Ars that BotDefense has been crucial because it's time consuming to manually fight spam bot activity. Merari01 also underscored the challenges of fighting spam bots, with karma being sold cheaply.

With BotDefense shutting down, [fewer] spam bots will be caught, banned, and reported to site admins, which means more will be able to be sold. ... The inevitable end result is that more people will be robbed of their money and/ or personal details and that more conversations will be manipulated.

Reddit's 2022 Transparency Report said spam, which includes karma farming and scams, represented 79.6 percent of content removed by Reddit administrators last year.

In response to BotDefense's announcement, a Reddit user going by Dacvak who moderates the r/gaming subreddit using BotDefense said:

What an enormous loss to the site and its users. The average person has no idea how much botspam there would be without you guys, and it’s worth noting that Reddit does not have effective tools for combating the growing complexity and number of bots.

This place will slowly but surely become a cesspool of bot-driving garbage, and I don’t blame anyone but Reddit for that.

[Blankity Blank]

I’ve read just enough to get the sense that the powers that be at Reddit seem to have overstepped perhaps significantly. But the thing that I’m not getting from all this, is that it seems like nothing is being excised in protest from Reddit that can’t be relatively easily be replaced.

The dissenting/departing mods have no ownership of the actual subreddits and the peripheral software adds considerable utility, but can’t they also be ‘reinvented’ or just replaced by other software with similar functionality?

It’s telling that so many dissatisfied parties aren’t just rolling up their carpet and leaving as their show if protest, they are very actively seeking to damage Reddit on the way out and spreading FUD.

I’ve used Reddit, through the “official” app for years. And from that perspective, even with all the ballyhooed ‘sabotage’, it’s been pretty much as usable as ever. Anything I’ve noticed is the result of active undermining, which will of course vanish as soon as the perpetrators leave or are banned.

I’ve also tried Apollo, one of the alternate clients, and it’s certainly a good app, but I’ve not seen or heard articulated any features that make Reddit unusable without it.

I have no fealty to Reddit as a company, I’m just not getting the professed magnitude for the general user base of the ongoing battle.

[Tiangou]

Reddit has (had) something like 100,000 active communities with 4-500 million users... 50 million and more posts per day.

And they haven't provided tools for quick/bulk operations. Imagine having to deal with 10,000 posts in a day, each taking a dozen swipes and 10 clicks to deal with, scrolling around to move between queues and tags and user-management options. At 10 seconds per post, that's pushing 30 hours. Apollo and RIF and other apps allowed quick disposition with a few gestures. (Other apps like Sync and BaconReader provided a better all-around experience for frequent visitors/posters after "New Reddit" destroyed the GUI.)

3rd party tools that tapped into the APIs provided vital utility for the mods.

Without those tools, the mods literally can't do their jobs. There aren't enough hours in the day.

Those mods who have left or are leaving represent thousands of years of man-hours of learning the ropes. As Reddit removes mods and replaces them with newbs who have no experience and no tools to do their jobs, the subs are falling apart.

Now, the biggest automated tool for removing bots and their scam/spam/misinformation/propaganda posts is going away.

Without experienced mods and tools like that, who will keep the place running?

Without access to the APIs, who is going to make new tools?

At this point, so many apps/tools have been retired that it would take years to replace them even if Reddit hired teams of new programmers and put millions of dollars into replacing it all, which they're not doing.

They assumed that they had an endless cash-cow, but it's looking a lot more like they've butchered their golden goose.

[sekker]

Blankity Blank wrote:
I’ve read just enough to get the sense that the powers that be at Reddit seem to have overstepped perhaps significantly. But the thing that I’m not getting from all this, is that it seems like nothing is being excised in protest from Reddit that can’t be relatively easily be replaced.

The dissenting/departing mods have no ownership of the actual subreddits and the peripheral software adds considerable utility, but can’t they also be ‘reinvented’ or just replaced by other software with similar functionality?

It’s telling that so many dissatisfied parties aren’t just rolling up their carpet and leaving as their show if protest, they are very actively seeking to damage Reddit on the way out and spreading FUD.

I’ve used Reddit, through the “official” app for years. And from that perspective, even with all the ballyhooed ‘sabotage’, it’s been pretty much as usable as ever. Anything I’ve noticed is the result of active undermining, which will of course vanish as soon as the perpetrators leave or are banned.

I’ve also tried Apollo, one of the alternate clients, and it’s certainly a good app, but I’ve not seen or heard articulated any features that make Reddit unusable without it.

I have no fealty to Reddit as a company, I’m just not getting the professed magnitude for the general user base of the ongoing battle.

The original post here showcases how many of the Reddit functions were done by unpaid members of the community.

Reddit is dealing with the reality that if they want these functions, they are going to have to share some of their proceeds with those who will do this in the future.

I have no sympathy for the Reddit ‘owners’. They were actually caretakers of software the a community of people decided to use. This will go down in business classes as an example how not to deal with how to ‘monetize’ an online network.

[sekker]

sekker wrote:
[quote=Blankity Blank]
I’ve read just enough to get the sense that the powers that be at Reddit seem to have overstepped perhaps significantly. But the thing that I’m not getting from all this, is that it seems like nothing is being excised in protest from Reddit that can’t be relatively easily be replaced.

The dissenting/departing mods have no ownership of the actual subreddits and the peripheral software adds considerable utility, but can’t they also be ‘reinvented’ or just replaced by other software with similar functionality?

It’s telling that so many dissatisfied parties aren’t just rolling up their carpet and leaving as their show if protest, they are very actively seeking to damage Reddit on the way out and spreading FUD.

I’ve used Reddit, through the “official” app for years. And from that perspective, even with all the ballyhooed ‘sabotage’, it’s been pretty much as usable as ever. Anything I’ve noticed is the result of active undermining, which will of course vanish as soon as the perpetrators leave or are banned.

I’ve also tried Apollo, one of the alternate clients, and it’s certainly a good app, but I’ve not seen or heard articulated any features that make Reddit unusable without it.

I have no fealty to Reddit as a company, I’m just not getting the professed magnitude for the general user base of the ongoing battle.

The original post here showcases how many of the Reddit functions were done by unpaid members of the community.

Reddit is dealing with the reality that if they want these functions, they are going to have to share some of their proceeds with those who will do this in the future.

I have no sympathy for the Reddit ‘owners’. They were actually caretakers of software that a community of people decided to use. This will go down in business classes as an example how not to deal with how to ‘monetize’ an online network.

[chopper]

Is this some kind of replacement for Digg?

[freeradical]

Will this have any affect on the pr0n there?

[Acer]

freeradical wrote:
Will this have any affect on the pr0n there?

Advertisers frown on that sort of thing, so that's probably on the chopping block schedule.

[rich in distress]

Wait, there’s pr0n in Reddit??
I don’t want to be the last to know if there’s a special subforum over here…

[JoeH]

rich in distress wrote:
Wait, there’s pr0n in Reddit??
I don’t want to be the last to know if there’s a special subforum over here…

Yes, they started discouraging it a few years ago. But there are private and quarantined reddits that don't show up on searches. There was some talk about the bots for various search sites being blocked from crawling those sub-reddits, but I don't know if that actually happened. Some of it migrated to Reddit when Tumblr removed such pages.