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As BotDefense Leaves 'Antagonistic' Reddit, Mods Fear Spam Overload (arstechnica.com) 68

Posted by EditorDavid from the annals-of-the-API-wars dept.
"The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike..." reports Ars Technica.

"The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense." BotDefense, which helps remove 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.

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "abrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderate subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting. On Wednesday, dequeued announced that BotDefense is ceasing operations. BotDefense has already stopped accepting bot account submissions and will disable future action on bots. BotDefense "will continue to review appeals and process unbans for a minimum of 90 days or until Reddit breaks the code running BotDefense," the announcement said...

Dequeued, who said they've been moderating for nearly nine years, said Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward devs and mods are the only reason BotDefense is closing. The moderator said there were plans for future tools, like a new machine learning system for detecting "many more" bots. Before the API battle turned ugly, dequeued had no plans to stop working on BotDefense...

[S]ubreddits that have relied on BotDefense are uncertain about managing their subreddits without the tool, and the tool's impending departure are new signs of a deteriorating Reddit community.
Ironically, Reddit's largest shareholder — Advance Publications — owns Ars Technica's parent company Conde Naste.

The article notes that Reddit "didn't respond to Ars' request for comment on BotDefense closing, how Reddit fights spam bots and karma farms, or about users quitting Reddit."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

As BotDefense Leaves 'Antagonistic' Reddit, Mods Fear Spam Overload More

As BotDefense Leaves 'Antagonistic' Reddit, Mods Fear Spam Overload

Comments Filter:

  • Don't Bite The Hand That Feeds It (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Sunday July 09, 2023 @01:38PM (#63671377)

    Or in this case the one that protects it.

    • Re:Don't Bite The Hand That Feeds It (Score:4, Interesting)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Sunday July 09, 2023 @02:09PM (#63671465)
      Well, I would just say that if they want to monetize the site, they need to plan on paying the workers. The more something is making bank for somebody, the less others will work for free on it.

      Seems like the high valuations estimated for the site at one time were assuming they'd have their cake and eat it too.

      • Re:Don't Bite The Hand That Feeds It (Score:4, Interesting)

        by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Sunday July 09, 2023 @02:28PM (#63671511) Journal

        Yes. If you don't pay your workers with money, you have to pay with other things, like respect, for example.

        • So...two AwardibadgesTM? I can display them on my group calendar so everyone can see the respect I've earned. I approve of value-added rewards, because I watch company costs.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Strider- ( 39683 )

          If you don't pay your workers with money, you have to pay with other things, like respect, for example.

          Last I checked, though, I can’t spend respect at the grocery store.

        • Yes. If you don't pay your workers with money, you have to pay with other things, like respect, for example.

          Have you been talking with my CEO?

      • I think experience has by now pretty well established that monetizing social media is not possible without extensive enshitification. Either you run a site as a non-profit, and there might be some hope of it not being horrendously terrible, or you make money (for a little while) by destroying the site.

        • Definitely my favorite sin.

          Watching people cutting off their own legs at the knee to sell them on the open market always brings a smile to my face.

        • Social media could be designed using P2P, with no ads or commercial interests directly involved. The model for monetisation would be by offering a paid Pro version, where authorised caching servers allow you to extend your reach beyond a few thousand people. As a bonus, file sharing could be done without any consequence, as the developers would not be hosting nor be responsible for any content.

          Celebs and so-called influencers would have to pay to be able to shit up the place, while normal folks can use i

      • It is monetized already through advertising/promotion.

        Other streams are available such as merchandising if they wanted, just they need some investment.

        They got too greedy, like flickr, sadly.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by linzeal ( 197905 )

        The problems inherent in unpaid moderators was evident back when USENET and MUDs were around in the 1990's. Amazing that Reddit thinks that it can solve this problem with techno-totalitarianism and I guess newly appointed slave mods?

        Non-paid anonymous moderators are liable to randomly quit, have strange agendas, and other problems like selling their accounts.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I've heard that a lot, but my cat used to bite the hand that fed him and he lived like a prince.

  • Seems strange to me the summary does not mention that BotDefense seemed to rely on PushShift [reddit.com], which was shut down because it never responded to Reddit at all amount compliance with API terms...

    • Re:Is not real reason PushShift being disabled? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Sunday July 09, 2023 @02:31PM (#63671521)

      which was shut down because it never responded to Reddit

      In your post, PushShift never responded according to Reddit employee "u/lift_ticket83". I would take it with a grain of salt that Reddit might be saying things that are not true to benefit Reddit.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I would take it with a grain of salt that Reddit might be saying things that are not true to benefit Reddit.

        They may also have begun to notice how badly they screwed up and are now attempting to shift the blame.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • you give someone a free messageboard and you create an entitled frankenstein

            Reddit allowed anyone to discuss just about anything. Each area was under their own unpaid, self governance. Now that Reddit wants to go public, they want to impose their new rules and some of them are very arbitrary. Sure legally, Reddit owns the board, but calling people "entitled" for not wanting rules arbitrarily imposed on them underscores a lack of understanding.

  • At the end of the day wasn't the catalyst for all of this that AI was using Reddit as a free source of training material? And Reddit was upset they weren't getting part of the action.
    Maybe this is the first part of AI's plan to destroy society :)

  • Simplicity of email (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stikves ( 127823 ) on Sunday July 09, 2023 @02:02PM (#63671451) Homepage

    In the "good old days" API was called a protocol, and 3rd party programs were the only way to talk to the services.

    Yes, I remember being excited to finally get "webmail" on our department servers (squirrelmail, is anyone remembers). People no longer had to worry with IMAP setup, and they could access the mail from anywhere with a browser.

    However today, services want to have only the browser and their frontend to access the API, and nothing else.

    The reason?
    Ad money.

    The services were never free. They were supported by the ads. You could be viewing $12 worth of ads per month, and receive $10 worth of services. For many sites this used to work okay.

    What went wrong?
    The default UI from these services (Twitter, Reddit, and others) no longer are enough for the users, and the community has developed even better frontends, like this one to fight spam. If Reddit has had caught up with proper tools, this would not be necessary.

    Apparently, a bunch of motivated volunteers with free time can do better than a paid team.

    Who would have thought that?
    (Hint: This is still relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org])

    • The failure with your statement above is that it wasn't $12 worth of ads for $10 cost, it was $0.12 in ads and $0.04 in costs. Revenue per eyeball is miniscule, so they pack a lot of ads in and do whatever they can to increase that revenue/eyeball. They also happen to do whatever they can to lower their costs, which may really be Reddit's biggest pain point.

      Me, Reddit was maybe 5% of my internet use before the first day of the first protest on this. I got a modicum of value out of it, but mostly it was w

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by stikves ( 127823 )

        You might be right about price scale, but the main point stands.

        They want to show you ads in order to give you a service, which has value. (Let's not kid ourselves, we don't like to pay upfront for services we love, otherwise none of this would be necessary).

        And the 3rd party clients will not want to show those ads, for obvious reasons.

        Hence Reddit's dilemma. They made their bed, and now they have to lie in it.

      • His statement didn't fail. You just moved the decimal place and made the same statement.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Apparently, a bunch of motivated volunteers with free time can do better than a paid team.

      Not that surprising. The users are who suffer most from developer incompetence. Hence they are the most motivated to fix things. Paid devs generally only do what they have to and they may not care about that very much. Of course a _service_ that eventually wants to monetize itself more may have real problems with that as a result, because the service will in significant part not be theirs anymore. As Reddit is finding out.

      Moral: If you accept volunteer services, make sure to always play nice with these peop

      • Re:Simplicity of email (Score:4, Interesting)

        by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Sunday July 09, 2023 @06:16PM (#63672199)
        Well that and Reddit is known as a terrible place to work and they pay peanuts to their devs. This is less about opensource ideology and more about a cheap company who is bad at writing code even though that's the majority of what they do. Other sites don't have this issue because their default apps are of far higher quality.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Makes sense to me. All the more reason for them to not start throwing rocks with this glasshouse they are sitting in.

  • The drama is still going on?

    I would have thought Reddit dwellers with any sort of good sense would have moved on to another, friendlier forum and called it a day at this point really.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      First they've got to find one, or decide to do without.

    • I would have thought Reddit dwellers with any sort of good sense would have moved on to another, friendlier forum and called it a day at this point really.

      Grief takes a while to process. They already got through the Denial stage, and are now mostly circling back and forth between Anger and Bargaining, with a handfell already processing Depression. The last stag, Acceptance, will take longer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Probably still too early, but Reddit is doomed. They have set something in motion they cannot control of fix.

      • All reddit did was assert that their playground is still, in fact, their playground.

        As for the OP, some playground bullies still think it is theirs, and would rather hold their breath and pass out blue in the face than admit that they are not, in fact, the biggest bully.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          All reddit did was assert that their playground is still, in fact, their playground.

          In a very real sense it is not exclusively theirs and has not been forever. In that situation asserting full control is a suicidal move.

  • There's nothing "ironic" about the ownership of Reddit and Ars. It's almost like news companies can report on things independently.

  • I have never heard anyone point out Open Source / Effort is effectively the same as internships - they are only for those who can afford it. Except one is "bad corporations" and the other is "cool university kids".
  • And hope others will follow.....
  • The discourse about reddit doesn't really make sense to folks that have been using reddit regularly. The idea that Reddit "now has a bot problem" or "is about to have a bot problem" both completely ignore the past 8 years of reddit. Reddit IS a bot problem and always has been.

    The high-traffic subs they're using to show off BotDefense's street cred have completely dominated by marketing spam and algorithmic engagement. These subs were and are complete failures for users and are only useful in the creation
  • My son recently deleted his reddit account along with the ~16k posts he had made (using a script). He got an email from Reddit offering to restore all the posts, and when he rejected that offer, received a more concerning email that, according to the EULA that everyone agrees to when signing up, any content he had made belongs to them and they have the right to restore it. At this point, he responded that under the "Right to be forgotten" laws, he had a right to remove them and that any posts that were re

  • that reddit is simply the tyranny of the majority getting butthurt at the minority for even daring to poke fun at it.

    Rather than government or corporate censorship we're willing to tolerate completely unqualified faceless individuals doing it.

    Reddit uses the addiction model of social media, where low effort posts pander for likes. When "I like cheese" gets ten thousand upvotes, it seems like the mental midgets have taken over society.

    I know slashdot sucks in many ways, but the lack of mods or upvoting

  • I know it's been around a while, though I'd have to Google it to find out if it post-dates or pre-dates Slashdot. But I've never heard a good reason to visit it.

    include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn

    OK, that might be a reason, says the guy with a folder of "GeoPr0n" (landscape photos, thin sections under polarised light, sedimentary structures, the usual suspects).

    Do I have to, like cut the throat of my second-born or something to start an account there? Where do I mail the blood-soaked towel?

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