BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting Reddit, causing concern about spam moderation on large subreddits
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.
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. The announcement also advised "keeping BotDefense as a moderator through October 3rd so any future unbans can be processed."
Botdefense has been a great resource. It's a shame they're ending the service. I'm skeptical that there have been "concerning implications for spam moderation" on large subreddits due to API changes or other changes in the last couple of months. I haven't experience any of these myself moderating a large community.
At the same time, let's not over-state its importance. Several other tools do the same thing pretty efficiently. I'm very surprised it's only dealt with less than 150.000 accounts. Most large subreddits will average banning more than 100 human accounts each day, much less bots etc. Those bans of humans since 2019 are equivalent to the bot-bans.
It's been a welcome addition to deal with some bots automatically for communities, but it definitely shouldn't have been their major tool against bots. A well configured and updated automoderator condition is way, way more effective. Botdefense has been a welcome drop in the very, very large bucket of bots that plague reddit.
Attempting to deal with spam/bots/automated accounts on an account-level rather than dealing with the problematic content irrespective of the username posting it is a losing battle. This has been the case for at least the last decade.
It's just a shame that reddit's automated, site-wide tools that don't deal with content in account-agnostic ways are so convoluted. Admin is also pretty unresponsive in adjusting tools to take up large new trends that span hundreds or thousands of accounts.
Thanks for your perspective and input.