https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spam-overload-as-botdefense-leaves-antagonistic-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.

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."

I've heard much about the great Digg migration but I found Reddit through different means.

Any of you hear of mfisn? It was my Reddit before Reddit. A bare bones link sharing community where a number of registered users could share links. Unregistered users could suggest links that I guess a registered user could approve? I remember sharing links to movie trailers there. I found Reddit years later after googling it and finding a Reddit post asking about it. And that's how I fell into Reddit.

I discovered mfisn through cookiethievery, a yourethemannowdog-esque page that had a rotation of repeating animations set to a short music loop. And I vaguely recall finding that through an AIM buddy's profile...? Either that or albinoblacksheep.

Any of you have a traceable lineage of Internet communities you've passed through? What were your pre-Reddit internet go-to sites? Are they still around?

Mixed feelings about it all.

I think Reddit suffers from the same ‘1 discussion keeps you coming back for ten years in hope of a repeat’ that most if not all social media struggles with. It also has excellent dogs in hilarious situations and because of the amount of users, a constant refresh of what should be a tired genre but which just dosnt seem to die.

I have enough respect for r/pics for the John Oliver death march, that I cant go back.

A lot of people want to talk about Reddit and that will likely continue. This is a place to post minor news updates, so that Reddit topics don't fill up the front page of ~tech.

(Up to you what counts as "minor.")

Edit:

This might be a caching issue - Tildes mods have edited this post's title accordingly.

Anyway, this issue is concerning, as many people deleted their comments and accounts. Now the accounts are gone but the comments are back. Intentional or not, Reddit should fix this asap and communicate. This isn't acceptable.

Edit 2, 16 days after the original post:

For the 4th or 5th time, comments are popping back. Most of them in their original form, very few (2 out of 25) still edited as "[deleted]"

Original post:

(I know, more reddit stuff, sorry)

On June 16, four days after the beginning of the current Reddit protests, some users were reporting that their deleted comments were getting restored:

• https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144
• https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/34112/Heads-up-Reddit-is-quietly-restoring-deleted-AND-overwritten-posts-and

There were doubts if this was intentional or a bug caused by the blackout, or some rollbacks. Hanlon's razor, etc.

I then personally mass-edited my comments to "[removed]" two days ago, and lo & behold, they're getting edited back. And from what I've seen, there's definitely a pattern:

• All restored comments are at least 8-12 months old, so several pages deep in the comments history
• 90% of them are about programming, a few of them on my country's subreddit.
  • (More than half of my comments are on gaming subreddits, they're still edited as "[removed]")
• The vast majority of them have responses
  • (Though most of my comments also have responses)
• They're edited back in "small waves". 15-20 this morning, 4 this evening (so far).

I'm now editing them back twice, hoping that Reddit only keeps the previous version of a comment.

I find Reddit's behavior to be absolutely shameful. I've been on internet forums for nearly 25 years, and I've never seen a site unilaterally and silently decide to un-delete or (un-)edit comments. Never.

It feels like a golden rule of internet has been broken, and I'm surprised to not see more talks about it.

https://lifehacker.com/the-four-best-reddit-alternatives-1850562547

Tildes scores a mention:

Tildes

Tildes is another website trying to be the new Reddit. It’s still in an invite-only alpha stage, so you’ll need to ask somebody for an invite.

Tildes is not federated, so there’s only one place to sign up. And it has yet another name for its communities: They are, of course, tildes. (A tilde is the “~” character, and in the old old Internet, a lot of personal web pages had a tilde at the start of their names, a continuation of an even earlier tradition.) On Tildes.net, each tilde can have tags, so there is ~health and it contains the tag “fitness.”

How to sign up for Tildes: Find someone who has a tildes account, and ask for an invite.

I am really struggling without r/selfhosted. I truly believe it is, by far, the best community for self-hosters that I have come across. What I am missing most of all is, whenever I search for questions to self-hosting problems - especially for smaller projects - the answers are nearly always found within posts on that sub.

At least with things like programming, there is stackoverflow and a bunch of other small communities.

I'm going to end up going to Discord to find my solutions, which is the next big community. But it means having to go on there and ask the question (that has probably been asked hundreds of times before), rather than just searching the issue.

I just saw this post in the /r/ModCoord subreddit, which lists multiple instances of Reddit admins contacting moderator teams of closed subreddits with this message:

Hi everyone,

We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. We are reaching out to find out if any moderators currently on the mod team would be willing to take steps to reopen the community. Subreddits exist for the benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Your users rely on your community for information, support, entertainment, and finding connection with others who have similar interests. The ability to find and make these connections is incredibly important to many people and ensuring that active communities are able to remain stable and active (and open) is very important.

Our goal here is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is usable for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community please let us know.

Shit is getting real. The admins are looking for scabs who are willing to cross the picket-line and do the work the strikers are refusing to do.

It's not like this wasn't predictable. We all knew this was coming. It's still surprising to see it actually happen.

In this article from The Verge posted today "While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that"

Ironically mere minutes before this article went live, Reddit admins posted this to /r/modsupport.

"Leaving a community you deeply care for and have nurtured for years is a hard choice, but it is a choice some may need to make if they are no longer interested in moderating that community. If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team."

This statement not only completely contradicts what was "pledged" by Spez, but is also a very clear threat to subreddit moderators telling them to fall in line or get replaced by someone who will.

More articles that came out today about this subject:

Kotaku: Reddit's CEO Is Just Making Everything Worse

NBC: Reddit CEO slams protest leaders, saying he'll change rules that favor ‘landed gentry’

MacRumors: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts

ARS Technica: As the Reddit war rages on, community trust is the casualty

NPR: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: 'It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company'

The full Verge interview Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview

Akin to this: https://tildes.net/~tech/1670/redditors_of_tildes_which_subreddits_are_you_missing_the_most_during_the_blackout

What can we leave behind?
What should we leave behind?

For me, the one BIG thing is the stupid puns.
Threads full and full and full of puns, one after the other.

Case in point:
https://tildes.net/~movies/16bf/chasing_horse_faces_sex_assault_charges

I can so live without that side of reddit.

edit: Yeah, that "thread" is two comments long, but I just got reddit flashbacks just seeing those.

https://postimg.cc/phNYcrTJ

Just deleted my Reddit account. I was a Digg addict, and thereafter way to absorbed in Reddit for my own good.

Wanted to thank Christian for a brilliant app (if he ever was to see this: you poured your soul into that thing. Thank you for all you did). I’ve now deleted the app on all devices and am moving on!

Am looking forward to a fresh change.

I really like the feel of this place. Low key, easy to navigate and not crowded. And the civil conversations just blow my mind!

PS: sincerely appreciate the invite link!

I, clearly along with many others, recently left Reddit and have personally decided not to return unless it sees drastic, lasting change. However, this has made it clear just how reliant I was on the site for multiple aspects of my life, ranging from local and world news, to hobby related announcements, to perspective, advice, and memes directly from marginalized communities. In Tildes I've already found some of what I've been missing, and I'm sure I'll find more as the community continues to grow, but Tildes doesn't have the same setup to allow for finding the same niche communities that I once had (nor should Tildes ever need to have that).

With all of that said, what gaps are you currently experiencing? Have you found any good sites or resources that have helped you or might help others in the thread?

What's it like over there right now? IIRC the blackout was supposed to finish today. I've decided to quit reddit unless something changes, so I want to do my best not to visit the site, but I am very curious about what the website and culture has been like for the past few days. And now that the initial blackout is 'over', how many subreddits have started to emerge again? Are people coming back now and acting like they've won? Has reddit responded to the blackout at all?

I have never been a leader at a big company (or anywhere...), and honestly I am pretty ignorant when it comes to money and business, so maybe that's why I feel this way but... isn't this what for-profit companies ultimately are supposed to do? (make money?)

Reddit is blowing up today over his internal memo, and that's when I kind of started to feel bad for him. Wouldn't an internal memo be expected at a time right now? Wouldn't it say that kind of stuff? I'm just curious but for others, if you were in his position, what would you do right now? Is there a better move to be made? What should he have said in that memo? I kind of feel bad for him. At the end of the day he helped create reddit, and it must kind of suck to watch your own project devolve and people come to hate you.

The thing about this API decision that got to me is how abrupt it was - 30 days or thereabout. That doesn't seem like very long. But aren't these decisions usually made by multiple people? (not just a CEO?) I also think it sucks that reddit app hasn't been made accessible to vision impaired folks. So maybe he sucks as a leader, but is that a reason to hate him?

I'd love to better understand.