Post contents (and a mirror):
BotDefense is wrapping up operations
TL;DR below.
When we announced the BotDefense project in 2019, we had no idea how large the project would become. Our initial list of bots was just 879 accounts. Most of them were annoying rather than outright malicious.
Since then, we’ve witnessed the rise of malicious bots being used to farm karma for the purpose of spamming and scamming users across Reddit and we’ve done our best to help communities stem the tide. We spent countless hours finding and reviewing accounts, writing code to automate detections, and reviewing appeals (mostly from outright criminals and karma farmers definitely running bots, but we typically unban about 4 accounts per month, and unlike similar bots an unban means that we unban the account everywhere we banned it).
Along the way, we’ve struggled with the scope of the problem, rewritting our back-end code multiple times and figuring out how to scale to the 3,650 subreddits that BotDefense now moderates. We came up with new algorithms to identify content theft, reduce the number of times we accidentally ban an innocent account, and more. In January of 2023, we added an incredible 10,070 bots to our ban list which now stands at an incredible 144,926 accounts.
Like many anti-abuse projects on Reddit, we’ve done all of this for free while putting up with Reddit’s penchant for springing detrimental changes on developers and moderators (e.g., adding API limits without advance notice and blocking Pushshift) and figuring out workarounds for numerous scalability issues that Reddit never seems to fix. Without Pushshift, the number of malicious bots we were able to ban dropped to 5,517 in May.
Now, Reddit has changed the Reddit API terms to destroy third-party apps and harm communities. A group of developers and moderators tried to convince Reddit to not continue down this path and communities protested like never before, but that was all in vain. Reddit is so brazenly hostile to moderators and developers that the CEO of Reddit has referred to us as “landed gentry”.
With these changes and in this environment, we no longer believe we can effectively perform our mission. 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.
Therefore, we have already disabled submissions of new accounts and our back-end analytics, and we will be disabling future actions on malicious and annoying bots. We will continue to review appeals and process unbans for a minimum of 90 days, or until Reddit breaks the code running BotDefense.
We’d rather be figuring out how to combat the influx of ChatGPT bots flooding Reddit, temu bots flooding subreddits with fake comments, and every other malicious bot out there, of course.
At this time, we advise keeping BotDefense as a moderator through October 3rd so any future unbans can be processed. We will provide updates if the situation changes or if we have any other news to share.
Finally, I want to thank all of the users and moderators who have contributed accounts, my co-moderators who have helped review countless accounts, and to all of the communities that have trusted us with helping moderate their subreddits.
Regards.
— dequeued
TL;DR With the API changes now in place, we no longer believe we can effectively perform our mission so we are sunsetting BotDefense. We recommend keeping BotDefense on as a moderator through October 3rd so any unbans can be processed.
Let this be a lesson to all devs out there. Never do work for corporations for free. Only contribute to FOSS. Devs are the backbone of the internet and before the fediverse there was no outlet for them to work on actually distributed platforms as opposed to libraries and utilities. If you want to do work on a social platform do it on the fediverse where you don’t have some heartless corporation exploiting your free work and not appreciating anything you do.
Reddit should have been paying their own devs to do this themselves. This is literally millions of dollars worth of dev work.
Why is this copied word for word from the comment by /u/[email protected] ?
Bot or bad joke?
Maybe they accidentally commented with their porn alt? Seems like the comment was deleted.
Reddit is literally using bots to generate artificial activity, so I don’t think they’ll care much.
Good for them. We need to fight to maintain a freeweb imo a lot of people aren’t fond of people around the world comparing notes and organizing. I greatly appreciate all the developers, coders, and other people who actually give a fuck.
This is how you fight the money men, take away their toys. The manager-CEO class of people don’t understand technology, they think everything is a matter of applying the right amount of psychopathic charisma to cut deals and generate profit. Meanwhile, back in reality, none of this technology works without expertise. The type of person who holds this expertise is the antithesis of the manager-CEO. They run the show, they keep the lights on and they should never forget that.
👏👏👏
Honestly it will obviously be up to you guys but I think you should pull your support right away. The faster Reddit goes downhill the faster apathetic users will think about alternatives. But either way thank you for the work you did and for joining us on Lemmy!!
I’m not associated with r/BotDefense, but I’m sure they appreciate your sentiment.
I’m sure that reddit realizes it but I’ll share for all of you that don’t. If CGPT fills reddit with it’s own comments then future AI projects won’t be able to use Reddit data to train on. An AI that trains on itself or other AI data will suffer what’s known as model collapse. Basically if you don’t have enough variability in the training data you create an unuseable model, that will happen as CGPT fills the internet more and more with it’s content. Sadly if we don’t solve this problem then we likely won’t get past current gen AI in terms of capabilities and scale.
Then they’ll turn their gaze to the Fediverse
DUN DUN DUN DUUUUN
Metas already here with fucking threads.
Screams into void
I reported a bunch of spam-link bots, porn-bots posting CSAM-adjacent stuff, and a slew of stuff that was very obviously and blatantly in violation of Reddit ToS.
All the links/content remained and my account got suspended for “abusing the report function”. Considering the content I reported, it’s a safe guess that Reddit admin and moderation teams benefit from having such material on the site. Not sure how, or why. But their actions seem to indicate something.
Then you look at the controversies Reddit has had… that one dude’s suicide, Ghislaine Maxwell holding a powermod position on front-page subs, the powermod controversy wherein a dozen or so mods had thousands of subreddits under their control.
There’s also been a huge attitude shift. While most of it seems the same, there’s a very strong anti-American presence now that seems to make sure they fit that sentiment into every thread whether it’s justified, related, or completely out of place.
The Reddit algorithms or whatever also seem to love pushing certain topics to the point of stripping it of any/all meaning and turning into propaganda.
Reddit’s army of pro-spez bots likes this.
NOOOOO everyone who likes Reddit and spez is a bot NOOOO :marseysoycrytremble:
Who likes Spez who isn’t a bot tho
Anyone who lives in reality unlike you
Lemmy feels more legitimate with trolls so I’m glad you’re here. This place is growing fast.
I know, right? It’s lovely to see a real, genuine, bona fide dickhead in the comments. God bless you Slacker, you fucking moron.
I’ve been on here about a month, but this is the first comment that fucking killed me. The real reddit is in the comments.
Bless his heart
Spez, the honorary moderator, pimpdaddy awarding public defender of r/jailbait? That spez? You’re off your rocker, bro.
7,000+ subreddits and their communities demonstrated that they don’t like spez or what he’s doing to reddit. You are objectively wrong.
Regardless of whether you like Reddit or not why would you like spez? He’s a horrible business professional who idolizes a worse business professional.
Holy shit if you keep following the link about the GPT influx it just keeps getting worse and worse. First link: nearly 1000 bots. Next link: 2400 bots! An even further link: Over 5000 now!
If reddit’s entire history is any indication, yes. They like spam and malicious actors.
MoAr TrAfFiC = w1n, or something.
Just to get the investors, spez will 100% take the cash and run and let reddit burn down
When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.
spez sees this as an absolute win.
Bots count as active users on the metrics, I’m sure Reddit admins see this as a huge win
deleted by creator
Another nail in the coffin for Reddit.
As someone that makes a living off of finding and stopping bots, I wish I had known about this project and subreddit. I would have liked to work alongside these folks.
If anyone reading this is in need of bot detection on the Fediverse please message me.
This is a bit out of my realm, but are you referring to actual software for detection, or that you can teach the patterns that many bots follow to better detect?
Reddit is now dependent on bots anyway. Who else will write their 5-star reviews and keep shitting on Lemmy in comments?
