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.
👏👏👏
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.
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/poppyxxx@lemmynsfw.com ?
Bot or bad joke?
Maybe they accidentally commented with their porn alt? Seems like the comment was deleted.
Signed into the wrong account and Lemmy delete doesn’t work 😬
I didn’t think about it yet but of course there is pron on here
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.
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.
Bless his heart
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.
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.
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.
This Reddit meltdown gets better and better. All of this could’ve been so easily avoided. Instead we have Reddit, doubling, tripling, quadrupling(sp?) down on terrible ideas. Fun to watch though.
When 90% of the value of your company is created by a small group of unpaid volunteers, it’s not a good idea to piss them off. That said, the repercussions from all this will take a few months at least to be analyzed.
Especially when ChatGPT bots are on the rise… Reddit couldn’t have picked a worse time to alienate the BotDefense team.
It’s a game of Jenga and Spez won’t let you take your turn. There’s no way he can win it.
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?
Apologies for the late reply. I’m open to help in either way, actually. It would be fun to contribute to a FOSS project that manages bots for the Fediverse or to answer questions for those already trying to mitigate their presence here.
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
Bots count as active users on the metrics, I’m sure Reddit admins see this as a huge win
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.
Reddit is literally using bots to generate artificial activity, so I don’t think they’ll care much.
Reddit continues to crumble, what else is new ?
spez sees this as an absolute win.
Is there any chance that BotDefence might be tempted to turn its talents to the Fediverse?
Reddit fucked around, and now they’re about to find out.
Le Reddit is finished take #1000000000000000000. I’m sure Reddit will fall any day now, any day as it continues to thrive
You’re really determined to plug your ears and drown out a sentiment that permeates reddit itself, nevermind the big media sites picking up this whole debacle.
Reddit isn’t thriving. It’s not even profiting, the ceo said it himself.
Your thesis of this being a nothing-burger is disproven by the simple fact that you’re here, in a rapidly growing social network (because of reddit) on the comment section of a post stating the exact opposite of what you want to desperately believe.
Look in the mirror, bro.
deleted by creator
What in the fresh fuck are you talking about?
The overwhelmingly left leaning administration of Reddit want pro-Nazi spam accounts to convert the vehemently left leaning userbase of reddit into Republicans? This is some Alex Jones level shit.
They just want to force people into using the site and their app so they can serve ads and harvest user data. They are trying to IPO so they are doing everything to make it seem profitable in the short term, they don’t care about the future of the site.
The comment you’re replying to is nonsense. Twitter loves nazis. Reddit, as you observed, is simply greedy.
Yeah, some of these takes are just off the rails. If Reddit had some scheme to mass-convert people to Republicans, they wouldn’t be quarantining subreddits like The_Donald that would theoretically be instrumental in achieving this master plan. Or they’d be manipulating posts on r/politics to be far more right leaning.
Not killing off API usage in hopes of angering the volunteers who protect against bots in hopes that there’ll be an uptick in pro-Nazi bots in hopes that it’ll sway the result of political elections.
Finally, someone with a brain on Lemmy
LMAO average delusional leftoid. Imagine thinking Reddit of all sites wants pro-Nazi shit to be spammed
what’s a leftoid?
Nazi jargon for “person with left leaning politics that we can dehumanize”
The same group unironically uses the term “femoid” to describe women and calls gay people groomers. They also have some less-than-pleasing terms for black people, Asians, Jewish people, etc.
It’s all about dehumanizing who they disagree with. Just nazi things.
