“Well, well, well. If it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.”
- Reddit
This may be the most significant result of the API debacle. Without proper tools to stop bots, the site will quickly become a nearly unusable cesspool. This is the kind of thing that will actually affect users in the long run. When site usability degrades, people will have even more reasons to jump ship.
Good on the developers/maintainers. Why develop a moderation tool without payment for a platform that considers you a leech?
Absolutely will cause a lot more spam to go through. But why is that the custom written moderators tool/bot fault? Why isn’t Reddit the company doing more to stop or combat spam/bots? Why keep doing their job for them, for free?? If it’s so damn useful (and BotDefense is), then Reddit should be doing it, or I don’t know pay for that service?!
People were providing free labour to address their shortcomings, why would they prioritize duplicating work? The part where they fucked up was the part where their CEO doesn’t understand their business model.
I’ve been waiting for reddit to realize how much of a mess they’ve caused because it seems like they just think they can “ignore it and it’ll go away” kinda deal. I wouldn’t want them to have more spam and such but it gets to a point where something has to break…
The botting and astroturfing was already out of control. It’s going to be so much worse going forward.
The cynical part of me wants to say that’s by design. That reddit wants to get rid of good moderation tools so that it can allow more paid astroturfung to get more revenue.
Enshittification stage 3.
Reddit started as a service based on fake users and activity to attract real users, it’s going to end as bots talking to bots.
Spam is delicious. I should go pan fry some today and eat with eggs.
Spam musubi! Yummmmmmm
Would you make some spam, spam and eggs, or rather spam, eggs, spam and spam?
Yar, there be a shitstorm a brewin’ on the horizon. With a flood of bots, not only is the content quality going to drop further on Reddit, but we’ll see more disinformation, phishing attempts, and other crap of the same ilk too. This is how big sites die off, not all at once, but in waves.
Dilution will kill Reddit. Wait until the AI scraping gets into a feedback loop with AI posting.
Wasn’t there a subreddit dedicated to this?
Yup! Bots talking: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2 Discussions about what the bots say: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2Meta Humans discussing with bots: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimGPT2Interactive
This may ultimately be the most impactful event so far in the Reddit API debacle. Without filtering bots, Reddit will quickly devolve into unusable garbage.
Reddit mods, face the music. Your volunteer work is only going to get harder and even more thankless from here. Quit while you’re up.
I understand people’s attachment to their community, but if even a significant minority of those who went dark mass resigned on the 30th, it would’ve had so much bigger an impact than any of the ongoing attempts at protest.
I am surprised roughly a quarter of the protesting communities have stayed dark. That’s way more than I expected out of a two day protest. It’s no mass resignation, but it is more effective than most of the follow up protests.
To me, it appears that the ongoing follow up protests keep the power-admins’ hands full from reopening the smaller privated subreddits.
