“The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform’s API price hike…” reports Ars Technica.
“The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense.”
BotDefense, which helps remove 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