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.

Valued bot fighter

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "andabrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderates 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."

The situation also highlights the importance of Pushshift, which recently lost Reddit API access due to a "miscommunication," according to Ars Technica sister site Wired—but then regained it. Pushshift is run by the Network Contagion Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey and is said to be popular among Reddit's thousands of volunteer moderators. As a non-commercial and educational tool, Pushshift has an exemption to Reddit's new API pricing scheme, but dequeued told Ars Technica that restrictions Reddit has imposed have "made it cumbersome to use." Further, "most of the users who submit bots to BotDefense no longer have access," the mod said.

That's important because "Pushshift is critical to our efforts to detect repost bots, comment copy bots, bots that use ChatGPT to mimic human activity, and other types of malicious bots," dequeued told Ars Technica. "Pushshift has a very detailed system for searching through past content. We use it to detect these bots. Reddit is much more limiting in searching for past posts, and the API doesn't support searching for comments."

Like other moderators Ars has spoken to, dequeued cited shuttered third-party Reddit apps, like Apollo and RIF Is Fun, as key moderation tools. dequeued also pointed to "apps that acted as front-ends to Pushshift, which made it easier for users to research malicious accounts" as critical to BotDefense's efforts.

Some third-party Reddit apps, like Narwhal, are still available and have moved to paid models. However, devs Ars has spoken with have shown uncertainty around how sustainable these approaches are.

Meanwhile, dequeued said that Reddit's "few minor gestures" to keep a small number of third-party apps alive doesn't fix the poor reputation the company now has with BotDefense.

Dequeued, who said they've been moderating for nearly nine years, said Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward devs and mods are the only reason BotDefense is closing. The moderator said there were plans for future tools, like a new machine learning system for detecting "many more" bots. Before the API battle turned ugly, dequeued had no plans to stop working on BotDefense.

Reddit's spam problem

While Reddit Content Policy violations have been a hot topic lately, as moderators have protested Reddit's actions by adding Not Safe For Work (NSFW) tags or hyper-focusing on John Oliver, Reddit's largest content removal issue is usually spam.

A user who asked for privacy reasons to be identified by their Reddit name, Merari01, and who moderates the r/LifeProTips subreddit told Ars that BotDefense has been crucial because it's time consuming to manually fight spam bot activity. Merari01 also underscored the challenges of fighting spam bots, with karma being sold cheaply.

The moderator said:

With BotDefense shutting down, [fewer] spam bots will be caught, banned, and reported to site admins, which means more will be able to be sold. ... The inevitable end result is that more people will be robbed of their money and/ or personal details and that more conversations will be manipulated.

Reddit's 2022 Transparency Report said spam, which includes karma farming and scams, represented 79.6 percent of content removed by Reddit administrators last year.

The company said 97,264,778 spam posts and comments and 2,729,489 spam private messages were removed.

Reddit says it has over 100,000 subreddits and claimed in its 2022 report that 98.3 percent of spam post and comment removals were flagged by Reddit automation. But the subreddits that have relied on BotDefense are uncertain about managing their subreddits without the tool, and the tool's impending departure are new signs of a deteriorating Reddit community.

In response to BotDefense's announcement, a Reddit user going by Dacvak who moderates the r/gaming subreddit using BotDefense said:

What an enormous loss to the site and its users. The average person has no idea how much botspam there would be without you guys, and it’s worth noting that Reddit does not have effective tools for combating the growing complexity and number of bots.

This place will slowly but surely become a cesspool of bot-driving garbage, and I don’t blame anyone but Reddit for that.

Moderators have shared their skepticism with Ars about Reddit's long-term ability to update and maintain its own mod tools like AutoMod. Many also wonder if automated moderation tools can really police nuanced Reddit discussions that have been ongoing for years.

Reddit didn't respond to Ars' request for comment on BotDefense closing, how Reddit fights spam bots and karma farms, or about users quitting Reddit.

Meanwhile, at the protests...

As Reddit looks for new revenue from the API changes that took effect July 1, frustrated users have already left, including the heads of popular communities, like the Java Team at Mojang Studios' Minecraft. API pricing protests originally started on June 12, when over 8,800 subreddits promised to go private during a 48-hour period. As of this writing, 2,108 subreddits are still dark, as per the Reddark_247 tracker.

Reddit has responded by removing protesting moderators, threatening to re-open private subreddits, and urging mods of protesting communities to remove their communities' NSFW label.

However, this approach has led to confusion on subreddits that may have moved to NSFW status for non-protest reasons. As spotted by The Verge, the moderators of r/military claimed on Thursday that "this is a subreddit for those in the military and with that comes a NSFW environment. To be fair, this subreddit should have been NSFW already, but we’d never thought to change it until recently."

Regardless of whether or not the subreddits' move to NSFW was totally unrelated to the protest, the uncertainty is indicative of obstacles in Reddit's current ability to trust moderators to do what they've done for years for free—and to have open dialogue with mods working with communities with unique needs. The r/military subreddit has since removed its NSFW label, saying it was unable to speak with Reddit about the situation.

With only a week having passed since Reddit implemented new API rules, it's alarming to see so many notable community members decide that their volunteer efforts and innovations are no longer worth providing.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.