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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.

  • god_is_love@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    👏👏👏

    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!!

  • fidodo@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • ashok36@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • nahida@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Especially when ChatGPT bots are on the rise… Reddit couldn’t have picked a worse time to alienate the BotDefense team.

  • Tacocuted @lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • artifice@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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?

      • Tacocuted @lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • couragethebravedog@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • febra@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Reddit is literally using bots to generate artificial activity, so I don’t think they’ll care much.

      • Seasoned_Greetings@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • whatsarefoogee@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        The comment you’re replying to is nonsense. Twitter loves nazis. Reddit, as you observed, is simply greedy.

      • XYZinferno@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Seasoned_Greetings@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.