this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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A volunteer-made project that fights bots on Reddit is shutting down (BotDefense) (www.theverge.com)
submitted 1 year ago by Regna@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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From the article:

A volunteer-made project that fights bots on Reddit is shutting down. BotDefense, a tool that helps fight bots in more than 3,600 subreddits and has nearly 150,000 accounts on its bans list, will be going away.

As for why: 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.

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[–] Wander@yiffit.net 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey, I hope you don't mind me asking a question.

Given that upvotes and downvotes are public on Lemmy, do you think it would be possible to use that info to potentially detect bots or vote manipulation?

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'd imagine it's possible to identify the behaviour that some bots followed on Reddit. It also does help that global karma isn't a thing since it was a big part of the incentive that led to bots in the first place. I don't know if you ever encountered the subreddit "FreeKarma4u" but it was basically just a sub with no rules that allowed bots to upvote each other's posts and comments until they met the karma threshold to start posting on other subs.